Obama to visit Fort Drum after announcing troop withdrawal

Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama goes on the road Thursday to sell his plan to withdraw 33,000 U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

He will meet with soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York -- many of whom have recently returned from Afghan deployments.

France announced on Thursday that it would follow suit, saying it "will initiate a progressive withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan, and will follow a timetable comparable to the withdrawal of the American troops."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said the withdrawal will be done in consultation with NATO allies and the Afghan government.

All French soldiers could be out of Afghanistan by 2013, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet told France Info radio Thursday.

Obama announced Wednesday night that all the additional U.S. forces he ordered to Afghanistan in December 2009 will be home within 15 months.

In a nationally televised address from the East Room of the White House, Obama said 10,000 of the "surge" forces would withdraw by the end of this year, and the other 23,000 would leave Afghanistan by September 2012.

Calling the deployment of the surge "one of the most difficult decisions that I've made as president," Obama said the military campaign was "meeting our goals" in Afghanistan and the drawdown would begin "from a position of strength."

"Al Qaeda is under more pressure than at any time since 9/11," Obama said. "Together with the Pakistanis, we have taken out more than half of al Qaeda's leadership. And thanks to our intelligence professionals and special forces, we killed Osama bin Laden, the only leader that al Qaeda had ever known. This was a victory for all who have served since 9/11."

At the same time, Obama said the Afghanistan drawdown and the simultaneous winding down of the war in Iraq would help the United States begin to refocus attention and resources on efforts to resolve economic and other problems and to unify a politically divided nation.

"America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home," the president said.

Afghanistan's defense ministry said Thursday it "respects the decision of the U.S. government and the U.S. people" and is ready to take up the slack as U.S. forces begin to pull out.

"Based on quantity and quality developments, the ... Afghan National Army is ready to cover the gap," the ministry said.

The Taliban called Obama's announcement "only ... a symbolic step which will never satisfy the war weary international community or the American people."

"The assertion of American leaders about making headway in Afghanistan and Obama's proclamation of them being in a stronger position are nothing more than baseless claims and propaganda," the group said in a statement released Thursday.

The troop withdrawals from Afghanistan will begin next month, as Obama promised when he ordered the surge in a speech 18 months ago at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.

After the departure of all the surge forces, the total U.S. military deployment in Afghanistan will be slightly fewer than 70,000 troops.

Obama's time frame will give U.S. commanders another two "fighting" seasons with the bulk of U.S. forces still available for combat operations.

It also will bring the surge troops home before the November 2012 election in which Obama will seek a second term.

Initial reaction was varied, with outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates supporting Obama's decision while congressional leaders were divided between those who wanted a faster withdrawal and others calling for caution in leaving Afghanistan.

"It's important that we retain the flexibility necessary to reconsider troop levels and respond to changes in the security environment should circumstances on the ground warrant," said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, in a statement. "Congress will hold the administration accountable for ensuring that the pace and scope of the drawdown does not undermine the progress we've made thus far."

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, was more blunt, saying: "This is not the 'modest' withdrawal that I and others had hoped for and advocated."

Democratic colleagues of Obama expressed support for starting the withdrawal but said more troops should be included and they should depart faster than the president announced.

"It has been the hope of many in Congress and across the country that the full drawdown of U.S. forces would happen sooner than the president laid out -- and we will continue to press for a better outcome," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said in a statement.

Two candidates for the Republican presidential nomination to run against Obama next year expressed reservations about the withdrawal strategy, but differed in their reasoning.

"We all want our troops to come home as soon as possible, but we shouldn't adhere to an arbitrary timetable on the withdrawal" from Afghanistan, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said in a statement. "This decision should not be based on politics or economics."

In his own statement, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who was Obama's ambassador to China until recently, called for shifting the Afghanistan mission to "a focused counterterror effort which requires significantly fewer boots on the ground than the president discussed tonight."

"We need a safe but rapid withdrawal, which encourages Afghans to assume responsibility, while leaving in place a strong counterintelligence and special forces effort proportionate to the threat," Huntsman said.

The killing of bin Laden in early May and the success in reversing Taliban momentum in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar enabled the beginning of a troop withdrawal that will culminate with handing over security responsibilities to Afghan forces in 2014, the senior administration officials said on condition of not being identified.

Gates -- along with Afghan war commander Gen. David Petraeus -- had pushed for an initial drawdown of 3,000 to 5,000 troops this year, according to a congressional source. Gates also urged the president to withdraw support troops only -- not combat troops.

Obama, however, ultimately decided to adopt the more aggressive withdrawal plan. The senior administration officials said Obama's withdrawal schedule fell within the range of options presented to him by Petraeus.

In a statement after Obama's speech, Gates said it was "critical" that U.S. forces continue to "aggressively" carry out the surge strategy of degrading the capability of the Taliban while bolstering Afghan security forces.

"I support the president's decision because it provides our commanders with enough resources, time and, perhaps most importantly, flexibility to bring the surge to a successful conclusion," Gates said, signaling Pentagon control in deciding which U.S. forces to withdraw.

Public exhaustion with the conflict is reflected in recent public opinion polls. Nearly three-quarters of Americans support the United States pulling some or all of its forces from Afghanistan, according to a June 3-7 CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey.

That figure jumped 10 points since May, likely as a result of the death of bin Laden, pollsters said.

The United States has spent roughly $443 billion on the war in Afghanistan, according to budget analysts. According to Travis Sharp, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security, the troop reductions Obama announced would bring a savings of about $7 billion in fiscal year 2012.

Senior administration officials told CNN that planning for the announcement began in January, when the president summoned top members of his national security team into the Oval Office and tasked them with coming up with a plan for the drawdown.

The calculations that went into the drawdown decision included the fact that "remarkable" and "unexpected" progress had been made degrading al-Qaeda's infrastructure in its bases in the tribal regions of Pakistan over the prior 18 months, one of the officials said.

Additionally, the Taliban have been rolled back from their heartland regions in southern and southwestern Afghanistan, both in northern and southern Helmand Province and around the key city of Kandahar, which had been their de facto capital. This progress fulfilled the administration's pledge to reverse the momentum of the Taliban, which had been one of the key rationales for the surge.

Another factor favoring the drawdown was the growth in Afghan army and police forces of 100,000 men in the past year, the officials said.

CNN's Saskya Vandoorne, Barbara Starr, Ted Barrett, Deirdre Walsh, Tom Cohen, Alan Silverleib and Brianna Keilar, Ben Brumfeld and CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen contributed to this report.

CNN

Obama's Afghanistan Drawdown: Why Troop Levels Won't Affect the War's Outcome (Time.com)

President Barack Obama will on Wednesday announce the size of the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan he will order in July in keeping with the symbolic drawdown he promised to begin this summer. His top military men appear to want to keep most combat troops in the field for at least another two years; other advisers want the withdrawal that begins this summer to involve substantial numbers of troops and on an accelerated schedule. But the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan appears increasingly unlikely to decisively determine the outcome of the war.

Soon after he arrived in office, President Obama buckled to pressure from the Pentagon and doubled down on the U.S. commitment of blood and treasure in Afghanistan, sending an extra 30,000 soldiers as part of the Afghan "surge". Whatever tactical gains have been made in that time - and are likely to be made in the next two years even if current force levels were maintained - Obama will be well aware that a decade of warfare in Afghanistan has failed to qualitatively transform the strategic equation. The key argument from the generals and Administration figures like Defense Secretary Robert Gates in support of keeping the full complement of fighting men in Afghanistan is that the gains made in recent years are "fragile". Of course they are: Experience has shown that there's no reason to expect any area "cleared" by NATO forces will remain that way once they reduce their force levels there. It was ever thus, and there's little reason to expect any different in a conflict that pits a foreign armies against an indigenous insurgency backed by a significant section of the population and with sanctuary in a neighboring country. But who'd want to be the President who has to call time on a failed expeditionary war? (Watch "A New Season of Fighting in Afghanistan.")

Obama's track record suggests the withdrawal he announces for this year will involve a desultory figure of less than 5,000 of the 100,000 troops the U.S. currently has deployed in Afghanistan. But expect, also, to see the President define downward the benchmark of success, focusing it narrowly on protecting the American mainland from another transnational terror attack by al-Qaeda, and using the killing of Osama bin Laden to underscore the fact that the job is almost done. The terror network, much reduced by a decade of pummeling, today operates more from Pakistan than Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan mission's more ambitious nation-building goals originally proclaimed by the Bush Administration, however, are plainly beyond reach for the foreseeable future. The U.S. finds itself propping up a corrupt and ambivalent Karzai government knowing it has limited ability to win hearts and minds in the war zone, but also that it has no better alternative. The argument that the U.S. needs to be in Afghanistan to stop Pakistan falling to the Taliban has always been specious, for the simple reason that those currently in power in Pakistan see the Afghan Taliban as an ally that, unlike the U.S., shares Islamabad's strategic interests in Afghanistan. And Pakistan's generals act accordingly. Pakistan has been the headquarters of the Afghan Taliban's leadership shura ever since U.S. forces and their Afghan allies swept the movement from power in late 2001. The generals who make Pakistan's decisions didn't stop seeing Afghanistan as a key front in their existential strategic rivalry with India just because it became the initial geo-strategic focus of the U.S. "war on terror".

Afghanistan on June 7 superseded Vietnam as the longest war in U.S. history, having dragged on twice as long as American involvement in World War II. The more relevant comparison, however irksome it may be to American exceptionalists, may be to Soviet Union's nine-year debacle in Afghanistan - a milestone the U.S. passed last November.

Sure, there are plenty of differences between the two cases - Moscow hadn't suffered terror attacks originating in Afghanistan; it faced insurgent opposition in all of Afghanistan's major ethnic groups whereas the Western presence is opposed from within the Pashtun majority, but has found willing allies the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities whose leaders were traditionally grouped in the Northern Alliance that had fought Taliban rule. And, of course, U.S. counterinsurgency warfare is far smarter and more effective than the Red Army's. (See pictures of medevac in Afghanistan.)

Still, like the Soviets, the U.S.-led operation controls only part of the country; the writ of the feckless government it has propped up doesn't extend much beyond the capital; Pakistan continues to function as a rear base for the insurgents; and the long-term trend lines offer no reason to expect that the insurgents will be eliminated.

The U.S. is not going to be routed in Afghanistan, like some 19th Century British expeditionary force. But nor is it able to vanquish a foe that, in traditional guerrilla style, simply melts away to form up elsewhere whenever the foreign army concentrates its forces. The Taliban doesn't need to storm Kabul to win. As Henry Kissinger famously noted, in an insurgency of this type, the guerrilla army wins by not losing; the conventional army loses by not winning.

And the U.S.-led NATO operation is clearly not winning, even if it's managing to tread water in areas where it has concentrated its forces. Polls show that a majority of Americans no longer believe the war is worth fighting. And that's an opinion long shared by the majority of Afghans in the Pashtun war zone.

The comforting prospect offered to Americans looking for an end to a war that is costing upward of $100 billion a year and a slow but steady drip of U.S. casualties is that the U.S. is training and equipping Afghan security forces projected to number 300,000 by October. But few Western military observers have much confidence that this force will be either able or willing to continue NATO's fight once Western troops leave, ostensibly in 2014 - although the rump Northern Alliance elements will certainly fight tooth and nail to protect their turf from any Taliban return. Right now, Kabul doesn't exactly control much of the territory of which it is the sovereign capital, and that's unlikely to change no matter who's in power there. (See what it will take to finish the job in Afghanistan.)

Washington appears to have recognized that the only way to relieve itself of an open-ended burden in Afghanistan is to negotiate a peace agreement with the Taliban enemy it had originally hoped to destroy. Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged last weekend that preliminary negotiations are already under way, although with little expectation of near-term progress.

The purpose of the NATO war effort, over the past two years, has been to set the negotiating table more favorably to the Western side, hoping to forcefully "demonstrate" to the Taliban that it can't prevail on the battlefield and therefore that it needs to be more amenable to U.S. terms for peace. And, of course, the Taliban's purpose has been the exact opposite - to demonstrate the futility of the NATO effort, so as to give it a better chance of imposing its own terms at the peace table.

Despite the "surge", the Taliban doesn't appear to be feeling squeezed to accept U.S. peace terms. On the contrary, right now it seems to playing hard to get, believing that time and circumstance work in its favor.

So outcome of the Afghanistan war is unlikely to be determined by the troop numbers to which President Obama commits on Wednesday. Instead, it will be shaped by what the U.S., the Northern Alliance, and Afghanistan's key neighbors, most importantly Pakistan, are willing to accept by way of a political compromise.

Watch "Joe Klein: Crisis in the Afghan War Policy."

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Huntsman chides ex-boss Obama on troop drawdown (AFP)

NEW YORK (AFP) – Former ambassador to China Jon Huntsman chided his ex-boss President Barack Obama on Wednesday for what he criticized as a too-tentative plan to draw down US forces in Afghanistan.

"I think that we can probably be more aggressive," Obama's former envoy to Beijing told NBC's "Today Show" one day after formally announcing his bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

"We've been at this for nine years and 50 days. We put Karzai in power, we've had democratic elections.... We've routed the Taliban, we've dismantled Al-Qaeda," the former Utah governor said hours before Obama was set to announce the size and pace of a US troop reduction in Afghanistan.

Sources have said that the president will announce a drawdown of 10,000 US troops by year's end and 30,000 by the end of 2012, but Huntsman said a much bigger pullout is called for -- in part to help fix a US economy groaning under a huge debt burden.

"What we need now is a healthy dose of nation-building here at home," Huntsman told NBC.

He pounded home his criticism speaking to another US television program, ABC's "Good Morning America," calling Obama's plans to gradually remove US troops "a little slow and a little cautious."

"When you look at one out of every six Defense Department dollars going in support of what we're doing in Afghanistan, I think over the next year, I think there is room to draw down more," he told ABC.

Huntsman, 51, said he believed war-weary Americans want a "fairly aggressive" reduction and that he worried more about the United States losing ground to economic rivals.

As envoy to China, Huntsman -- the son of a billionaire businessman -- helped Washington navigate a particularly thorny time in relations between the world's top two economies as they battled over everything from the yuan and trade to Taiwan and Internet freedom.

But Democrats have pounded Huntsman in a sign that they take seriously the potential threat he poses just two months after he ended a 20-month stint in Beijing.

Huntsman also has assailed Obama over historically high unemployment and declared "we need more than hope," a mocking reference to the "hope and change" mantra of the Democrat's historic 2008 campaign.

Polls showed Huntsman trailing his rivals for the Republican nomination, notably former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a fellow Mormon and the frontrunner in the crowded field of candidates looking to deny Obama a new term.

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Obama's Afghan Drawdown: Why Troop Levels Won't Affect the War's Outcome (Time.com)

President Barack Obama will on Wednesday announce the size of the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan he will order in July in keeping with the symbolic drawdown he promised to begin this summer. His top military men appear to want to keep most combat troops in the field for at least another two years; other advisers want the withdrawal that begins this summer to involve substantial numbers of troops and on an accelerated schedule. But the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan appears increasingly unlikely to decisively determine the outcome of the war.

Soon after he arrived in office, President Obama buckled to pressure from the Pentagon and doubled down on the U.S. commitment of blood and treasure in Afghanistan, sending an extra 30,000 soldiers as part of the Afghan "surge". Whatever tactical gains have been made in that time - and are likely to be made in the next two years even if current force levels were maintained - Obama will be well aware that a decade of warfare in Afghanistan has failed to qualitatively transform the strategic equation. The key argument from the generals and Administration figures like Defense Secretary Robert Gates in support of keeping the full complement of fighting men in Afghanistan is that the gains made in recent years are "fragile". Of course they are: Experience has shown that there's no reason to expect any area "cleared" by NATO forces will remain that way once they reduce their force levels there. It was ever thus, and there's little reason to expect any different in a conflict that pits a foreign armies against an indigenous insurgency backed by a significant section of the population and with sanctuary in a neighboring country. But who'd want to be the President who has to call time on a failed expeditionary war? (Watch "A New Season of Fighting in Afghanistan.")

Obama's track record suggests the withdrawal he announces for this year will involve a desultory figure of less than 5,000 of the 100,000 troops the U.S. currently has deployed in Afghanistan. But expect, also, to see the President define downward the benchmark of success, focusing it narrowly on protecting the American mainland from another transnational terror attack by al-Qaeda, and using the killing of Osama bin Laden to underscore the fact that the job is almost done. The terror network, much reduced by a decade of pummeling, today operates more from Pakistan than Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan mission's more ambitious nation-building goals originally proclaimed by the Bush Administration, however, are plainly beyond reach for the foreseeable future. The U.S. finds itself propping up a corrupt and ambivalent Karzai government knowing it has limited ability to win hearts and minds in the war zone, but also that it has no better alternative. The argument that the U.S. needs to be in Afghanistan to stop Pakistan falling to the Taliban has always been specious, for the simple reason that those currently in power in Pakistan see the Afghan Taliban as an ally that, unlike the U.S., shares Islamabad's strategic interests in Afghanistan. And Pakistan's generals act accordingly. Pakistan has been the headquarters of the Afghan Taliban's leadership shura ever since U.S. forces and their Afghan allies swept the movement from power in late 2001. The generals who make Pakistan's decisions didn't stop seeing Afghanistan as a key front in their existential strategic rivalry with India just because it became the initial geo-strategic focus of the U.S. "war on terror".

Afghanistan on June 7 superseded Vietnam as the longest war in U.S. history, having dragged on twice as long as American involvement in World War II. The more relevant comparison, however irksome it may be to American exceptionalists, may be to Soviet Union's nine-year debacle in Afghanistan - a milestone the U.S. passed last November.

Sure, there are plenty of differences between the two cases - Moscow hadn't suffered terror attacks originating in Afghanistan; it faced insurgent opposition in all of Afghanistan's major ethnic groups whereas the Western presence is opposed from within the Pashtun majority, but has found willing allies the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities whose leaders were traditionally grouped in the Northern Alliance that had fought Taliban rule. And, of course, U.S. counterinsurgency warfare is far smarter and more effective than the Red Army's. (See pictures of medevac in Afghanistan.)

Still, like the Soviets, the U.S.-led operation controls only part of the country; the writ of the feckless government it has propped up doesn't extend much beyond the capital; Pakistan continues to function as a rear base for the insurgents; and the long-term trend lines offer no reason to expect that the insurgents will be eliminated.

The U.S. is not going to be routed in Afghanistan, like some 19th Century British expeditionary force. But nor is it able to vanquish a foe that, in traditional guerrilla style, simply melts away to form up elsewhere whenever the foreign army concentrates its forces. The Taliban doesn't need to storm Kabul to win. As Henry Kissinger famously noted, in an insurgency of this type, the guerrilla army wins by not losing; the conventional army loses by not winning.

And the U.S.-led NATO operation is clearly not winning, even if it's managing to tread water in areas where it has concentrated its forces. Polls show that a majority of Americans no longer believe the war is worth fighting. And that's an opinion long shared by the majority of Afghans in the Pashtun war zone.

The comforting prospect offered to Americans looking for an end to a war that is costing upward of $100 billion a year and a slow but steady drip of U.S. casualties is that the U.S. is training and equipping Afghan security forces projected to number 300,000 by October. But few Western military observers have much confidence that this force will be either able or willing to continue NATO's fight once Western troops leave, ostensibly in 2014 - although the rump Northern Alliance elements will certainly fight tooth and nail to protect their turf from any Taliban return. Right now, Kabul doesn't exactly control much of the territory of which it is the sovereign capital, and that's unlikely to change no matter who's in power there. (See what it will take to finish the job in Afghanistan.)

Washington appears to have recognized that the only way to relieve itself of an open-ended burden in Afghanistan is to negotiate a peace agreement with the Taliban enemy it had originally hoped to destroy. Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged last weekend that preliminary negotiations are already under way, although with little expectation of near-term progress.

The purpose of the NATO war effort, over the past two years, has been to set the negotiating table more favorably to the Western side, hoping to forcefully "demonstrate" to the Taliban that it can't prevail on the battlefield and therefore that it needs to be more amenable to U.S. terms for peace. And, of course, the Taliban's purpose has been the exact opposite - to demonstrate the futility of the NATO effort, so as to give it a better chance of imposing its own terms at the peace table.

Despite the "surge", the Taliban doesn't appear to be feeling squeezed to accept U.S. peace terms. On the contrary, right now it seems to playing hard to get, believing that time and circumstance work in its favor.

So outcome of the Afghanistan war is unlikely to be determined by the troop numbers to which President Obama commits on Wednesday. Instead, it will be shaped by what the U.S., the Northern Alliance, and Afghanistan's key neighbors, most importantly Pakistan, are willing to accept by way of a political compromise.

Watch "Joe Klein: Crisis in the Afghan War Policy."

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

View this article on Time.com

Most Popular on Time.com:

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Obama to deliver speech on Afghanistan troop pullout

Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama will deliver a highly anticipated speech Wednesday evening about troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.

The address is scheduled for 8 p.m. ET.

On Tuesday, an administration official told CNN that Obama will announce this week that 30,000 U.S. "surge" forces will be fully withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2012.

Members of Congress are being informed that 10,000 troops will be withdrawn by the end of this year, followed by another 20,000 next year, a congressional source said.

The time frame would give U.S. commanders another two "fighting" seasons with the bulk of U.S. forces still available for combat operations.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pushed for additional time to roll back Taliban gains in the country before starting any significant withdrawal -- a position at odds with a majority of Americans, according to recent public opinion surveys.

Gates -- along with Afghan war commander Gen. David Petraeus -- had pushed for an initial drawdown of between 3,000 and 5,000 troops this year, the congressional source said. The secretary also urged the president to withdraw support troops only -- not combat troops.

Obama, however, ultimately decided to adopt a more aggressive withdrawal plan.

Gates acknowledged Tuesday that the president must take into account public opinion and congressional support for further military engagement.

"Sustainability here at home" is an important consideration, Gates said, noting that people are "tired of a decade of war."

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, repeated his call Tuesday for a withdrawal of 15,000 troops this year.

"The level of U.S. troop reductions in Afghanistan needs to be significant to achieve its purpose --- letting the Afghan government know we are determined to shift primary responsibility for their security to the Afghan security forces," Levin said in a written statement.

An estimated 100,000 U.S. troops are serving in Afghanistan, some 30,000 of which are part of the so-called surge ordered in 2009 in a bid to control the rising violence.

Obama has been mulling how many troops should be withdrawn this summer and by the end of the year.

The president is expected, in his remarks Wednesday, to stress the importance of preserving flexibility in force levels on the ground so commanders can adjust as conditions warrant, the official said.

The drawdown will be accomplished by troops returning home and not being replaced as well as canceling some proposed deployments.

So far, Obama has only said publicly that troops will begin coming home in July, and he recently indicated the number would be "significant."

The president has repeatedly said he is confident the United States can meet the self-imposed deadline to begin bringing troops back from Afghanistan without compromising Afghan security, though military commanders and government officials have raised concern about the readiness of Afghan security forces.

"We have made great strides toward achieving the objectives laid out in the mission that the president articulated in December of 2009," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday.

Obama "will make his decision based on the need to succeed further in achieving those objectives and to transfer authority gradually, security authority, over to the Afghan national security forces, with an eye to the fact that, as agreed to by NATO in Lisbon, we will eventually transfer full security lead over to the ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) in 2014," Carney said.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans polled this month said they support the United States pulling some or all of its forces from Afghanistan.

That figure jumped 10 percentage points since May, likely as a result of the death of Osama bin Laden, pollsters said.

The deployment of U.S. forces also hasn't been popular with many Afghan leaders, who openly criticize the presence of the Americans in their country.

It's a message that's not lost on U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry.

"When we hear ourselves being called occupiers and worse, our pride is offended and we begin to lose our inspiration to carry on," Eikenberry said during a Sunday speech at Herat University in western Afghanistan.

"At the point your leaders believe that we are doing more harm than good, when we reach a point that we feel our soldiers and civilians are being asked to sacrifice without a just cause ... the American people will ask for our forces to come home."

Republicans -- who have been the strongest supporters of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan -- appear to be shifting their opinion on the conflict. Forty-seven percent of Republicans said in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll in May that they favored a partial or full withdrawal of American troops. Sixty percent of Republicans favored a withdrawal when asked this month.

The most recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted June 3 through 7, with 1,015 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

CNN's Aliza Kassim, Barbara Starr, Ted Barrett and Alan Silverleib contributed to this report.

CNN

Obama ponders Afghanistan troop withdrawal, post-bin Laden

We've known for more than a year that President Obama is planning to begin a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in July, but we don't know what the pace will be.

Now we wonder if that pace will quicken after the death of Osama bin Laden.

Certainly many Democrats -- and some Republicans -- are urging a stepped-up withdrawal.

"I think there's going to be a lot of strong feeling on the part of most Democrats and many, I think many independents, and even some Republicans that the decision of the president to reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan should be a robust reduction," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., said, "our reaction to the death of bin Laden should be that we declare victory. ... I think this changes the whole dynamics of the war on terrorism. Let's go after them. Let's not occupy a country for 10 years for nothing but a waste of lives."

Observers will be looking for clues from Obama on Friday, when he visits returning Afghanistan soldiers at Fort Campbell, Ky.

"Fort Campbell is home to several units, including the 101st Airborne Division which has several Brigade Combat Teams that have recently returned from Afghanistan, even as a significant part of the division remains deployed,"' said the White House announcement.

As Obama meets with advisers about the Afghanistan pullout, bin Laden's death isn't the only new element.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has been nominated by Obama to be CIA director.

The current CIA director, Leon Panetta, is on tap to replace retiring Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

In the meantime, some lawmakers are arguing against a too-hasty retreat from Afghanistan, lest it again become a harbor for the kinds of terrorists once rallied by bin Laden.

"We would repeat a mistake that we made once before when we pulled out of Afghanistan after the Soviets did," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. "That invited ultimately the Taliban and al-Qaeda into Afghanistan and from Afghanistan they attacked us on 9/11."

See photos of: Barack Obama, Afghanistan, Robert Gates, David Petraeus

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Obama ponders Afghanistan troop withdrawal, post-bin Laden

We've known for more than a year that President Obama is planning to begin a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in July, but we don't know what the pace will be.

Now we wonder if that pace will quicken after the death of Osama bin Laden.

Certainly many Democrats -- and some Republicans -- are urging a stepped-up withdrawal.

"I think there's going to be a lot of strong feeling on the part of most Democrats and many, I think many independents, and even some Republicans that the decision of the president to reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan should be a robust reduction," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., said, "our reaction to the death of bin Laden should be that we declare victory. ... I think this changes the whole dynamics of the war on terrorism. Let's go after them. Let's not occupy a country for 10 years for nothing but a waste of lives."

Observers will be looking for clues from Obama on Friday, when he visits returning Afghanistan soldiers at Fort Campbell, Ky.

"Fort Campbell is home to several units, including the 101st Airborne Division which has several Brigade Combat Teams that have recently returned from Afghanistan, even as a significant part of the division remains deployed,"' said the White House announcement.

As Obama meets with advisers about the Afghanistan pullout, bin Laden's death isn't the only new element.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has been nominated by Obama to be CIA director.

The current CIA director, Leon Panetta, is on tap to replace retiring Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

In the meantime, some lawmakers are arguing against a too-hasty retreat from Afghanistan, lest it again become a harbor for the kinds of terrorists once rallied by bin Laden.

"We would repeat a mistake that we made once before when we pulled out of Afghanistan after the Soviets did," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. "That invited ultimately the Taliban and al-Qaeda into Afghanistan and from Afghanistan they attacked us on 9/11."

See photos of: Barack Obama, Afghanistan, Robert Gates, David Petraeus

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Military: Troop ailments, from backs to breathing, swell

WASHINGTON — More than 190,000 active-duty servicemembers sought treatment for back injuries in 2010 ? roughly 70,000 more than did in 2001, before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, according to a Defense Department morbidity report released Friday.

U.S. Army Spc. Benjamin McCune, 21, is carried through a military hospital on March 22, 2010 at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan. The 82nd Airborne soldier suffered back injuries when his armored vehicle struck an IED.

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U.S. Army Spc. Benjamin McCune, 21, is carried through a military hospital on March 22, 2010 at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan. The 82nd Airborne soldier suffered back injuries when his armored vehicle struck an IED.

The number of servicemembers who saw a doctor for adjustment disorders increased from 33,987 in 2001 to 79,500 in 2010.

And 140,000 more servicemembers had signs and symptoms of respiratory problems in 2010 than did the previous year.

Mental disorders possibly caused by combat stress increased by about 170,000 cases from 2001 to 2010. And an increase of epilepsy ? from 1,514 cases in 2001 to 2,620 in 2010 ? may come as a result of an increase in traumatic brain injuries, which has been connected to the disorder

But some of those numbers ? such as a jump from 9,688 diagnosed "all other neurologic conditions" in 2001 to 32,667 in 2010, or the increase from 65,520 cardiovascular cases in 2001 to 91,013 in 2010 ? may seem more mysterious. Doctors, researchers and environmental experts, both civilian and military, believe open burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan may be partly to blame. Most of the pits in Iraq ? one of which burned 240 tons of Styrofoam, plastic water bottles, diesel engines and computer parts along with other trash every day ? have been shut down since Congress demanded it, but new ones have been created to get rid of troop waste in Afghanistan.

And, civilian studies have shown that fine particulate matter increases cases of respiratory and cardiovascular disorders. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates industrial particulate matter for just that reason, but the troops have breathed in everything from cement-factory exhaust to leaded gasoline fumes in the Middle East.

The number of pregnancy complications also increased from 13,755 in 2001 to 24,540 in 2010.

"As noted many times in the past, the prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of injuries of all types ? particularly, back injuries ? and the detection, characterization and management of mental disorders ? including substance disorder and deployment stress-related disorders, e.g., PTSD ? should have the highest priorities for military medical research, public health and force health protection programs," states the Defense Department's newly released Medical Surveillance Monthly Report.

The report also cites the "scarce resources for diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation and disability compensation."

The numbers include active-duty servicemembers who went to a military health clinic at a permanent base anywhere in the world and do not include evaluations performed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

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