Afghan pullout puts surge's end in sight

Updated at 10:20 a.m. ET

One hundred thousand U.S. servicemen and women are based in Afghanistan. Up to 10,000 of them will be removed between now and the middle of next year, CBS News correspondent Bill Plante reported on CBS' "The Early Show."

President Obama is expected to address the nation Wednesday night and announce his plans to start pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan during the next 12 months. Mr. Obama is also weighing a timeline for bringing home the remaining 20,000 of the 30,000 "surge" troops he ordered to Afghanistan as part of his December 2009 decision to send reinforcements to reverse the Taliban's battlefield momentum.

Sources tell CBS News that the remaining "surge" forces will be scheduled for removal from the country by the end of 2012.

Mr. Obama is likely to outline a phased withdrawal that will bring 5,000 troops home this summer and an additional 5,000 by winter or spring 2012, according to a senior U.S. defense official. That timeline could allow military commanders to keep high troop levels in Afghanistan for two more crucial fighting seasons.

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 military says that with 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan they have succeeded in loosening the grip of the Taliban. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged Tuesday the pressure for the U.S. commitment to end.

"It goes without saying that there are a lot of reservations in the Congress about the war in Afghanistan and our level of commitment," said Gates. "There are concerns among the American people who are tired of a decade of war."

Obama aides have sidestepped questions about what role the cost of the war in Afghanistan played in Mr. Obama's decision, saying only that the president was focused on meeting the goal of transferring security by 2014.

The New York Times reported in its print editions Wednesday that Afghan war spending has been on the rise, up to $118.6 billion for this year. By contrast, the annual amount spent on the war was $14.7 billion in 2003, when President George W. Bush launched the war in Iraq.

During the weekend, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, also expressed frustration with Afghan President Hamid Karzai's recent criticism of the war effort.

"When we hear ourselves being called occupiers and worse our pride is offended and we begin to lose our inspiration to carry on," Eikenberry said.

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Three times as many troops are in the country as when Mr. Obama took office. Even by drawing down the 30,000 reinforcements, there still will be great uncertainty about how long the remaining 70,000 troops would stay there, although the U.S. and its allies have set Dec. 31, 2014, as a target date for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan.

Two Foreign Relations Committee members, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., talked with "Early Show" co-anchor Erica Hill about what they wanted to hear during Mr. Obama's address.

"I want to know what the nature of our operations are," Corker told Hill before referencing Mr. Obama's Afghan envoy Richard Holbrooke, who died last December. "We continue to sort of have an evolving mission. It's changed multiple times since I've been in the Senate, four years and five months, and so I'd like to understand more fully that with the troops we have on the ground what it is we want to accomplish, what the nature of that is. We're involved right now with a Holbrooke doctrine and nationbuilding effort which is not just sustainable now to not sustainable in the future."

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Menendez said the military had done what it was sent to do in Afghanistan.

"We have largely accomplished the mission," Menendez told Hill. "The reason we went into Afghanistan after September 11 is to get bin Laden and al Qaeda. Bin laden is dead. There are 50 to 100 al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. The Taliban was, you know, a side benefit to that engagement. It seems to me it's time to move from a counter-insurgency effort where we're trying to prop up a corrupt government in Karzai to one that is counter-terrorism, which would require a lot less troops, a lot less national lives of Americans and a lot less national treasury."

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 president Wednesday night will announce the parameters of the pullout, which is expected to start next month. That's the date the president promised to begin withdrawing forces when he announced the 30,000 troop surge in December 2009.

A year later, Mr. Obama announced his intent to have all U.S. combat troops out Afghanistan by 2014.

"My goal is to make sure that by 2014 we have transitioned, Afghans are in the lead and it is a goal to make sure that we are not still engaged in combat operations of the sort we're involved in now," Mr. Obama said Nov. 20, 2010.

There's been robust internal debate about how swiftly the troops should be withdrawn particularly after the death of Osama bin Laden, Plante reports. The vice president and other advisers want them out quickly. Others, like Gates, want a more measured approach. Ultimately, though the decision rests with one person.

"I think that this is a process where the president consulted with all the senior members of his national security team and made a decision," White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters Tuesday. "And obviously, the commander in chief makes this decision."