As the White House debates keeping a much smaller force in Iraq after 2011, it must decide whether to axe a peacekeeping role in the country's volatile north, officials and analysts said Wednesday.
Amid negotiations with Iraqi leaders on the scope of a future US military mission, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has approved a tentative proposal to retain as few as 3,000-4,000 troops beyond an end-of-year deadline, a senior defense official told AFP.
The proposed smaller footprint, first reported by Fox News, has been floated as a way of navigating the politically-charged talks with Baghdad, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"If you go in with 10,000, then you may get nothing. You don't want to go heavy and overplay your hand," the official said, referring to the higher training force troop numbers previously touted by senior officers.
The Obama administration's internal debate on Iraq requires the president's advisers and commanders to contemplate what tasks will be carried out by any follow-on force, and what missions might have to be jettisoned.
With the Iraqi military designed for counter-insurgency missions, US and local officers have long argued that forces will need help with logistics, intelligence, counter-terror operations, air power and naval security.
But lighter US numbers of roughly 3,000 would be too small to address what top generals have said is perhaps the most serious threat to Iraq's stability -- ethnic tensions between Kurds and Arabs in the country's oil-rich north.
