President Barack Obama and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan speak at a news conference in the East Room at the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 11, 2013. (AP Photo / Charles Dharapak)
WASHINGTON?? Uneasy allies, President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed on one big idea: After 11 years of war, the time is right for U.S. forces to let Afghans do their own fighting.
U.S. and coalition forces will take a battlefield back seat by spring and, by implication, go home in larger numbers soon thereafter.
"It will be a historic moment," Obama declared.
In a White House meeting billed as a chance to take stock of a war that ranks as America's longest, Obama and Karzai agreed to accelerate their timetable for putting the Afghanistan army in the lead combat role nationwide. It will happen this spring instead of summer ? a shift that looks small but looms larger in the debate over how quickly to bring U.S. troops home and whether some should stay after combat ends in 2014.
The two leaders also agreed that the Afghan government would be given full control of detention centers and detainees. They did not reach agreement on an equally sticky issue: whether any U.S. troops remaining after 2014 would be granted immunity from prosecution under Afghan law.
Obama declared that "it will not be possible" for the U.S. to keep troops in the country after 2014 without an agreement that guarantees them immunity from prosecution.
Karzai has resisted that idea but seemed to soften Friday.
"I can go to the Afghan people and argue for immunity for U.S. troops in Afghanistan in a way that Afghan sovereignty will not be compromised," he said.
At a joint news conference with Karzai in the White House East Room, Obama said he was not yet ready to decide the pace of U.S. troop withdrawals between now and December 2014. That is the target date set by NATO and the Afghan government for the international combat mission to end. There are now 66,000 U.S. troops there.
"By the end of next year, 2014, the transition will be complete ? Afghans will have full responsibility for their security, and this war will come to a responsible end," he said, noting that more than 2,000 Americans have died since the war began in October 2001.
The Afghan army and police now have 352,000 in training or on duty, although that number is viewed by many as unsustainable because the government is almost entirely reliant on international aid to pay the bills. Obama and Karzai must also decide whether a residual U.S. force will remain after 2014.
Some private security analysts ? and some in the Pentagon ? worry that pulling out too quickly will leave Afghanistan vulnerable to collapse.
"Numbers are not going to make a difference to the situation in Afghanistan," Karzai said. "It's the broader relationship that will make a difference."
Friday's meeting was the first with Karzai since Obama's November re-election.
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