CHICAGO (Reuters) – NATO set an “irreversible” course out of Afghanistan on Monday but President Barack Obama admitted the Western alliance’s plan to end the deeply unpopular war in 2014 was fraught with peril.

A landmark NATO summit in Chicago endorsed an exit strategy that calls for handing control of Afghanistan to its own security forces by the middle of next year but left questions unanswered about how to prevent a slide into chaos and a Taliban resurgence after allied troops are gone.

The two-day meeting of the 28-nation military bloc marked a major milestone in a war sparked by the September 11 attacks that has spanned three U.S. presidential terms and even outlasted al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Obama and NATO partners sought to show their war-weary voters the end is in sight in Afghanistan – a conflict that has strained Western budgets as well as patience – while at the same time trying to reassure Afghans that they will not be abandoned.

“We are now unified behind a plan to responsibly wind down the war in Afghanistan,” Obama told the summit’s closing news conference.

“Are there risks involved? Absolutely,” Obama conceded, saying the Taliban remained a “robust enemy” and NATO’s gains on the ground were fragile. But he insisted the overall strategy, which offered few specifics on the pace of withdrawal, was sound.

Even in NATO’s outward show of solidarity, it was clear that differences remained after nearly 11 years of military engagement that has failed to defeat Taliban Islamists.

CHICAGO, May 21 (Reuters) – NATO set an “irreversible” course out of Afghanistan on Monday but President Barack Obama admitted the Western alliance’s plan to end the deeply unpopular war in 2014 was fraught with peril.

A landmark NATO summit in Chicago endorsed an exit strategy that calls for handing control of Afghanistan to its own security forces by the middle of next year but left questions unanswered about how to prevent a slide into chaos and a Taliban resurgence after allied troops are gone.

The two-day meeting of the 28-nation military bloc marked a major milestone in a war sparked by the Sept. 11 attacks that has spanned three U.S. presidential terms and even outlasted al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Obama and NATO partners sought to show their war-weary voters the end is in sight in Afghanistan – a conflict that has strained Western budgets as well as patience – while at the same time trying to reassure Afghans that they will not be abandoned.

“We are now unified behind a plan to responsibly wind down the war in Afghanistan,” Obama told the summit’s closing news conference.

“Are there risks involved? Absolutely,” Obama conceded, saying the Taliban remained a “robust enemy” and NATO’s gains on the ground were fragile. But he insisted the overall strategy, which offered few specifics on the pace of withdrawal, was sound.

Even in NATO’s outward show of solidarity, it was clear that differences remained after nearly 11 years of military engagement that has failed to defeat Taliban Islamists.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – NATO will hand over the lead role in combat operations to Afghan forces across the country by mid-2013, alliance leaders said on Sunday as they charted a path out of a war that has lost public support and strained budgets in Western nations.

A NATO summit in Chicago on Monday will formally endorse a U.S.-backed strategy for a gradual exit from Afghanistan, a move aimed at holding together an allied force scrambling to cope with France’s decision to withdraw its troops early.

President Barack Obama and NATO partners want to show their war-weary voters the end is in sight in a conflict that has dragged on for more than a decade while at the same time trying to reassure Afghans that they will not be abandoned.

“There will be no rush for the exits,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said as the summit got under way.

He sought to put up a show of unity even as France’s new President Francois Hollande vowed to stick by his pledge to withdraw French troops by year’s end, two years earlier than the alliance timetable.

NATO’s plan is to shift full responsibility to Afghan forces for security across the country by the middle of next year and then withdraw most of the alliance’s 130,000 combat troops by the end of 2014, Rasmussen said.

While foreign forces will continue to fight the Taliban and other militants as necessary – and it may be very necessary – the new mission for U.S. and NATO troops will assume a new focus on advising and supporting Afghan soldiers.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda pledged on Monday to strengthen the U.S.-Japan security alliance, the latest effort to project unity between Washington and its Asian partners as a counterweight to China’s growing assertiveness in the region.

The two leaders put their stamp of approval on a long-stalled agreement to sharply reduce the U.S. military presence on the island of Okinawa, which could help ease the way for Obama’s strategy of dispersing U.S. forces around the western Pacific.

But the show of solidarity between Obama and Noda at the White House was overshadowed by what was shaping up as a tense diplomatic standoff between the United States and China over a Chinese dissident believed to be under U.S. protection in Beijing.

Underscoring the sensitivity over the case, Obama maintained his administration’s silence on Chen Guangcheng’s fate when asked about it at a joint news conference. But he went on to press China to improve its human rights record, a longstanding irritant in relations between the world’s two biggest economies.

The Obama administration used a visit by Noda and meetings between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and their counterparts from the Philippines to showcase efforts to forge closer security ties with Asian allies.

Starting with a trip late last year, Obama has touted a “pivot” toward the economically dynamic Asia-Pacific region widely seen as a U.S. effort to reassure nervous allies there of the U.S. commitment as China flexes its economic and military muscle.

“We have agreed to a new joint vision to guide our alliance and help shape the Asia-Pacific for decades to come,” Obama said after Oval Office talks with Noda.

FORT STEWART, Georgia (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s campaign sought to make the death of Osama bin Laden a central part of the U.S. presidential election on Friday with a video that questioned whether Republican rival Mitt Romney would have made the same call to approve the mission that killed the al Qaeda leader.

Obama, a Democrat, was praised by leaders from both parties for approving the risky May 2011 mission that killed bin Laden, but he has tread carefully with the issue in campaign events.

His re-election campaign embraced the issue fully on Friday. It put out a video that touted Obama’s leadership in approving the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader in Pakistan.

“The commander-in-chief gets one chance to make the right decision,” the video said, also quoting former President Bill Clinton praising Obama for ordering the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

“Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?” it asks, before referring to news reports quoting the former Massachusetts governor saying it was “not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”

Republicans roundly criticized the ad.

John McCain, Obama’s opponent in the 2008 election, called it cheap. “Shame on Barack Obama for diminishing the memory of September 11th and the killing of Osama bin Laden by turning it into a cheap political attack ad,” he said in a statement.

FORT STEWART, Georgia (Reuters) – President Barack Obama on Friday carefully alluded to the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, while his campaign unveiled a new political ad that touted his decision to order the commando raid nearly a year ago as reason to re-elect him in November.

Obama’s visit to Fort Stewart, a sprawling Georgia military base and home of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, was billed as a chance to showcase his administration’s efforts to help U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan struggling to re-adjust to civilian life.

But the president began his speech by thanking U.S. troops and special operations forces for achievements his re-election campaign is also keen to cite, including the death of the al Qaeda leader who planned the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and then evaded capture for nearly a decade.

“Future generations will speak of your achievements. They’ll speak of how the 3rd Infantry Division’s ‘thunder run’ into Baghdad signaled the end of a dictatorship and how you brought Iraq back from the brink of civil war,” he told more than 10,000 soldiers, veterans and their family members at the base in Georgia.

“They’ll speak of you and your service in Afghanistan and in the fight against al Qaeda, which you have put on the path to defeat. And to the members of the Special Operations Forces community, while the American people may never know the full extent of your service, they will surely speak of how you kept our country safe and strong and how you delivered justice to our enemies,” he said.

Obama, a Democrat, did not mention bin Laden by name in his remarks to the troops. But hours earlier, his campaign put out a video that touted Obama’s leadership in approving the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader in the pre-dawn hours of May 2 in Pakistan, which was May 1 in the United States.

“The commander-in-chief gets one chance to make the right decision,” the video said, also quoting former President Bill Clinton praising Obama for ordering the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama, seeking to sharpen contrasts with Mitt Romney, said on Wednesday his presumptive opponent in the November election won’t be able to disavow conservative views he embraced in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Obama, in a Rolling Stone magazine interview released the day after Romney swept five primaries and claimed victory in the Republican contest, sought to feed perceptions of the former Massachusetts governor as a politician who flip-flops on issues to suit the moment.

“I don’t think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, ‘Everything I’ve said for the last six months, I didn’t mean,’ ” Obama said. “I’m assuming that he meant it. When you’re running for president, people are paying attention to what you’re saying.”

The Democratic president’s comments jibed with a re-election campaign strategy of casting him as champion of the middle class who will face the standard-bearer of a Republican party that turned sharply to the right and is beholden to the rich.

Romney, a relative moderate in his party who toughened his rhetoric as the bitter Republican race dragged on, went as far as describing himself as “severely conservative” when he addressed a conservative Republican group in Washington in February.

But his speech on Tuesday night focused almost exclusively on attacking Obama for his handling of the economy and contained little of the conservative rhetoric that marked the Republican primary season fight.

While Republicans want to make the election a referendum on a fragile economic recovery and stubbornly high unemployment under Obama, the president and his Democrats want to make the focus more about income inequality in his face-off against Romney, the wealthy former head of a private equities firm.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama, seeking to sharpen contrasts with Mitt Romney, said on Wednesday his presumptive opponent in the November election won’t be able to disavow conservative views he embraced in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Obama, in a Rolling Stone magazine interview released the day after Romney swept five primaries and claimed victory in the Republican contest, sought to feed perceptions of the former Massachusetts governor as a politician who flip-flops on issues to suit the moment.

“I don’t think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, ‘Everything I’ve said for the last six months, I didn’t mean,’ ” Obama said. “I’m assuming that he meant it. When you’re running for president, people are paying attention to what you’re saying.”

The Democratic president’s comments jibed with a re-election campaign strategy of casting him as champion of the middle class who will face the standard-bearer of a Republican party that turned sharply to the right and is beholden to the rich.

Romney, a relative moderate in his party who toughened his rhetoric as the bitter Republican race dragged on, went as far as describing himself as “severely conservative” when he addressed a conservative Republican group in Washington in February.

But his speech on Tuesday night focused almost exclusively on attacking Obama for his handling of the economy and contained little of the conservative rhetoric that marked the Republican primary season fight.

While Republicans want to make the election a referendum on a fragile economic recovery and stubbornly high unemployment under Obama, the president and his Democrats want to make the focus more about income inequality in his face-off against Romney, the wealthy former head of a private equities firm.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States believes a Chinese firm sold North Korea components for a missile transporter showcased in a recent military parade and will press Beijing to tighten enforcement of a U.N. ban on such military sales, a U.S. official said on Saturday.

The Obama administration suspects the Chinese manufacturer sold the chassis – not the entire vehicle – and may have believed it was for civilian purposes, which means it would not be an intentional violation of U.N. sanctions, the senior official said.

But such a sale – coming to light amid tensions over a failed North Korean rocket launch earlier this month – raises concerns in Washington on whether China is making enough of an effort to abide by the prohibition on weapons sales to Pyongyang.

The New York Times first reported on U.S. findings about the origin of parts of the transporter launcher system – essentially a large truck on top of which a missile is mounted – displayed in a parade in Pyongyang on Sunday.

The newspaper said the administration suspected the Chinese manufacturer involved in the transaction was Hubei Sanjiang. The official, who confirmed details of the administration’s thinking on the matter, said the firm likely sold the part to a front company that was used to mask the buyer’s true identity.

Beijing, reclusive North Korea’s only major ally, has denied it has broken any rules, although a modern, eight-axle missile transporter spotted in the military parade to celebrate the founder of North Korea was said by some western military experts to be of Chinese design and possibly origin.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told U.S. lawmakers on Thursday that China has provided some assistance to North Korea’s missile program, but he said he did not know the “exact extent of that.”

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will use a tour of election battleground states next week to push Congress to prevent interest rates on federal student loans from doubling, a move that could appeal to middle-class and younger voters crucial to his re-election chances.

Obama will make his pitch in speeches at universities in North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa, three states expected to play a major role in the November election. The youth vote is a key national constituency his campaign team hopes to re-energize.

The two-day trip is part of a campaign by the Obama administration to get Congress to extend low interest rates on college loans to more than 7.4 million students.

If lawmakers fail to act, rates on the loans will double on July 1 to 6.8 percent — this at a time when other loans boast near record low rates, with the average for a 30-year mortgage at 3.9 percent this week.

The new push jibes with the White House’s strategy of casting the Democratic president as a champion of the middle class, to draw contrasts with congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney, his wealthy Republican presidential challenger.

“We have an immediate crisis,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a White House briefing. “College has to be affordable for the middle class.”

Republicans insist that Democrats created the problem in the first place when they controlled Congress and passed a bill that cut rates on subsidized Stafford loans in 2007 but allowed them to revert back to higher levels after four years.