NATO and its partner nations formally agreed that Afghan security forces would take control of any combat next summer with NATO sliding into a support role. Obama called the transition “the next milestone” in bringing the nearly 11-year long war to a close.

“This will be another step toward Afghans taking full lead for their security as agreed to by 2014,” Obama said as he opened a meeting of NATO leaders and other countries that have participated in the war.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Afghans were already leading security operations in half the country and were on pace to meet next year’s targets.

“Transition means the people of Afghanistan increasingly see their own army and police in their towns and villages providing their security,” Rasmussen said. “This is an important sign of progress toward our shared goal: an Afghanistan governed and secured by Afghans for Afghans.”

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai participated in Monday’s meeting, as did Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, whose country will have a critical role in ensuring Afghanistan’s stability after NATO troops leave.

Zardari’s presence has cast a shadow over the summit. The U.S. and Pakistan remain at odds over Pakistan’s closure of key routes used to send supplies to NATO troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan closed the supply lines in November following a U.S. airstrike that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers. While both sides have indicated the issue will be resolved, no deal is expected during the NATO meetings.

Obama thanked other nations in Central Asia and Russia for their roles in providing “critical transit” for supplies but pointedly made no mention of Pakistan.

Following the war meeting, Obama, Zardari and Karzai talked briefly on the sidelines of the summit. U.S. officials had indicated Obama would not hold a formal bilateral meeting with Zardari as long as the supply route matter remained unresolved.

Rasmussen also met with Zardari and said he was “encouraged” by their talk and believed Pakistan would re-open the supply lines in the “very near future.”

As NATO leaders herald the Afghan war’s end, they face the grim reality of two more years of fighting and more of their troops dying in combat.

Some NATO countries, most recently France, have sought to end their combat commitments early. The Taliban and its allies have warned that they are waiting to fill the void in Afghanistan after NATO leaves.

Obama is eager to show election-year leadership on the world stage during the Chicago meetings.

Following a meeting with Karzai Sunday, Obama said NATO’s drawdown plans mean that by 2014, “the Afghan war as we understand it is over.”

But he acknowledged enormous progress must be made for that to become a reality.

“We still have a lot of work to do, and there will be great challenges ahead,” Obama said after his lengthy talks with Karzai. “The loss of life continues in Afghanistan.”

Obama’s words were echoed by other U.S. officials, who sternly warned that American forces and their allies should still expect to be engaged in battle even after Afghans take the lead.

“After this milestone in 2013 there still will be combat capability, combat authority and an expectation there will be combat,” said retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the top White House national security council official in connection with the war.

Many alliance leaders, Obama chief among them, have a political incentive for trumpeting that drawdown plan, given the growing public frustration.

Sixty six percent of Americans oppose the war, while only 27 percent support the effort, according to an AP-GfK poll released this month.

In France, voters elected President Francois Hollande in part because of a campaign pledge to pull his country’s 3,300 troops out of Afghanistan ahead of schedule. Since taking office, Hollande has said he plans to make good on his promise to bring combat troops home by the end of this year but will maintain French support for Afghanistan in other ways.

The U.S. and NATO will also maintain a sizeable and lengthy commitment to Afghanistan after combat troops come home at the end of 2014.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a member of the Armed Services Committee who visits Afghanistan often, said that by 2014 Afghan forces, with the backing of international trainers and logistical support, “will be able to provide stability.”

Speaking Monday on CBS’ “This Morning,” Reed said that Afghan leaders and the international community need to seek a political settlement “but the security forces will provide the foundation for the stability that is absolutely necessary as our troops withdraw.”

Obama, in a trip to Afghanistan this month, signed a deal with Karzai detailing much of the U.S. commitment, including annual financing from Congress and support for development, health and education projects. The U.S. may also leave a residual troop presence in Afghanistan, though any such step would require approval from the Afghans.

At the NATO conference, leaders were also discussing how the international community would finance Afghan security forces after 2014. With none of the NATO countries having the stomach to pursue the war much longer, the only viable option is to support an Afghan army and police force capable of defending the country against the Taliban and its allies.

NATO estimates it will cost about $4.1 billion a year to finance the forces. The Afghan government will pay about $500 million of that, and the rest will come from donor countries, many of which are struggling with deficits and the specter of recession.

While the Chicago meeting was not billed as a pledging summit, leaders were discussing where the rest of the contributions would come from. About $1.3 billion is expected to come from NATO members other than the United States. About $1 billion of that has already been pledged, a senior Western official said Sunday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to disclose the figures.

The U.S. and some nations outside the military coalition are expected to make up the $2.3 billion.

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Associated Press writers Ben Feller and Anne Gearan contributed to this report.

Leaders at the G-8 economic summit have sought to focus some of their efforts in recent years on the plight of the developing world. At the 2009 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, Obama championed a food security initiative that resulted in $22 billion in pledges from G-8 leaders and other nations.

The private sector commitments Obama was announcing Friday build on that effort, administration officials said. The goal is to achieve sustained agriculture growth and raise 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years.

“It’s not about replacing aid,” said Mike Froman, a top Obama adviser for international economics. “It’s about combining aid with private capital.”

Obama is also expected to call on countries to fulfill the financial food security pledges they made in 2009. The pledge period for L’Aquila Food Security Initiative ends later this year, and some humanitarian groups say much of the promised money has not been dispersed.

The G-8 will release an accountability report this weekend detailing how much of the $22 billion is still on the sidelines. Administration officials say the U.S. is on track to fulfill its $3.5 billion pledge.

On Saturday, Obama and the other G-8 leaders will be joined at Camp David by the heads of four African countries — Ghana, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Benin — for a session on food security.

While administration officials say Obama will urge wealthy nations to maintain their commitment to alleviating hunger in Africa, the U.S. and other G-8 countries were not expected to announce any new financial pledges of their own.

But with some new faces around the conference tables, Obama and the other leaders will be confronted by the stark reminder of the political turmoil from Asia to Europe that cost several of their old counterparts their jobs.

Since late 2011, public frustration with Europe’s debt crisis has led to the ouster of leaders in Italy, Spain, Greece and most recently, France. Two other members of the G-8, Britain and Japan, have had leadership shake-ups since Obama took office.

Obama is fighting for his own job in a campaign expected to hinge on the economy. He has had the good fortune of being able to hold both summits this year in the U.S., allowing him to tailor the meetings around his election-year messages of expanding the economy, creating jobs and ending the war

The summit locations rotate annually for each organization.

Leaders from the world’s eight leading industrialized nations arrive in the Washington area on Friday for meetings at Camp David, the wooded presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Immediately following the G-8 summit, Obama and most of the other leaders will fly to Chicago Saturday evening to join other heads of state from NATO.

Obama originally planned both meetings for Chicago, his hometown. But the White House abruptly scrapped those plans in March, announcing with little explanation that the G-8 would shift to Camp David.

It was an unexpected move from Obama, who rarely spends time at Camp David and has never hosted a world leader there, unlike many of his predecessors. The White House said that location would lend itself to more intimate talks. It also will keep them far from the protests that usually flare on the summit fringes.

But U.S. and other diplomats said a major reason for the switch was to appear welcoming to Vladimir Putin, who recently reclaimed the presidency in Russia. Putin planned to skip NATO because of his staunch opposition to the alliance’s planned missile defense shield, and separating the two meetings was seen as a way to give Putin cover to slip away less awkwardly.

Yet in a move widely perceived as a snub, Putin told Obama last week that he was skipping the G-8 as well in order to stay in Russia and focus on forming his government. Russia’s former president and current prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, will attend the G-8 sessions, which also include the U.S., Japan, Britain, France, Italy and Canada.

White House officials insisted Putin’s presence was not a factor in their decision to move the G-8 summit.

The G-8 talks are expected to be dominated by the eurozone crisis, though Obama administration officials are keeping expectations for tangible agreements low. While the health of the U.S. economy is closely linked to Europe’s stability, Obama has made clear that he has no appetite for ponying up American money to help bail out the continent.

Instead, Obama will largely play the role of facilitator, urging European leaders to balance calls for austerity, largely driven by Germany, with a growth agenda.

“This is really for Europe to sort out,” said Heather Conley, a Europe expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We are sitting on the bleachers a bit. And we are going to have to watch how this plays out with the frustration in recognizing that it will have a profound impact for the global economy and for the U.S. economy.”

Obama will have a new ally in his calls for a growth agenda in Europe, new French President Francois Hollande. But administration officials say Obama plans to caution Hollande, France’s first socialist president in 17 years, that Europe cannot abandon budget-cutting entirely.

Obama will host Hollande at the White House for a meeting Friday before the G-8 summit begins.

Hollande will be in the spotlight as the weekend of summitry moves to Chicago, where NATO will firm up plans for how the alliance will finish its shift from a combat role in Afghanistan to an advisory role next year. The alliance will also reaffirm its commitment to fully ending the combat mission in Afghanistan by 2015.

Hollande campaigned on pledge to speed up the withdrawal of France’s 3,400 troops from Afghanistan and pull them out by the end of the year. But he recently acknowledged that a fast-track pullout might force the French to leave behind some military gear, and some U.S. officials believe he is likely to try to find some wiggle room, perhaps by leaving some forces in Afghanistan in an advisory role.

The NATO-backed plan for drawing down in Afghanistan is an important part of Obama’s campaign message about the increasingly unpopular war. But Obama is not expected to announce the next steps in the U.S. withdrawal plan from Afghanistan during the summit.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai will be in Chicago, and NATO also has extended an invitation to Pakistan, which has a vital role in ensuring stability in the region after the U.S. and other foreign forces draw down. The invitation to President Asif Ali Zardari was a signal of rapprochement between the U.S. and Pakistan and a sign that Islamabad is ready to reopen its western border to U.S. and NATO military supplies heading to Afghanistan.

The NATO meeting also will showcase the effort to get firm financial commitments from inside and outside the alliance for support for Afghan forces. NATO argues that even the projected bill of about $4 billion annually is cheaper than the cost of war. But it is not clear that several European governments have the budget or the will to keep paying. The U.S. expects to pay much of the total, but U.S. officials say Washington cannot do it alone.

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Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC