Obama: NATO stabilizing Afghanistan

CHICAGO -- The NATO alliance that has fought for a decade in Afghanistan is helping that nation shift toward stability and peace, but there will be "hard days ahead," President Barack Obama said yesterday as alliance leaders insisted the fighting coalition will remain effective despite France's plans to yank combat troops out early.

With a global economic crisis and waning public support for the war as a backdrop, world leaders opened a NATO summit confronted by questions about Afghanistan's post-conflict future: money for security forces, coming elections and more.

German officials cautioned against following France's example, but NATO's secretary general and the U.S. commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan played down stresses in the fighting alliance.

"We still have a lot of work to do and there will be great challenges ahead," Obama said. "The loss of life continues in Afghanistan and there will be hard days ahead."

The NATO summit opened in the afternoon, with a moment of silence to pay tribute to forces killed or injured while serving the alliance.

"Just as we've sacrificed together for our common security, we will stand united in our determination to complete this mission," Obama said.

The end of the war is in sight, Obama said following a lengthy discussion with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the sidelines of the summit. The alliance is pledged to remain in Afghanistan into 2014, but was to seal plans by today to shift foreign forces off the front lines a year faster than once planned.

Afghan forces will take the lead throughout the nation next year, instead of in 2014, despite uneven performance so far under U.S. and other outside tutelage.

The shift is in large part a response to plummeting public support for the war in Europe and the United States, the contributors of most of the 130,000 foreign troops fighting the Taliban-led insurgency. A majority of Americans now say the war is unwinnable or not worth continuing.

Karzai said his nation is looking forward to the end of war, "so that Afghanistan is no longer a burden on the shoulder of our friends in the international community, on the shoulders of the United States and our other allies."

Obama said NATO partners would discuss "a vision for post-2014 in which we have ended our combat role, the Afghan war as we understand it is over, but our commitment to friendship and partnership to Afghanistan continues."

Newly elected French President François Hollande has said he will withdraw all French troops by year's end, a full two years before the timeline agreed to by the U.S.-led NATO coalition. His stance was facing some resistance.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle cautioned that "withdrawal competition" among countries with troops in Afghanistan could strengthen the terrorist threat. And Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany stood "very firmly" behind the principle of "in together, out together."

Hollande, speaking briefly to French reporters outside a Chicago hotel, insisted he was being "pragmatic" in his new leadership. "I am pragmatic in my effort to let the alliance continue to work for our defense and security, and at the same time make sure that our soldiers can come home from Afghanistan by the end of 2012."