The US president, Barack Obama, right, and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai leave after a joint press conference in the East Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on Friday. — AFP photo

The US president, Barack Obama, said Saturday that the US goal in Afghanistan was ‘within reach’ as he vowed to move ahead with a timetable to end the 11-year-old military campaign and focus on a broad domestic agenda.
‘We’ve pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds,’ Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address. ‘And our core objective—the reason we went to war in the first place—is now within reach: ensuring that al-Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America.’
The comments came after Obama wrapped up talks with visiting Afghan president Hamid Karzai, promising to speed up a transfer of lead security responsibility from NATO to Afghan forces this spring, in a sign that the pace of US troop withdrawal could quicken.
After meeting with Karzai, Obama said NATO forces would have a ‘very limited’ role in the country after 2014 and insisted that Washington had achieved its prime goal of ‘decapitating’ al-Qaeda.
The leaders met at a crucial moment in the final chapter of a long, bloody war, and as Obama balances the future security of Afghanistan with US combat fatigue and a desire to spend America’s dwindling resources at home.
Obama, planning the withdrawal of most of the 66,000 US troops left in Afghanistan, said that after 2014, American forces would have a ‘very limited’ mission in training Afghan forces and preventing a return of al-Qaeda.