Soldiers watch a rebroadcast of US President Barack Obama's speech in Kandahar, Thursday. (AP) WASHINGTON/KABUL: Congressional Democrats are leading the criticism of President Barack Obama's plan for withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan, arguing that his timeline for bringing 33,000 home by next summer is not fast enough. An initial withdrawal of 10,000 troops is expected to take place in two phases, with 5,000 troops coming home this summer and 5,000 more by the end of the year. An additional 20,000-plus are to follow by September 2012. That still would leave about 70,000 US troops in Afghanistan, with many to come home gradually over two more years. “It has been the hope of many in Congress and across the country that the full drawdown of US forces would happen sooner than the president laid out — and we will continue to press for a better outcome,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, leading a chorus of disgruntled Democrats who took the president to task, albeit politely. From across the political divide, the Republican response to Obama's timeline for withdrawing tens of thousands of troops was measured. House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, warned Obama not to sacrifice the gains the US has made in Afghanistan, while Sen. John McCain said the drawdown was too rash. “This is not the ‘modest' withdrawal that I and others had hoped for and advocated,” McCain said in a statement following Obama's prime television time address to the nation Wednesday night. “It seems the president is trying to find a political solution with a military component to it, when it needs to be the other way around,” Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said. John Kerry, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee objected to that argument. “Everybody has consistently said there is ... no military solution,” he said. “If there is no military solution, then you better go hunt for the political one.” Afghan President Hamid Karzai Thursday backed up that argument, promising that his nation's youth will stand up and defend Afghanistan as the US begins to pull its troops out. Karzai thanked international troops for their support and said “the people of Afghanistan will be protecting their homeland.” Potential Republican presidential candidates were quick to weigh in with criticism. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney accused Obama of proposing an “arbitrary timetable” and said the decision on withdrawing troops “should not be based on politics or economics.” Former US envoy to China Jon Huntsman said the approach in Afghanistan should be focused on counterterrorism, “which requires significantly fewer boots on the ground than the president discussed tonight.” The withdrawal is supported by the bold bottom-line claims of his security team: Afghanistan, training ground for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US, no longer is a launching pad for exporting terrorism and hasn't been for years. Yet the White House insists the US must maintain a strong fighting force in Afghanistan for now to keep the country from slipping back into a terrorist haven. Military commanders favored a plan that would allow them to keep as many of the 30,000 surge troops in Afghanistan for as long as possible, ideally through the end of 2012. The Pentagon, however, assured worried US lawmakers Thursday that Obama's US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was not “a rush to the exits” that would jeopardize security gains. French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced Thursday the progressive withdrawal of France's troops on a timetable matching the American pullout that starts this summer. Meanwhile, just hours after Obama's announcement, a special Afghan court set up by Karzai after fraud-marred parliamentary elections last year threw out results in about a quarter of the seats in the assembly, raising fears of a constitutional crisis. The court Thursday ruled that 62 lawmakers elected to the 249-seat lower house of parliament would have to vacate their seats and be replaced by new members because of alleged poll fraud.
