United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's surprise announcement on Wednesday that US troops will phase out their combat role in Afghanistan by mid-2013 is drawing mixed reactions, as well as a fair bit of confusion here, from both critics and supporters of the 11-year-old war.
The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, called the decision "misguided" and "naive". Neo-conservatives and other hawks charged that it was politically motivated and would result in the return of the Taliban to Kabul little more than a decade after a US-coordinated military campaign chased their leadership into Pakistan.
"Only in some alternative universe is this a winning strategy," complained Max Boot, a neo-conservative military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). "In the world we actually inhabit it is a recipe for a slow-motion - or maybe not so slow - catastrophe."
Similarly, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, General (retired) David Petraeus, the architect of the US counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, insisted that Panetta's remarks were consistent with previous planning.
Not only did he say that Washington hoped to end the US combat role by mid-2013 - 18 months before the end-of-2014 deadline - but he also indicated that NATO would likely cancel plans to expand the size of Afghanistan's security forces from the current 310,000 to 350,000 soldiers and police.
But the war's critics, many of whom were deeply disappointed by President Barack Obama's decision shortly after taking office in 2009 to send substantially more troops to Afghanistan, cheered Panetta's announcement.
