{"id":10314,"date":"2011-10-03T16:12:23","date_gmt":"2011-10-03T20:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=10314"},"modified":"2011-10-03T15:07:25","modified_gmt":"2011-10-03T19:07:25","slug":"pres-obama-still-on-track-to-remove-afghanistan-troops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=10314","title":{"rendered":"Pres. Obama: Still On Track To Remove Afghanistan Troops"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 Citing &#8220;huge challenges&#8221; ahead, <strong>President Barack Obama<\/strong> says he still intends to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by next year and says the administration&#8217;s strategy for winding down the war remains unchanged.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pres. Obama<\/strong> made his declaration in a letter to congressional leaders Friday. The letter accompanied a semiannual report assessing the administration&#8217;s policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.<\/p>\n<p>The letter reports improvement in the fight against al-Qaida, as well as a reversal in the Taliban&#8217;s momentum in Afghanistan and headway in the training of Afghan security forces.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Huge challenges remain, and this is the beginning \u2014 but not the end \u2014 of our effort to wind down this war,&#8221;<strong> Pres. Obama<\/strong> wrote.<\/p>\n<p>The 33,000 troops represent the force surge <strong>Pres. Obama<\/strong> announced in December 2009. Last June, he announced the withdrawal of 10,000 U. S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year and that the 33,000 surge troops would leave Afghanistan by the summer of 2012.<\/p>\n<p>In his letter, <strong>Pres. Obama<\/strong> said that plan was still on track.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WASHINGTON \u2014 Citing &#8220;huge challenges&#8221; ahead, President Barack Obama says he still intends to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by next year and says the administration&#8217;s strategy for winding down the war remains unchanged. Pres. Obama made his declaration in a letter to congressional leaders Friday. The letter accompanied a semiannual report assessing the administration&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}