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WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama Tuesday renewed a vow to hand over security in Afghanistan to Afghan forces, but warned the pace of a US troop withdrawal would be set by the conditions on the ground.
Amid a deadly Taliban and Al-Qaeda insurgency in Afghanistan, the US commander-in-chief reaffirmed US troops would begin handing over to Afghan forces next year.
But the president appeared to step back from an earlier pledge that American forces would actually start withdrawing from the war-torn country in 2011.
"Next August we will begin a transition to Afghan responsibility," Obama said in his primetime Oval Office address to the nation, as he formally declared an end to the seven-year US combat mission in Iraq.
He warned: "The pace of our troop reductions will be determined by conditions on the ground, and our support for Afghanistan will endure."
"But make no mistake: this transition will begin because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people's."
There are fewer than 50,000 troops in Iraq now, as Obama switches his focus to hunting down Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In a major speech in December unveiling a new fast-track war strategy, Obama announced he was pouring 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, as he groped for an exit from a conflict seen by many as a Vietnam-style quagmire.
The war in Afghanistan, launched to oust the militant Taliban leadership in 2001 in the wake of the 2001 September 11 attacks, is deeply unpopular in the United States.
And in December, Obama pledged to cadets at the West Point military academy that American forces would start coming home from Afghanistan within 18 months, in July 2011.
There are currently more than 140,000 US and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan aiming to flush out remnants of the hardline Taliban, but violence in the country has shown no signs of abating.
The death toll among foreign troops in Afghanistan reached another grim milestone last month, with the number killed since the war began nine years ago topping 2,000, according to the icasualties.org website.
In a US television interview in August, US and NATO commander in Afghanistan General David Petraeus said he would not be bound by the earlier July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing US troops.
Petraeus, who took over command in July, said Obama's date for the start of a limited US withdrawal was not set in stone and should be viewed as a bid to increase the urgency of the counter-insurgency effort.
"I think the president has been quite clear in explaining that it's a process, not an event, and that it's conditions-based," Petraeus told NBC television.
Obama said in Tuesday's address that he had ordered the deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan who were "fighting to break the Taliban's momentum."
"Because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on the offensive," Obama said, vowing once again to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al-Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving
as a base for terrorists."
US troops will begin training and advising Afghan security forces with the aim of handing over responsibility for defense matters, he said.
"As with the surge in Iraq, these forces will be in place for a limited time to provide space for the Afghans to build their capacity and secure their own future.
"But as was the case in Iraq, we cannot do for Afghans what they must ultimately do for themselves," Obama said.
The Taliban still controls large swathes of the south -- where the insurgency is at its most intense -- and have put up stiff resistance to the surge of foreign troops as part of a counter-insurgency strategy.
-AFP/wk
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