Obama: Half of US combat troops home within 1 year
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US President Barack Obama said Tuesday he will bring home within a year about half of the 66,000 US troops now in Afghanistan, shrinking the force to the size he found it when he entered the White House vowing to reinvigorate a stalemated war.
More will leave the battlefield in 2014, he said, but he did not spell out what US military presence would remain after 2014, when the US-led combat mission is scheduled to end. The stated goal is to prepare Afghanistan's army and police to handle the Taliban insurgency largely on their own by then. (AP)
