WASHINGTON: With concern mounting about the direction of Afghanistan, the United States and its allies are stepping up efforts to lay the political groundwork to begin pulling out troops next year.

In the past week, a major conference in Kabul endorsed a 2014 target for Afghans to take charge of security and US President Barack Obama huddled with Prime Minister David Cameron, who said Britain could start to withdraw in 2011.

While neither date is new, many experts see a growing urgency to spell out an exit strategy as the human and financial costs rise, Western public support wanes and donors become more skeptical of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Obama in December ordered a surge that brings US and NATO troops to 150,000 but also said combat forces would start leaving in mid-2011, a decade after the September 11, 2001 attacks triggered the war that overthrew the Taliban regime.

With troops numbers at their peak, this summer was initially expected to be the season of a major offensive in Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold and ethnic Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan.

But officials have grown more cautious after an operation in nearby Marjah, which was supposed to be a test-run of then commander Stanley McChrystal`s strategy of seizing and then stabilizing areas by building local institutions.

"They`ve learned a lesson from Marjah -- the Afghan government structure simply can`t fill in behind US forces with nearly the kind of speed, pace and effectiveness that the strategy had intended," said Bruce Jones, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank.

"The idea of a turnaround in Kandahar, I think if you attempted that, you would set up yet another failure," Jones said.

If the US goals are to build security, ensure human rights and root out corruption in Afghanistan, "that could take a couple of generations," Jones said.

"It`s unrealistic to think that the American body politic is going to sustain the level of presence there long enough to give the Afghans time to develop their institutions," he said.

Richard Haass, the president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations who had advised former president George W. Bush on Afghanistan, recently argued it was time to "scale back US objectives and sharply reduce US involvement on the ground."

With CIA chief Leon Panetta recently estimating that no more than 100 Al-Qaeda figures were in Afghanistan, Haass that the United States was closer to achieving its core goals than many realized.

"It makes no sense to maintain 100,000 troops to go after so small an adversary, especially when Al-Qaeda operates on this scale in a number of countries," Haass wrote in Newsweek magazine.

The United States could instead treat Afghanistan like Yemen and Somalia, with targeted counter-terrorist strikes, and switch from nation-building to a "decentralization" policy of backing local leaders who share US goals, Haass said.

The Obama administration has walked a fine line on the July 2011 target. It has used the date to encourage Karzai to take greater charge but taken pains not to describe it as a withdrawal -- which could change calculations in Pakistan, Taliban`s former backer which has since allied with Washington.

"The military element is not open-ended," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said Friday. "But our commitment to Afghanistan -- we will be there for many, many years."

Among other nations involved in Afghanistan, The Netherlands is pulling out next month after its government collapsed over the issue. Australia said last month it could withdraw its forces within three years.

"The zeitgeist right now seems to be for a disengagement on the part of everyone," said Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department official who is now a scholar at the Middle East Institute.

But he feared that many were not considering consequences of withdrawal, such as potential fighting among Afghan ethnic groups, a refugee crisis or an intensified proxy conflict between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India.

"We have a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the doubts rise, there is no question that it`s going to drive down our will and make it impossible to succeed with our strategy," Weinbaum said.

BDST: 0859 HRS, July 25, 2010