President Obama charted a middle course Wednesday for ending the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, outlining a departure plan that will remove troops faster than his commanders had requested but more slowly than many of his political allies would like. 
 
 In a prime-time address from the White House, Obama said he will bring home 10,000 U.S. troops by the end of the year and 23,000 more by next summer, a withdrawal window that will conclude two months before voters decide whether to give him a second term. The first troops will leave Afghanistan next month. 
 
 “Tonight,” the president said from the East Room, “we take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding.” 
 
 In contrast to his 2009 decision to send additional forces to Afghanistan, Obama appeared to give greater weight this time to the growing impatience of a war-weary public and a skeptical Congress, whose members have been demanding a rapid drawdown and a narrower mission after nearly a decade of battle. 
 
 Obama was a relatively new commander in chief when he authorized the troop “surge” 18 months ago. Today he is a candidate for reelection at the head of a party deeply opposed to the war, and he emphasized his push to end the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq to “reclaim the American dream that is at the center of our story.” 
 
 “Over the last decade, we have spent $1 trillion on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times,” he said in a 13-minute address that sounded at times like a campaign speech. “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.” 
 
 Obama’s decision drew a measured response from Capitol Hill, where some Democrats indicated that they will continue to pressure the president for a faster withdrawal. 
 
 In a statement, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, called the plan a “positive development, although in my view the conditions on the ground justify an even larger drawdown of U.S. troops.” 
 
 Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a statement that he is “concerned that the withdrawal plan that President Obama announced tonight poses an unnecessary risk to the hard-won gains that our troops have made thus far in Afghanistan and to the decisive progress that must still be made.” 
 
 He added: “This is not the ‘modest’ withdrawal that I and others had hoped for and advocated.” 
 
 Obama’s plan will also influence U.S. allies in Afghanistan, which supply about 40,000 troops — about 30 percent of the international forces there. Some European leaders are as eager as Obama to end their expensive and politically unpopular commitments to the Afghanistan war effort, and they welcomed the president’s announcement. 
 
 On Thursday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France will pull its 4,000 troops out of Afghanistan on the same staggered timetable as the U.S. withdrawal. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said his country wants to reduce the German contingent of 4,900 troops by the end of 2011--but has not yet formulated a withdrawal plan. 
 
 Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who along with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and European leaders was briefed by Obama in advance of the speech, also cheered Obama’s announcement, saying “today is a very happy day” for Afghanistan. 
 
 “We thank the international communities for their help and services to our country, and Afghanistan will always be thankful to them,” Karzai told reporters. 
 
 But the Taliban said it considered Obama’s drawdown plan “only as a symbolic step which will never satisfy the war-weary international community or the American people.” 
 
 Obama’s plan covers the withdrawal of the 33,000 troops that he ordered to Afghanistan at the end of 2009, when he also set July 2011 as the date they would begin coming home. 
 
 That decision, largely consistent with the request of his military commanders, followed a months-long strategy review designed to correct the downward course of a conflict that Obama as a candidate called “the war we need to win.” 
 
 The pullout schedule he outlined Wednesday will leave 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of next summer, and Obama said their departure will continue steadily through 2014, when the Afghan army is scheduled to take over security. 
 
 Obama’s military commanders had requested that the bulk of the surge forces remain in Afghanistan through the end of next year, giving them another full fighting season at nearly current strength in addition to the one underway. 
 
 In the past week, the president met three times with his national security team, sessions that included Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of international forces in Afghanistan, whom he has nominated to head the CIA. 
 
 Petraeus presented Obama with a range of withdrawal proposals — some, administration officials acknowledged, that would keep the surge forces in Afghanistan far longer than Obama had envisioned. But the adopted plan, those officials said, has the military’s support. 
 
 “The president’s decision was fully within the range of options presented to him,” said one senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plan. 
 
 Military officers had sought the additional time with the surge forces to consolidate battlefield gains that remain, in their assessment, “fragile and reversible.” 
 
 They also argued that maintaining pressure on the battlefield would benefit U.S. efforts to broker a reconciliation between Karzai, an unpredictable ally, and the Taliban, which the administration has determined cannot be eliminated as a political force. 
 
 But administration officials said Wednesday that the surge has already done its job by bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table. 
 
 “Thanks to the pressure delivered by the surge, we’re in active support of Afghan initiatives to reach out to the Taliban and explore what might be possible by way of a political settlement,” said a second administration official. “And there are openings today that simply didn’t exist 18 months ago.” 
 
 In the weeks preceding his decision, Obama confronted mounting criticism of maintaining a large U.S. presence in Afghanistan at a time of economic distress and fiscal constraint at home. 
 
 
 
 Administration officials said Vice President Biden, who led a faction of civilian advisers who argued against a large troop surge in 2009, is pleased with Obama’s withdrawal schedule, even though it is not as quick as Biden had hoped it would be. 
 
 Biden and other senior White House officials, including national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon, had pushed for a significantly larger number of the surge forces to return by the end of this year. 
 
 The war effort costs the United States about $10 billion a month — a figure some congressional leaders have called “unsustainable” — and a majority of Americans no longer think the battle is worth fighting. Since the surge began, 684 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan. 
 
 Even congressional Republicans, long the bedrock of support for Obama’s war policy, have called for a faster drawdown and a sharper focus on destroying al-Qaeda rather than rebuilding Afghanistan. 
 
 Obama’s own party long ago turned against the mission. More recently, some leading Democratic foreign policy figures, as well administration allies, have called for a new approach to take advantage of recent changes on the ground. 
 
 Those include the killing in May of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, where many war skeptics believe the real enemy resides. 
 
 “We haven’t seen a terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan for the past seven or eight years,” said a third senior administration official, describing the reasoning behind the withdrawal. “The threat has come from Pakistan over the past half-dozen years or so, and longer.” 
 
 Special correspondents Sayed Salahuddin and Javed Hamdard in Kabul and staff writer Felicia Sonmez and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report. ||||| ”Given the progress we have seen, France will begin a gradual withdrawal of reinforcement troops sent to Afghanistan, in a proportional manner and in a calendar comparable to the withdrawal of American reinforcements,” Mr. Sarkozy said in a statement issued by his office, Reuters reported. 
 
 Mr. Obama, speaking in businesslike tones during a 15-minute address from the East Room of the White House, talked of ending America’s longest war and of the painful lessons he thought could be taken from it. While justifying the nation’s decade-long commitment, he talked of “ending the war responsibly” and warned of the perils of overextending the military by sending large numbers of soldiers into combat. He acknowledged that huge challenges remained before an end to the conflict that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and 1,500 American lives. 
 
 The withdrawals would begin winding down the military’s counterinsurgency strategy, which Mr. Obama adopted 18 months ago. Administration officials indicated that they now planned to place more emphasis on focused clandestine counterterrorism operations of the kind that killed Osama bin Laden , which the president cited as Exhibit A in the case for a substantial American troop reduction. 
 
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 “We are starting this drawdown from a position of strength,” Mr. Obama said. “ Al Qaeda is under more pressure than at any time since 9/11.” He said that an intense campaign of drone strikes and other covert operations in Pakistan had crippled Al Qaeda’s original network in the region, leaving its leaders either dead or pinned down in the rugged border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Of 30 top Qaeda leaders identified by American intelligence, 20 have been killed in the last year and a half, administration officials said. 
 
 But the withdrawal of the entire surge force by the end of next summer will significantly change the way that the United States wages war in Afghanistan, analysts said, suggesting that the administration may have concluded it can no longer achieve its loftiest ambitions there. 
 
 Mr. Obama acknowledged as much in his remarks. “We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place,” he said. “We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely. That is the responsibility of the Afghan government.” 
 
 Mr. Obama’s decision is a victory for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. , who has long argued for curtailing the military operation in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama indicated a willingness to move toward more focused covert operations of the type that the United States is conducting in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. “When threatened, we must respond with force,” he said. “But when that force can be targeted, we need not deploy large armies overseas.” 
 
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 The pace of the withdrawal is a setback for the president’s top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus , who has been named director of the Central Intelligence Agency . General Petraeus did not endorse the decision, said another official. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates argued publicly against a too-hasty withdrawal of troops, but he said in a statement on Wednesday that he supported Mr. Obama’s decision. 
 
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 During the internal debate, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also expressed reservations about the scale of the reductions, officials said. 
 
 General Petraeus had recommended limiting withdrawals to 5,000 troops this year and another 5,000 over the winter. 
 
 He and other military commanders argued that the 18 months since Mr. Obama announced the troop increase did not allow for enough time for the Americans to consolidate the fragile gains that they had made in Helmand and other provinces. 
 
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 But troops have succeeded in clearing many towns and cities of insurgents, and then keeping them safe so that markets were able to reopen and girls could go to school, for example. 
 
 Military officials say the withdrawal of American troops will impose limits on which areas of the country can be pacified. In particular, plans to pivot extra American troops from south and southwestern Afghanistan to volatile areas in the east, along the Pakistan border, will be curtailed or even canceled, officials said. 
 
 The effort to transfer responsibility for security to Afghan forces remains elusive because the Afghan troops are proving unprepared for the job. Corruption in the government of President Hamid Karzai continues to be rampant, sapping the confidence of many Afghans. 
 
 Still, the growing disenchantment in the United States with the war, particularly given the ballooning national debt , the country’s slow economic recovery and the whopping $120 billion price tag of the Afghan conflict this year alone, were all considerations weighed by the president. “Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war at a time of rising debt and hard economic times,” Mr. Obama said. “Now, we must invest in America’s greatest resource: our people.” 
 
 Republican presidential candidates including Mitt Romney and Jon M. Huntsman Jr. are demanding a swift withdrawal from Afghanistan, while Democrats complain that the cost of the war is siphoning money away from efforts to create jobs in the United States. Representative Dana Rohrabacher , Republican of California , called on Mr. Obama to speed the withdrawal. “If we’re going to leave, we should leave,” he said in a statement. “The centralized system of government foisted upon the Afghan people is not going to hold after we leave. So let’s quit prolonging the agony and the inevitable.” 
 
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 Highlighting the unusual political splits the war is causing, other Republicans criticized the president for pulling out too soon. Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that Mr. Obama was playing politics with the troop reduction, saying, “The president is trying to find a political solution with a military component, when it needs to be the other way around.” He said the situation in Afghanistan was “very precarious,” and that the White House seemed to be panicking about the levels of violence. 
 
 Mr. Obama’s speech, delivered at dawn on Thursday, Kabul time, is expected to be the subject of a speech by Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, scheduled for later in the day. Senior figures in Mr. Karzai’s administration began signaling that they were comfortable with the withdrawal of 10,000 troops by year’s end. 
 
 Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry, said the Afghan National Army “has this capability and quantity to fill the gap of those places where the foreign troops withdraw and leave Afghanistan.” 
 
 “We are ready,” General Azimi said. 
 
 Muhammad Siddique Aziz, an adviser to Mr. Karzai on tribal affairs, said the withdrawal plan was acceptable, but he warned against a complete withdrawal of American troops before the Afghan government was strong enough to administer the country on its own. “I think they have to concentrate more on the Afghan government so when they leave, the government can stand up on its own,” Mr. Aziz said. ||||| President Barack Obama will map a course for drawing down the nearly 10-year war in Afghanistan Wednesday, when he is expected to set a target of bringing home about 30,000 troops by the end of 2012. 
 
 FILE - In this June 15, 2010 file photo, President Barack Obama speaks in Pensacola, Fla. Nearing a critical benchmark in the Afghanistan war, President Barack Obama is considering both how many U.S.... (Associated Press) 
 
 The president is likely to pull out 10,000 troops by the end of this year, administration and Pentagon officials said, and aims to bring another 20,000 home by the end of next year. 
 
 But with 100,000 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, that drawdown may not be substantial enough to satisfy some lawmakers on Capitol Hill and a war-weary public. 
 
 The initial withdrawal is expected to happen in two phases, with 5,000 troops coming home this summer and an additional 5,000 by the end of the year, a senior U.S. defense official said. 
 
 The pace of bringing home the other 20,000 forces was unclear heading into Obama's primetime address to the nation Wednesday. The White House opted not to give the president's speech the weight of an Oval Office address. Instead, Obama was to speak for about 10 to 15 minutes from the East Room of the White House. 
 
 Obama's expected blueprint focuses on the 30,000 surge forces he ordered to Afghanistan as part of his 2009 decision to send reinforcements to reverse the Taliban's battlefield momentum. 
 
 The president reached his decision a week after receiving a range of options from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan. Obama informed his senior national security advisers, including outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, of his plans during a White House meeting Tuesday. 
 
 "The president is commander in chief," spokesman Jay Carney said. "He is in charge of this process, and he makes the decision." 
 
 The administration has begun briefing NATO allies on its plans. British Prime Minister David Cameron's office confirmed that officials there have been informed but declined to offer comment, or to make any immediate statement on the plans for about 9,500 British forces in Afghanistan. 
 
 The withdrawals would put the U.S. on a path toward giving Afghans control of their security by 2014 and ultimately shifting the U.S. military from a combat role to a mission focused on training and supporting Afghan forces. 
 
 The Obama administration has said its goal in continuing the Afghanistan war is to blunt the Taliban insurgency and dismantle and defeat al-Qaida, the terror network that used the country as a training ground for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. As of Tuesday, at least 1,522 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count. 
 
 The U.S. and its allies have set Dec. 31, 2014, as a target date for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan. 
 
 A reduction this year totaling 10,000 troops would be the rough equivalent of two brigades, which are the main building blocks of an Army division. It's not clear whether Obama's decision would require the Pentagon to pull out two full brigades or, instead, withdraw a collection of smaller combat and support units with an equivalent number of troops. 
 
 If Obama were to leave the bulk of the 30,000 surge contingent in Afghanistan through 2012, he would be giving the military another fighting season _ in addition to the one now under way _ to further damage Taliban forces before a larger withdrawal got started. It also would buy more time for the Afghan army and police to grow in numbers and capability. 
 
 Under that scenario, the emphasis in U.S.-led military operations is likely to shift away from troop-intensive counterinsurgency operations toward more narrowly focused counterterrorism operations, which focus on capturing and killing insurgents. 
 
 Afghan security forces and judicial institutions are expected to take up many aspects of the counterinsurgency fight by establishing the rule of law and respect for government institutions, U.S. officials in Afghanistan said Tuesday. 
 
 In recent speeches, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has criticized American forces, suggesting his ally is in danger of becoming an occupying force. He has even threatened action against international forces that conduct airstrikes and has accused allies of undermining and corrupting his government. 
 
 Yet there are concerns in his country about the withdrawals. Some of the areas slated to transition to Afghan control have been struck by attacks in recent weeks despite assertions by Karzai that peace talks have started between the U.S., his Afghan government and Taliban emissaries. Publicly, the Taliban say there will be no negotiations until foreign troops leave Afghanistan. 
 
 The transition to full Afghan control will begin in earnest on July 20 in five provincial capital cities and two provinces. The provincial capitals identified for transition are Lashkar Gah in Helmand province, plus capitals from provinces in the west, east and north and most of Kabul, the nation's capital. The largely peaceful northern provinces of Bamyan and Panjshir will also start to transition to Afghan control. 
 
 Some U.S. military commanders have favored a more gradual reduction in troops than Obama is expected to announce Wednesday night, arguing that too fast a withdrawal could undermine the fragile security gains. 
 
 But other advisers have backed a more significant withdrawal that starts in July and proceeds steadily through the following months. That camp believes the slow yet steady improvements in security, combined with the killing of Osama bin Laden and U.S. success in dismantling much of the al-Qaida network in the country, give the president an opportunity to make larger reductions this year. 
 
 Obama previously has said he favors a "significant" withdrawal beginning in July, his self-imposed deadline for starting to bring U.S. troops home. Aides, however, have never quantified that statement. 
 
 Pressure for a substantial withdrawal has been mounting from the public and Congress. Even Gates, who has said he favored a "modest" withdrawal, said Tuesday that Obama's decision needed to incorporate domestic concerns about the war. 
 
 "It goes without saying that there are a lot of reservations in the Congress about the war in Afghanistan and our level of commitment," Gates said during a news conference at the State Department. "There are concerns among the American people who are tired of a decade of war." 
 
 According to an Associated Press-GfK poll last month, 80 percent of Americans say they approve of Obama's decision to begin withdrawal of combat troops in July and end U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan by 2014. Just 15 percent disapprove. 
 
 On Capitol Hill, even the more moderate or conservative members of his party, such as Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, are pressing for significant cuts and a shift in mission. 
 
 "The question the president faces _ we all face _ is quite simple: Will we choose to rebuild America or Afghanistan? In light of our nation's fiscal peril, we cannot do both," Manchin said Tuesday. 
 
 Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said improved conditions in Afghanistan would permit Obama to withdraw at least 15,000 troops by the end of the year. 
 
 Obama aides have sidestepped questions about what role the cost of the war in Afghanistan played in Obama's decision, saying only that the president was focused on meeting the goal of transferring security by 2014. 
 
 Following the announcement on the drawdown, Obama will visit troops Thursday at Fort Drum, the upstate New York Army post that is home to the 10th Mountain Division, one of the most frequently deployed divisions to Afghanistan. 
 
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 Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Matthew Lee and Donna Cassata in Washington and Solomon Moore in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this report. 
 
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 Robert Burns can be reached at http://twitter.com/roburtburnsAP. Julie Pace can be reached at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC.
– A few hours ahead of President Obama's prime-time address on Afghanistan, administration officials are leaking some main points to the AP, Washington Post, and the New York Times: Obama will bring home 10,000 troops this year and another 20,000 or so by the end of next summer. Those combined withdrawals will effectively mean the return home of all the "surge" troops Obama sent to Afghanistan in 2009. Another 70,000 US troops would remain in the country heading into 2013. The timeline does not please Gen. David Petraeus, who wants the surge troops to remain through the end of 2012—long enough for another season of fighting. (The Times says Petraeus did not endorse the decision, though Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton did with reluctance.) Though generals think it's too much, too fast, Obama will likely face criticism from the growing number of critics who say the US should bring home more troops even quicker. The president gives his 10-minute address at 8pm ET.