WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. military warned on Thursday that President Barack Obama's faster-than-expected drawdown in Afghanistan created new risks, even as commanders said they backed the strategy to start winding down the unpopular, nearly decade-old war.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the U.S. Congress that Obama's plans to withdraw nearly a third of the some 99,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of next summer was a riskier plan than he had wanted. Obama announced the withdrawal timetable on Wednesday.
"The president's decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept," Mullen told a House of Representatives committee hearing in his first comments on Obama's plan.
Mullen later said the risks were still manageable and would not by themselves jeopardize the overall military mission.
His comments, while carefully phrased, were an unusually public expression of the Pentagon's initial unease with Obama's aggressive Afghan drawdown. In the run-up to Obama's decision, military leaders lobbied privately for more time, and outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates publicly said any troop withdrawal should be modest.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged "lots of competing opinions coming at (Obama) from all sides." She, too, said she supported his decision.
In Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Washington's ally in a relationship made tense by allegations of incompetence and corruption, welcomed the plan for a gradual pullout and said Afghans increasingly trusted their security forces.
European nations that have contributed troops to the military effort against the Afghan Taliban insurgency said they would also proceed with already-planned phased reductions.
But the Taliban, resurgent a decade after being toppled from power by U.S.-led forces following the September 11 attacks, dismissed the announcement and said only a full, immediate withdrawal of foreign forces could stop "pointless bloodshed."
They rejected any suggestion of U.S. military gains.
'RUSH TO THE EXITS'?
In a prime-time televised appearance on Wednesday, Obama said he would withdraw 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2011, and a further 23,000 by the end of next summer. Remaining troops would be steadily withdrawn after that.
Nearly 70,000 U.S. soldiers will, however, remain in Afghanistan even after the cuts announced by Obama, about twice the number when he took office in January 2009.
Obama's decision divided Congress, with some lawmakers demanding a more rapid pullout and others branding Obama's drawdown as a dangerous political move to appease his Democratic base ahead of the 2012 presidential election.
Senator John McCain, a Republican who lost to Obama in the 2008 election, said "I think we're taking a huge unnecessary risk."
Republican Senator Charles Grassley called the pullout pace "very dangerous" and said he understood that General David Petraeus, the overall commander in Afghanistan, had recommended a slower withdrawal than the one Obama announced.
"The president's only consideration in all of this should be what is best for our national security, not finding some halfway point" with war critics, Grassley told Reuters.
But Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, appearing at the committee hearing alongside Mullen, said, "Clearly, this is not a 'rush to the exits' that will jeopardize our security gains."
Mullen also played down the possibility that security gains could be easily reversed. Bringing home troops offered some benefits, he said, including reinforcing the goal of putting Afghans in control of their own security by the end of 2014.
"The truth is, we would have run other kinds of risks by keeping more forces in Afghanistan longer. We would have made it easier for the Karzai administration to increase their dependency on us," Mullen said.
The Taliban has been pushed out of some areas of their southern heartland, but the insurgency has intensified along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan and U.S. commanders have wanted to shift their focus to that area.
Still, Clinton, appearing separately before a Senate committee, acknowledged there was no military solution to the conflict and said the United States had a broad range of contacts in search of a political resolution.
Asked by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, if there was a possibility for a peace agreement with the Taliban, Clinton said, "I think there is, but I think that we're a long way from knowing what the realistic elements of such an agreement would be."
"I can only stress that we are committed to pursuing it, because it is the only path forward, there is no other path forward. Nobody is strong enough to really assert control," she said.
In another sign of the challenges ahead in transferring control to Afghan authorities, an Afghan court on Thursday overturned a quarter of the results from last year's fraud-tainted parliamentary election -- potentially plunging the country into a new political crisis.
Afghanistan has been in a state of political paralysis since the September 18 election, with a full cabinet still not in place after weeks of squabbling.
EUROPEANS CALL FOR GRADUAL PULLOUT
As the U.S. withdraws, so will its allies. France, Germany, Poland and Spain said they would proceed with a gradual drawdown.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, like Obama seeking re-election next year, said in a statement that he would oversee a pullout "in a proportional manner and in a calendar comparable to the withdrawal of American reinforcements." France's 4,000-strong contingent is the fourth largest in Afghanistan.
German Defense Minister Guido Westerwelle said his country, with 4,800 troops in the increasingly violent north, hoped "to be able to reduce our own troop contingent for the first time" by the end of the year.
(Additional reporting by David Alexander, Susan Cornwell, Missy Ryan and Jim Wolf in Washington; David Brunnstrom in Brussels and Paul Tait and Hamid Shalizi in Kabul; editing by Sanjeev Miglani and Mohammad Zargham)
Pakistan's Frontier Corps is often targeted by militants British military trainers working with security forces in Pakistan have been withdrawn at the request of the Pakistani government.