By JULIE PACE
AP White House Correspondent
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama will
announce in his State of the Union address that 34,000 U.S. troops will
be home from Afghanistan within a year, a senior administration official
said Tuesday.
That's about half the U.S. forces currently serving
there, and marks the next phase in the administration's plans to
formally finish the war by the end of 2014. The U.S. now has 66,000
troops in Afghanistan, down from a peak of about 100,000 as recently as
2010.
The U.S. is still finalizing plans for the size and
scope of its military presence after the war ends. The White House has
said it would be open to leaving no troops in Afghanistan, though it's
likely that a small presence will remain, in keeping with the Pentagon's
preferences.
Obama won't announce troop numbers beyond 2014 in
Tuesday's speech and has not yet made that decision, said the official,
who requested anonymity in order to discuss the troop drawdown ahead of
the president.
Obama discussed the next phases of the drawdown
with Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a day-long meeting in
Washington last month, the first meeting between the two leaders since
Obama's re-election. The two leaders agreed to accelerate their
timetable for putting Afghan forces in the lead combat role nationwide,
moving that transition up from the summer to the spring.
Obama will announce the troop drawdown and the
future of the U.S. role in Afghanistan during a joint session of
Congress that is otherwise expected to be dominated by the economy and
other domestic issues.
Foreign policy has intruded in recent days,
however, and the White House quickly condemned North Korea early Tuesday
for its nuclear launch hours before Obama's address. The president is
expected to make further remarks on this in his primetime speech.
Some private security analysts, as well as some
Pentagon officials, worry that pulling out of Afghanistan too quickly
will leave the battle-scarred country vulnerable to collapse. In a
worst-case scenario, that could allow the Taliban to regain power and
revert to the role they played in the years before 9/11 as protectors of
al-Qaida terrorists bent on striking the U.S.
Many Americans, however, are weary of the war,
according to public opinion polls, and are skeptical of any claim that
Afghanistan is worth more U.S. blood. Registered voters are roughly
split between those who say the U.S. should remove all troops and those
who favor leaving some troops in place for counterterrorism efforts,
according to a recent Fox News poll.
The Obama administration gave the first clear
signal in early January that it might leave no troops in the country
after December 2014. Administration officials have said they are
considering a range of options for a residual U.S. troop presence of as
few as 3,000 and as many as 15,000, with the number linked to a specific
set of military-related missions like hunting down terrorists.
Copyright 2013 The
Associated Press modified.
