In the most dramatic departure from the March approach, however, July 2011 will begin a new phase in the Afghanistan war: A date when the U.S. will “begin to transfer our lead responsibility” for “combat operations to our Afghan counterparts.” This is “not an open-ended commitment,” a senior official said. But the officials did not explicitly state that major U.S. troop withdrawals will occur by that time. The pace of the security transfer, as well as the date at which it is completed, will be determined by events on the ground, a senior official said. July 2011, in other words, marks “the beginning of a process which is not yet defined in terms of the length of the process or the endpoint.” It is, instead, a “strategic inflection point” that will place “pressure” on all parties — the Obama administration, NATO, the Afghans, the Pakistanis — “to do more sooner.”

One of the officials did say that some troop withdrawals can begin to occur by July 2011. But both emphasized that July 2011 is only the beginning of the end. The actual end of the transition to Afghan security-force control and correlative U.S. troop withdrawals are linked to conditions on the ground — meaning no timetable for the end of the war, just the so-called “transition to overwatch” as Gen. Petraeus liked to say about Iraq in 2007.