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The article reports on the skepticism of U.S. President Donald Trump on the involvement of the U.S. in Afghanistan.

The article discusses U.S. president Barack Obama's decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 given a lack of a signed bilateral security agreement (B.S.A.) with Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Topics addressed include the April 2014 presidential election in Afghanistan and the possibility that Karzai's successor will sign the agreement, as well as Obama's claim that any residual forces in Afghanistan will continue to shrink as the agreement goes unsigned.

Reports on the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in Afghanistan. Aims in improving foreign relations between the two countries; Plans providing assistance for the rebuilding of the Afghan economy; Concerns regarding rival warlords in the region.

The article reports that U.S. President Barack Obama is firm about his decision regarding the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan.

The article reports on the intentions of the U.S. President Barack Obama to establish friendly relations with Afghanistan.

The article reports on the decision of U.S. President Barack Obama to remove American troops in Afghanistan in 2013 which was viewed as a careful act of balancing military and political interests.

The article reports on the possibility for the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama to come up with a decision of the so-called zero option that would involve leaving no American troops in Afghanistan after 2014 to carry out counterterrorism operations and help train Afghan soldiers.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- President Obama, speaking to an American television audience on Tuesday night from Bagram Air Base, declared that he had traveled here to herald a new era in the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan, ''a future in which war ends, and a new chapter begins.'' Mr. Obama's address, during an unannounced visit to sign a strategic partnership agreement with President Hamid Karzai that sets the terms for relations after the departure of American troops in 2014, was a chance for him to make an election-year case that he is winding down a costly and increasingly unpopular war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- Seeking to project a united front on Afghanistan after a spate of bloody setbacks on the battlefield, President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain pledged on Wednesday that their countries would stick to the timetable for winding down the war by the end of 2014. While acknowledging the complications posed by the recent massacre of 16 Afghans, apparently by a lone American soldier, and the loss of 6 British soldiers to a roadside bomb, Mr. Obama and Mr. Cameron insisted that the American-led coalition was making gains in preparing Afghans to take over their own security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- President Obama pledged on Tuesday that a thorough investigation would be conducted into the bloody rampage by an American soldier in Afghanistan. ''The United States takes this as seriously as if this was our own citizens and our own children who were murdered,'' Mr. Obama said, in his first public remarks since the shooting took place on Sunday. He said he was ''heartbroken by the loss of innocent life,'' calling it outrageous and unacceptable. ''It's not who we are as a country, and it does not represent our military,'' he added. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The killing of two American servicemen and the eruption of deadly anti-American protests in Afghanistan confronts President Obama with a potential political weakness in a foreign policy that has so far offered few easy targets to Republican candidates eager for an opening. But the White House and the Obama campaign believe that, if anything, the bloodshed in Afghanistan will reinforce the sentiments of a large majority of Americans who want to get the troops out of there as soon as possible. This, the president's aides said, will constrain Mitt Romney or other Republicans seeking to benefit from a perception that Mr. Obama's Afghan strategy has gone awry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- It did not take long for Mitt Romney to pounce on Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta's statement Wednesday that American troops could end their combat role in Afghanistan by mid-2013, 18 months sooner than expected. Within hours, Mr. Romney lambasted it as ''naive'' and ''misguided.'' But President Obama, far from disavowing the Pentagon chief, seems eager to debate his Republican critics about a withdrawal timetable that his advisers contend is strategically sound, and which also happens to be politically popular. The White House said that Mr. Panetta's remarks reflected the president's resolve, supported by his experience in Iraq, not to wage a ''war without end'' in Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the anguished White House debates over the war in Afghanistan, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. argued consistently to stress counterterrorism over the more costly strategy of nation-building. It turns out, though, that Mr. Biden warned against the most sensational counterterrorism operation of the Obama presidency: the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden. In a speech last weekend to House Democrats at their annual retreat in Cambridge, Md., Mr. Biden said he had advised President Obama not to go ahead with the raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, arguing that the military needed more time to make sure Bin Laden was in the complex. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- As President Obama began mulling his next big decision on troop levels in Afghanistan last January, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. quietly flew to Kabul to meet with President Hamid Karzai and tour the battlefield with the top American commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus. At a military base in Wardak Province, where the Taliban continue to pose a security threat, Mr. Biden listened with bewilderment as an American civilian told him about plans to dig a well in a nearby village. ''Why do they need a well?'' he asked, according to a person who was there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- President Obama declared Wednesday that the United States had largely achieved its goals in Afghanistan, setting in motion a substantial withdrawal of American troops in an acknowledgment of the shifting threat in the region and the fast-changing political and economic landscape in a war-weary America. Asserting that the country that served as a base for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks no longer represented a terrorist threat to the United States, Mr. Obama declared that the ''tide of war is receding.'' And in a blunt recognition of domestic economic strains, he said, ''America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- President Obama plans to announce his decision on the scale and pace of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan in a speech on Wednesday evening, an administration official said Monday. As he closes in on a decision, another official said, Mr. Obama is considering options that range from a Pentagon-backed proposal to pull out only 5,000 troops this year to an aggressive plan to withdraw within 12 months all 30,000 troops the United States deployed to Afghanistan as part of the surge in December 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- As the Obama administration nears a crucial decision on how rapidly to withdraw combat forces from Afghanistan, high-ranking officials say that Al Qaeda's original network in the region has been crippled, providing a rationale for an accelerated reduction of troops. The officials said the intense campaign of drone strikes and other covert operations in Pakistan -- most dramatically the raid that killed Osama bin Laden -- had left Al Qaeda paralyzed, with its leaders either dead or pinned down in the frontier area near Afghanistan. Of 30 prominent members of the terrorist organization in the region identified by intelligence agencies as targets, 20 have been killed in the last year and a half, they said, reducing the threat they pose. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The killing of Osama bin Laden deep in Pakistan is sure to fuel the debate over the Obama administration's strategy in Afghanistan, where 100,000 troops are still fighting a war to destroy Al Qaeda. And the raid, conducted without the cooperation or even advance knowledge of Pakistan, raised fresh doubts about the lengthy American effort to turn it into a trustworthy partner in the hunt for terrorists. As President Obama approaches a critical period in deciding how many troops to pull out of Afghanistan -- and how fast -- the deadly raid on Al Qaeda's leader called into question many of the administration's basic assumptions about how to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for Islamic terrorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The State Department is warning hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and businesspeople identified in leaked diplomatic cables of potential threats to their safety and has moved a handful of them to safer locations, administration officials said Thursday. The operation, which involves a team of 30 in Washington and embassies from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, reflects the administration's fear that the disclosure of cables obtained by the organization WikiLeaks has damaged American interests by exposing foreigners who supply valuable information to the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- With roadside bombs by far the leading killer of American troops in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has started a worldwide effort to stop the flow of ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer that is their basic ingredient, into the war ravaged country. But the campaign, dubbed Operation Global Shield, is running up against stubborn hurdles in neighboring Pakistan, where the police routinely wave tons of ammonium nitrate shipments across the border into Afghanistan despite that country's ban on imports of the chemical. It is unclear whether the border guards are fooled by clever attempts to disguise the shipments as benign or are paid to turn a blind eye, or both. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- Rampant corruption in Afghanistan provides the Taliban with their No. 1 recruiting tool, the Obama administration's special representative to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, said Wednesday. But he insisted that the United States was taking adequate precautions to cut down on the misuse of billions of dollars in American aid to the country. Responding to deepening unease on Capitol Hill about where aid money is going, Mr. Holbrooke said recent reports of billions of dollars in cash being flown out of Kabul International Airport wrongly suggested that American civilian aid was being siphoned from Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- American, European and other foreign leaders met here Tuesday to pledge anew their support for Afghanistan, agree to entrust it with more spending decisions, and embrace its president's commitment for Afghan forces to take charge of security by 2014. They acknowledged that neither the public in their own countries nor the Afghan people had much patience left. The transition timetable, which President Hamid Karzaioutlined last year, is nonbinding and essentially unenforceable, and much depends on how and when responsibilities will be transferred. The conference's final statement stopped short of any firm commitment to the timetable, instead expressing ''support for the president of Afghanistan's objective.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Afghanistan and Pakistan signed a landmark trade agreement on Sunday, auguring a thaw between these two perennially suspicious neighbors and handing the Obama administration a rare victory in its beleaguered war effort in Afghanistan. The United States had prodded the two countries to sign the accord, calculating that it would bolster the Afghan economy by expanding its trade routes and curbing rampant smuggling. The pact would cover a multitude of trade and transit issues, ranging from import duties to port access. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The new American military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is pushing to have top leaders of a feared insurgent group designated as terrorists, a move that could complicate an eventual Afghan political settlement with the Taliban and aggravate political tensions in the region. General Petraeus introduced the idea of blacklisting the group, known as the Haqqani network, late last week in discussions with President Obama's senior advisers on Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to several administration officials, who said it was being seriously considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON WHILE the uproar set off by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's imprudent comments in Rolling Stone magazine has focused on the larger-than-life personalities involved, there is an important subtext: What the does all this drama suggest about how the Pentagon and the State Department are sharing responsibility for the war in Afghanistan? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The messy departure of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is likely to make the Obama administration's internal debates over Afghanistan even more pointed, giving the military a powerful advocate for staying the course as it prepares for a reckoning with more impatient officials like Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. President Obama insisted he was switching military leaders, not strategies, when he fired General McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, on Wednesday. But administration insiders acknowledge that there have been preliminary discussions about whether to rethink the approach to a war that is clearly bogging down. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- Six months after President Obama decided to send more forces to Afghanistan, the halting progress in the war has crystallized longstanding tensions within the government over the viability of his plan to turn around the country and begin pulling out by July 2011. Within the administration, the troubles in clearing out the Taliban from a second-tier region and the elusive loyalties of the Afghan president have prompted anxious discussions about whether the policy can work on the timetable the president has set. Even before the recent setbacks, the military was highly skeptical of setting a date to start withdrawing, but Mr. Obama insisted on it as a way to bring to conclusion a war now in its ninth year. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration, after pulling out all the stops last week to show some love and affection to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, is giving the cold shoulder to Mr. Karzai's vanquished political rival, Abdullah Abdullah. Mr. Abdullah, the former foreign minister and presidential candidate, landed in Washington last weekend, just after Mr. Karzai ended a weeklong visit that included an all-day session at the White House, lunch with President Obama, a side-by-side news conference with him in the White House East Room, dinner at the vice president's mansion, an elegant State Department reception, a walk through Arlington National Cemetery escorted by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and a private walk in Georgetown with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- When military officers and diplomats gathered in a secure room in the Pentagon on a recent Friday to get a video briefing from the Afghan battlefield, they were startled to see a youthful British diplomat in an open-neck shirt, rather than the familiar face and camouflage fatigues of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander. The diplomat's name is Mark Sedwill, the new senior civilian representative of NATO in Afghanistan, and on that day, he was acting as General McChrystal's proxy. It is a role Mr. Sedwill, 45, has taken on with increasing regularity in recent weeks, forging a tight relationship with the general that associates say carries echoes of the one in Iraq between Gen. David H. Petraeus and the American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan C. Crocker. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- Beneath twinkling chandeliers and amid tables of pastry and crudites, the Obama administration set out Tuesday to charm President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, rounding up cabinet members and other V.I.P.'s to welcome him and his ministers at a State Department reception. The party capped a day of meetings meant to showcase the breadth and durability of the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan -- one that is more often characterized by the testy back-and-forth between this administration and the mercurial Afghan leader. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TALLINN, Estonia -- Setting the stage for a gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States and other NATO countries adopted a plan here Friday that sets conditions for beginning to remove troops from a lead role in Afghan provinces by the end of this year. The plan, which NATO hopes to turn into a formal agreement with the Afghan government in July, would transfer authority to Afghans when they have met three criteria: a competent local police force, a durable civilian government and signs of reconciliation with the Taliban insurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- After more than a year of watching America's ability to influence President Hamid Karzai ebb, Obama administration officials now admit privately that the tough-love approach Mr. Obama adopted when he came to power may have been a big mistake. The difference in approach was evident in two recent scenes on Air Force One. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- Seeking to quell an increasingly vitriolic and public dispute, the Obama administration said Wednesday that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was ''a figure that we respect,'' and it sharply countered claims by a former United Nations official that the president might be a drug user. The State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, defended Mr. Karzai after a turbulent week in which the Afghan president accused the West of manipulating Afghanistan's elections and was quoted as threatening to join the Taliban if the United States did not stop pressuring him -- all in the wake of a visit to Kabul by President Obama. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- A day after he delivered a scorching attack on the West for its conduct in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai telephoned Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday to express surprise that his comments had caused such a stir, administration officials said. Mr. Karzai, the officials said, told Mrs. Clinton that he had not meant to criticize the United States but rather Western news coverage of Afghanistan. In a speech on Thursday, Mr. Karzai accused the news media of spreading reports characterizing last year's presidential election as fraudulent ''to pressure me.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- This month, with President Hamid Karzai looking ahead to a visit to the White House, he received a terse note from aides to President Obama: Your invitation has been revoked. The reason, according to American officials, was Mr. Karzai's announcement that he was emasculating an independent panel that had discovered widespread fraud in Mr. Karzai's re-election last year. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- With American troops pouring into insurgent strongholds in Afghanistan and the United States succeeding in killing insurgent leaders with drone attacks in Pakistan, the Obama administration is beginning to consider whether it has gained the upper hand sufficiently to justify an effort to begin talks with the Taliban. President Obama met with his war cabinet on Friday, and the issue of reconciling with the Taliban is gaining traction, even as administration officials debate whether the time is right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Members of the Taliban leadership met with a United Nations official this month to discuss the possibility of face-to-face peace talks with the Afghan government, American and United Nations officials said Friday. The official, Kai Eide, the United Nations' special representative in Afghanistan, met with a group of Taliban leaders in the days before this week's international conference in London, where President Hamid Karzai invited the Taliban to take part in peace talks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Afghanistan's president declared Thursday that reaching out to the Taliban's leadership would be a centerpiece of his plan to end the eight-year-old war in his country, setting in motion a risky diplomatic gambit that could aggravate frictions with the United States. A 65-nation conference here intended to muster money and support for an Afghan war strategy instead exposed divisions between the Afghan government and its allies over the timetable for drawing down foreign forces and whether and how to reconcile with the leaders of the Taliban insurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the Obama administration pours 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, it has begun grappling with the next great dilemma of this long war: whether to reconcile with the men who sheltered Osama bin Laden and who still have close ties to Al Qaeda. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has said he wants to reach out to the leaders of the Taliban, and administration officials acknowledge privately that they are considering the idea. But they warn that the plan is rife with political risk at home and could jeopardize a widely backed effort to lure lower-ranking, more amenable Taliban fighters back into Afghan society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Obama administration's ambitious civilian push in Pakistan and Afghanistan will keep thousands of Americans in those countries for years -- rebuilding Afghan agriculture, rooting out corruption and using the local media to counter anti-American sentiment. The steps, laid out in a 30-page policy paper to be released Thursday by the State Department, are the most detailed blueprint yet for the civilian part of the administration's strategy in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For American civilians serving in Afghanistan, the last stop before they ship out to Kabul or Kandahar is a dilapidated, vaguely foreboding institution that once served as a farm colony for ''feeble-minded'' boys, and later was a state mental hospital. The Army and the Indiana National Guard have turned the windswept complex, known as Muscatatuck, into a simulacrum of a war-torn Afghan city, with a courthouse, a jail and a graffiti-smeared marketplace. While the table-flat farmland around here hardly evokes the Hindu Kush, this is where the government trains Americans who are part of the most ambitious civilian campaign the United States has mounted in a foreign country in generations -- a ''civilian surge'' intended to improve the lives of Afghans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Hamid Karzai opted for continuity over change in the list of cabinet nominees he presented to Parliament on Saturday, retaining some leaders supported by the West but also several viewed as incompetent and two accused of involvement in the fraud that tainted the recent presidential election. The naming of the cabinet nominees was the first major test of whether Mr. Karzai would make the type of bold changes President Obama was hoping for when he decided to commit an additional 30,000 troops to fight a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

America's involvement in Afghanistan could stretch on for years and cost upward of $10 billion annually just to finance an adequate Afghan security force, the overall commander in the region told Congress on Wednesday. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, one of the military's most influential generals, estimated that building and maintaining a combined army and police force of 400,000 -- a size that American commanders believe may eventually be needed to fully secure the country -- would cost more than $10 billion a year. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On a seven-hour trip from Kabul to a NATO meeting in Brussels last week, the two men in Kabul most responsible for American policy in Afghanistan exchanged few words, according to administration officials, holing up in separate compartments on their military plane. The quiet flight of the two officials, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Karl W. Eikenberry, the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, reflects a chill between the two men that officials said took hold even before they staked out conflicting positions in the debate over how many added American troops to send to Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After months of anguished debate in the United States over how many new troops to send to Afghanistan, the numbers game switched to Europe on Friday, with NATO announcing that it planned to commit an additional 7,000 soldiers to the coalition in Afghanistan. NATO portrayed the pledge as a powerful vote of support for the American-led effort. But in Europe as in Washington, arithmetic on troops can get fuzzy. Of the 7,000 troops promised by NATO, from 1,500 to 2,000 are already in Afghanistan, sent months ago to bolster security during the presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Obama sent his top diplomat, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to Europe on Thursday to press sometimes balky NATO allies to contribute thousands of additional troops to his new strategy for turning the tide in the Afghanistan war. Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that some countries were confused by Mr. Obama's plan to begin bringing home American troops in July 2011. But she said that, over all, ''The response has been positive,'' and that she would work to clear up doubts over the American timetable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is far from clear that President Obama can depend on President Hamid Karzai to bring order to this violent country, but it is becoming clear that he will depend on Hillary Rodham Clinton to be his go-between in dealing with the mercurial Afghan leader. In a visit to Kabul, during which she held a 90-minute, one-on-one session with Mr. Karzai on Wednesday, and in an intense telephone call a few weeks ago in the aftermath of Afghanistan's election, Secretary of State Clinton has built an unlikely rapport with the Afghan leader, according to administration officials. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tainted by a flawed election and allegations of festering corruption in his government, President Hamid Karzai was inaugurated Thursday for a second term, promising to remedy the country's problems and to have the Afghan Army assume full control of security within five years. Speaking in Dari and Pashto, Mr. Karzai reached out to the country's two largest ethnic groups as well as to his defeated political rivals in a speech at a midday ceremony at the presidential palace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Obama sent his top diplomat to Afghanistan on Wednesday to press President Hamid Karzai to deliver ''measurable results'' on governance and corruption as the White House prepared specific new demands to accompany an American troop buildup. In an unannounced visit to Kabul, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Mr. Karzai privately that future civilian aid would depend in part on how his government performed in areas like developing an effective army and curbing cronyism, according to an American official. Publicly, she told reporters that Mr. Karzai had begun to tackle corruption but ''not nearly enough.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]