With Osama bin Laden now killed, costs spiralling, public support sagging and allies quitting combat, Barack Obama may opt to announce a faster drawdown of troops from Afghanistan.
Next month's start to the withdrawal - long-expected to be small and symbolic to fulfill the U.S. President's promise to have soldiers come home beginning in July - may now signal a strategic shift.
As the President mulls the size of the pullout, there's talk of a hurry-up timetable that could mean tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and Marines packing up and heading home in the next year.
That option, The New York Times reported Monday, is among several Mr. Obama's top war advisers have offered the President, whose new defence and security team doesn't share the personal investment in winning the Afghan war.
General David Petraeus, sent to Kabul last year to see if he could echo his success in Baghdad, is stepping down to take over the Central Intelligence Agency. Defence Secretary Robert Gates is retiring. They were the two leading proponents of America's current troop-heavy counterinsurgency strategy.
Mr. Obama was swept to office in part by promising to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and instead concentrate on what he called "the right war" in Afghanistan. A year after he reached the Oval Office, the number of U.S. troops had tripled to more than 100,000 and there were more foreign soldiers in Afghanistan than at the peak of the failed 1980s Soviet effort to subjugate the country.
The counterinsurgency campaign - especially in the Taliban heartlands of Kandahar and Helmand - remains a hard-fought and uncertain effort.
Mr. Gates, making his 13th and last trip to Afghanistan, clearly believes a hasty or massive pullout would be ill-advised.
"My view is that we've got to keep the pressure on," he said. " Clearly the killing of bin Laden was a big deal. [But]we've still got a ways to go and I just think we shouldn't let up on the gas too much, at least for the next few months."
Mr. Obama has tapped CIA director Leon Panetta to replace Mr. Gates at the Pentagon, Mr. Panetta led the administration's expansion of cross-border drone strikes to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Pakistan. Whether the outgoing spymaster endorsed the surge strategy for Afghanistan is unknown, but it is clearly an expensive, long-term option.
NATO has already set a 2014 target for handing security responsibilities to the Afghan police and military.
"We have already laid out a clear timetable for a gradual transfer," NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Monday. If Mr. Obama speeds up the pace of a U.S. drawdown, it will almost certain send other allies looking for an early exit.
Polls in Australia, for instance whose small contingent has fought fiercely and been far more engaged that some of the larger European NATO nations, show two-thirds of those surveyed want their troops home this year.
Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's increasingly shrill denunciations of American tactics have further cooled an already chilly relationship. He keeps threatening to block night raids and air strikes - two key U.S. tactics.
The Afghan President also seems ready to talk to the Taliban, perhaps anticipating that U.S.-led foreign forces will be gone in a few years. "Hopefully there will be a rethinking in the Taliban and in those elements who are not associated with international terrorist networks or with al-Qaeda that they take this opportunity to return to their country in peace and in dignity," Mr. Karzai said.