World behind strategy to exit Afghanistan: Obama

US President Barack Obama declared Sunday that the world was behind his strategy to end the war in Afghanistan, as more than 50 leaders gathered to hammer out a withdrawal plan at a key NATO summit.

The United States recognized the "hardship" Afghanistan had been through and realized its people "desperately want peace and security," Obama said as he met Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the sidelines of the Chicago talks.

"What this NATO summit reflects is that the world is behind the strategy that we have laid out," he told reporters. "Now it is our task to implement it effectively."

Karzai said his country no longer wants to be a "burden," urging the international community to complete a security transition to his Afghan forces as it pulls out 130,000 troops by the end of 2014.

"Afghanistan... is looking forward to an end to this war and a transformational decade in which Afghanistan will be working further for institution building and the development of sound governance in the country," Karzai said.

World leaders and international organizations were due to open their two-day summit later Sunday aimed at cementing the 2014 deadline from the decade-long war in Afghanistan and handing over security to Afghan forces.

They were meeting amid tight security in Obama's hometown of Chicago, with police deployed along the main arteries, some on horseback, as Coast Guard boats mounted with machine guns patrolled the river.

It is the first summit of the 28-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization on US soil in more than a decade, and comes as the 63-year-old organization confronts shifting 21st-century realities and shrinking defense budgets.

Despite France saying it would pull out its troops earlier than planned from Afghanistan, NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen vowed: "There will be no rush for the exits. We will stay committed to our operation in Afghanistan and see it through to a successful end."

But France has shaken up the carefully crafted withdrawal plan with new President Francois Hollande saying that he plans to pullout French troops by late 2012, a year earlier than planned.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday: "Germany supports NATO's idea: We went into Afghanistan together and we want to withdraw from Afghanistan together."

Apart from Afghanistan, Obama and his fellow leaders will take other key decisions, activating the first part of a missile shield for Europe, despite fierce Russian opposition and announcing a slew of military cooperation projects to cope with mounting austerity.

Karzai comes armed with a firm demand for $4.1 billion (3.2 billion euros) a year to fund his security forces after the pullout.

The United States is expected to foot half the bill while hoping the international community will stump up the rest.

Washington is also hoping that Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will agree to reopen key NATO supply routes into Afghanistan closed in November after US air strikes killed 26 Pakistani troops.

But the US-Pakistani talks on reopening vital supply routes for NATO forces in Afghanistan have stumbled over Islamabad demand to charge steep fees for trucks crossing the border, a senior US official told AFP.

The official confirmed that Pakistan has proposed an exponential increase in fees, from the current rate of about $250 per truck to "thousands of dollars."

"That's, in a word, unacceptable," he said.

Governments are feeling the pinch as Europe's debt crisis forces budget cuts across the board, and to cope NATO will announce more than 20 joint projects to pool military hardware as part of a so-called "Smart Defense" initiative.

NATO has touted a planned US-led missile shield for Europe as a shining example of military cooperation.

A first step to the shield will be the announcement at the summit of an "interim capability" putting a US warship armed with missile interceptors in the Mediterranean, and a radar system based in Turkey under NATO command.

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