Middle East, Leon Panetta | featured news

A German official is saying Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has told NATO allies that the U.S. will leave between 8,000-12,000 American troops in Afghanistan after 2014, when combat ends.

The US defence secretary says for the first time that he supports arming Syrian rebels, a proposal reportedly over-ruled by President Barack Obama.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta arrived in Kabul Wednesday afternoon to take stock of the war as the Obama administration weighs how quickly to draw down troops over the next two years. The trip, likely his last official visit to the war zone, will give Panetta a chance to consult with U.S. commanders and Afghan President Hamid Karzai about the future U.S. role here as the decade-long war comes to an end.

The U.S. military did not quickly intervene during the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya last month because military leaders did not have adequate intelligence information and felt they should not put American forces at risk, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Thursday.

Panetta won't dispute a report that he believes Israel may attack Iran this spring in an attempt to set back Iran's nuclear program.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Sunday that Iran is only one year away from producing a nuclear weapon. In an interview on the CBS show "60 Minutes," Panetta said that “the consensus is that, if they decided to do it, it would probably take them about a year to be able to produce a bomb and then possibly another one to two years in order to put it on a deliverable vehicle of some sort in order to deliver that weapon.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has condemned a video that apparently shows U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Afghan men, promising to punish those involved. Earlier, an Afghan Taliban spokesman said the video will not affect efforts to broker peace talks.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta marked on Thursday the end of the U.S. war in Iraq, with the last American troops withdrawing nearly nine years after the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

Leon Panetta cites governance problems, drug trafficking and the Taliban insurgency. Progress is "slower than I think anyone anticipated," he says.