Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is "seriously considering" leaving the capital Tripoli following a blistering series of NATO air raids, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing U.S. officials.

U.S. intelligence shows that the Libyan strongman "doesn't feel safe anymore" in the capital where he has ruled for over four decades, the Journal quoted a senior U.S. national security official as saying.

U.S. President Barack Obama's Afghan withdrawal plans "are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept," the top U.S. military officer told lawmakers Thursday.

"More force for more time is, without a doubt, the safer course. But that does not necessarily make it the best course," U.S. Joints Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told the House Armed Services Committee in prepared testimony.

Afghanistan's Taliban Thursday dismissed news of U.S. troop withdrawals as mere symbolism, vowing to fight on, but President Hamid Karzai said the move hastened his nation's ability to fend for itself.

Ordinary Afghans seemed split over U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement, after a decade of war, to pull tens of thousands of troops out of Afghanistan and concentrate on "nation-building" in America instead.

British leader David Cameron "fully agreed" with US President Barack Obama that "sustained pressure" could be applied to Afghan insurgents despite a troop cutback, his office said Thursday.

In a call made hours before Obama announced the withdrawal of thousands of U.S. troops from the war-torn nation, Cameron reaffirmed to the US leader that Britain would remove all of its combat troops by 2015.

France will carry out a progressive pullback of its forces in Afghanistan, with a timetable similar to that announced by for U.S. troops, the president's office said Thursday.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said in a statement that NATO member France would make a "progressive" withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan "in a proportional manner and in a timeframe similar to the pullback of the American reinforcements."

President Barack Obama Wednesday ordered all 33,000 U.S. surge troops home from Afghanistan by next summer and declared the beginning of the end of the war, vowing to turn to nation building at home.

In a watershed moment for American foreign policy, Obama also significantly curtailed U.S. war aims, saying Washington would no longer try to build a "perfect" Afghanistan from a nation traumatized by its blood soaked history.

President Barack Obama warned Monday that new "tactical" disagreements loomed between Israel and Washington, but vowed to leverage his administration's "creative powers" in the cause of peace.

Obama, who has had a testy relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke at length on the stalled peace process at a fundraiser for his 2012 reelection campaign grouping Democratic friends of Israel.

Eight foreign soldiers died in one day in Afghanistan, officials said Sunday, including four in a single incident believed to have been a vehicle accident.

The four died Saturday of "non-battle related injuries" in southern Afghanistan, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement.

U.S. Republicans uneasy with their field of White House hopefuls heard Friday they must set aside dreams of a "perfect" challenger to President Barack Obama in 2012 and back their eventual nominee.

"Don't get hung up on purity. In politics purity is a loser," Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, a former national party chief, told activists at a conference in this party city. "It is unity that wins elections."

The U.N. Security Council has split the international sanctions regime for the Taliban and al-Qaida to encourage the Taliban to join reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan.

The council unanimously passed two resolutions on Friday, setting up one new blacklist of individuals and organizations accused of links to al-Qaida and a second for those linked to the Taliban militia.