even the "dovish" Obama Administration will not withdraw from Astan anytime soon. From Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Fluornoy, "2014 Is Not a Withdrawal Date; It's an Inflection Point." (video here):

The plan was laid out at the NATO summit in Lisbon, and what it calls for is the transition process for transferring lead responsibility for security to the Afghans, to be completed by the end of 2014, and we believe we're on track to do that.

That said, the Afghan forces at that time will be largely infantry battalions, police, and so forth. They are still going to need support from the international community in terms of enablers, such as mobility, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and so forth, so it will take some time before they have all the enablers necessary.

They're going to need some continued support, and they're also going to need some advising and assisting. And so we, and NATO also, have been negotiating a strategic partnership agreement with the Afghan government that would lay out an enduring strategic partnership far into the future.

Obviously that will have economic dimensions, diplomatic, other dimensions, but one of the dimensions on the security side is, at the invitation of the Afghan government, we will continue to have a partnership force in place that really provides advising, assisting, continued support to the Afghan National Security Forces for quite some time. So 2014 is not a withdrawal date; it's an inflection point where we put Afghans firmly in the lead and we step back into a consistently supporting role, but with much lower numbers of troops.
The US has had a strategic partnership agreement with Astan (a presidential executive agreement between Karzai and Bush II; then renewed by Obama). Any number of Republicans (including most of their present presidential candidates) are more "hawkish" about state-building in Astan than Ms Fluornoy.

My own personal view is that the focus (of both Democratic and Republican state-building) has been primarily one of dealing either militarily and / or diplomatically with the local AQ "affiliate" (the Taliban), rather than that part of the primary problem (AQ leadership) which resides in Astan and Pstan. To that extent, I agree with Bob Jones that we chase after local insurgents too much.

Both the Democratic and Republican power elites disagree with me since my belief is that the US has more than performed its reasonable obligations under the current strategic partnership agreement - and pulling the plug on state-building is overdue.

Regards

Mike