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the afghanistan war

An Afghan boy watches U.S. soldiers during a foot patrol in Sabari district, Khost province, in the east of Afghanistan.

Claiming major progress - if not yet victory - in the war in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama will order 10,000 American troops to come marching home this year with twice as many more to pull out before his bid for re-election in November next year.

"We have put al-Qaeda on a path to defeat … we have inflicted serious losses on the Taliban," Mr. Obama said. "Even as there will be dark days ahead… these long wars will come to an end," he said referring to the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan that have overshadowed the first decade of the 21st century.

In a nationally televised address, Mr. Obama said there had been significant success in defeating al-Qaeda and reversing Taliban gains but there was none of the "mission accomplished" hoopla that haunted former president George W. Bush for years as the early victories in Iraq were replaced by bitter years of bloody insurgency.

With no audience, flanked by no flags and pointedly not from the Oval Office, the President's 12-minute speech seemed deliberately understated. Mr. Obama only rarely refers to the Afghan war.

The drawdown of troops - a significant reduction of "boots on the ground" - signals a shift to the kind of targeted "counterterrorist" strategy advocated by Vice-President Joe Biden. Military commanders wanted to retain the troop-intensive "counterinsurgency" strategy aimed as winning Afghan hearts and minds by flooding the Taliban heartlands of Helmand and Kandahar.

The President also held out the prospect of including the Taliban in peace talks but only if the fundamentalist Islamic group renounced violence.

His toughest message was aimed at Pakistan, where al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups lurk with the tacit connivance of at least parts of the Pakistani government.

"So long as I am President, the United States will not tolerate a safe haven for those who want to kill us," he said.

Nineteen months after announcing a surge of troops to Afghanistan, the "right war" in  Mr. Obama's view, he announced a phased pullout that was larger and with a faster timetable than ground commanders wanted. Yet it will leave more than 100,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan - 70,000 of them American - by the end of the 2012 summer fighting season.

After nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan - the Taliban regime that harboured al-Qaeda was toppled months after the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks - Americans are fed up with the bloody counterinsurgency. More than 1,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed, more than 12,000 wounded, and the war is costing $10-billion a month.

A few were quick to criticize the President's drawdown plan. Republican Senator John McCain called it an "unnecessary risk," adding it was "unfortunate" that Mr. Obama ignored the "well-known recommendations" of key commanders.

Before his speech, the President telephoned the leaders of Britain, France and Germany, all key allies with major troop commitments in Afghanistan. However, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Dutch Prime Minister weren't among those called, according to U.S. officials. Both countries, stalwart fighting allies for much of the decade, have pulled their troops out of combat roles.

Mr. Obama told war-weary Americans that he was determined to wind down both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. "It is time to focus on nation-building at home," he said.

He pointed to successes in decapitating al-Qaeda, not just with the Special Forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden in his Pakistani home, but also the relentless assassination campaign using missile-firing Predator drones that have attacked scores of al-Qaeda commanders.

The U.S.-led coalition has set 2014 as the year it wants shift responsibility for Afghanistan's security to its own police and army. Those forces, growing rapidly in size, remain under-equipped and often inadequately trained.

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