U.s. Troops, Afghan Troop Withdrawal | featured news

A German official is saying Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has told NATO allies that the U.S. will leave between 8,000-12,000 American troops in Afghanistan after 2014, when combat ends.

President Barack Obama will announce in his State of the Union address on Tuesday that 34,000 troops will return from Afghanistan by early 2014, a source familiar with the speech told Reuters.

Moving the mountain of U.S. military gear out of Afghanistan after more than a decade of war will cost billions of dollars and prove far more difficult than last year's withdrawal from Iraq, the Pentagon's No. 2 official said Tuesday.

The U.S. designation Saturday of Afghanistan as its newest "major non-NATO ally" amounts to a political statement of support for the country's long-term stability and solidifies close defense cooperation after American combat troops withdraw in 2014....

Officials say the US mission in Afghanistan will not change in the wake of an American soldier's attack on civilians, and troops are still on course to hand over security control to Afghans by the end of 2014.

Soldiers who just returned from Iraq are among several thousand being ordered to Afghanistan in six months as part of a mission designed to beef up Afghan forces ahead of a planned 2014 U.S. military withdrawal, officials said.

U.S. soldiers deployed on the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan say the war isn't going away for another ten years, even after Washington pulls troops from a country locked in a deadly Islamist insurgency.

The first U.S. troops have left Afghanistan as part of President Barack Obama's planned drawdown of about a third of the 100,000 U.S. forces there during the next year.

President Barack Obama said on Wednesday he will withdraw 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan by year's end and a total of 33,000 by the summer of 2012.

Gen. David Petraeus will not say whether U.S. troops will begin to pull out of Afghanistan next summer as President Obama pledged last year, saying any drawdown will be conditions based.