Published 10:25 a.m. ET -- An Obama administration senior official said Tuesday that during the president's State of the Union address he will announce that 34,000 of the 66,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan will be brought back to the United States within 12 months.

Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters

U.S. Army soldiers react after their comrade was wounded at patrol by an improvised explosive device (IED) in southern Afghanistan June 12, 2012.

By this spring, a senior administration official said, Afghan forces will be “assuming the lead across the entire country, with the United States and ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) stepped back to a train-advise-and-assist role. In that capacity, we will no longer be leading combat operations, but will provide support to the Afghans” during the 2013 and 2014 fighting seasons.

“By the end of 2014, we will responsibly bring our war in Afghanistan to a close,” the official said.

But the Obama administration is in negotiations on a security accord with the Afghan government that would allow some U.S. forces to operate in the country after 2014 to attack remnants of al-Qaida and to train Afghan forces.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a speech last month “We are still at war in Afghanistan,” but he said the progress the International Security Assistance Force has made in training the Afghan army and Afghan police “has brought us to what I hope will be the last chapter of this war, and the next chapter in NATO's relationship with Afghanistan.” 

NBC White House Correspondent Kristen Welker contributed to this story

TAMPA, Fla. -- South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) called on government contractors to put employees on layoff notice before November's election as a way to pressure Congress to address the so-called "fiscal cliff."

Graham, joined by Republican Sens. John McCain (AZ) and Kelly Ayotte (NH), were in Florida for their first stop on a  two-day, four-state tour by these three members of the Senate Armed Services Committee designed to bring attention to the $500 billion in automatic cuts scheduled to begin in January if Congress does not find other ways to cut spending.

“Politicians, you know, quite frankly respond to pressure,” Graham said about the  cuts set to begin in 2013 under the so-called sequestration budget.

“I’m urging every defense industry that could be affected by sequestration to put your employees on notice before November,” he continued. “The more it becomes real to us as to what comes the nation’s way, the more likely we are to solve the problem.”

Graham delivered the remarks inside a University of South Florida auditorium here in Tampa this morning to an audience of military veterans, academics, and defense contractors.

Some in the audience were linked to nearby MacDill Air Force base, a sprawling installation housing the U.S. Central Command, the organization that oversees America’s military activity in the Middle East, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

“There is gridlock in Washington,” McCain said as he warmed the crowd shortly after taking the podium. “I don’t need to tell you that.  It’s hard these days, trying to do the Lord’s work in the city of Satan.”

The line won laughs, but much of the humor today was strictly of the gallows variety.

Before the event began, audience members mingled and expressed satisfaction that South Florida’s defense industry was being recognized.

“I think they’re playing politics with peoples’ lives,” Donna S. Huneycutt, the executive vice president of a small government consulting firm, said of Congress in an interview. 

Huneycutt said she has a staff of 62 people, and nearly had to lay people off last year as a result of earlier budget cuts.

“I’d like to see both sides come to the table and compromise,” she said.

McCain, Graham, and Ayotte called for a bipartisan solution to the crisis.

They signaled they would break with other Republicans and would accept closing loopholes in the tax code in return for concessions from Democrats, including cuts to entitlement programs.

“We shouldn’t put our troops in this position,” Ayotte said. “We shouldn’t put our military feeling like they have the sword of Damocles hanging over their head.”

Ayotte, the wife of a retired Air National Guard pilot who flew combat missions over Iraq, is a buzzed-about prospect for the number-two slot on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s ticket and is rumored to be on his short list.

The town hall tour was scheduled to make stops later today in Fayetteville, NC and Norfolk, VA – also home to key military communities.

The tour will wrap Tuesday morning in Merrimack, NH at a facility for the defense contractor BAE Systems.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Friday said America is succeeding in Afghanistan, but warned that enemies are looking for new ways to inflict damage.

"In particular, they have sought to take advantage of a series of troubling incidents involving misconduct on the part of American troops," he said in a speech at Fort Benning, Georgia. "These days, it takes only seconds for one picture to suddenly become an international headline."

Panetta addressed about 1,300 soldiers from the 3rd Infrantry Division's 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team.

Relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan have been strained by several recent incidents, specifically the burning of Muslim holy books at a U.S. base and the massacre of 17 civilians, including children, allegedly by Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who is imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, awaiting trial in the killings. In addition, American troops have been videotaped urinating on the bodies of Afghan militants and shown in photographs posing with the body parts of dead insurgents.

"I know these incidents represent a very, very small percentage of the great work that our men and women do every day across the world," Panetta said, "but these incidents concern me — and all of the Service Chiefs — because they show a lack of judgment, a lack of professionalism, and a lack of leadership on the part of some of our men and women in uniform."

“While these are seemingly isolated events by a few bad apples,” Michael Smith, a professor of communications at La Salle University in Pennsylvania told msnbc.com, “they may come to symbolize America to the Afghan population. If this becomes the case, our mission is doomed and the lives of our troops at greater risk.”

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan, where he signed an agreement that spells out a winding down of the war as well as a longtime commitment to staying there.

Though no specifics on the number of troops who will remain in an advisory capacity, perhaps for a decade, were announced, the agreement pledges support after 88,000 combat forces leave Afghanistan in 2014 after what will be 13 years of war.

Related: Troops returning home to strained veterans-affairs system

In the meantime, the United States has said it is committed to stabilizing the Afghan government in the face of a messy insurgency from the Taliban, which hours after Obama’s visit launched a suicide car bomb attack that killed seven people in an a compound housing hundreds of westerners. 

Related: Extreme war stresses to blame in Marine urination video?

According to Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a former Defense Department intelligence assessment director, concerted communications campaigns to build up the images of American troops and the war effort started at the beginning of the Afghan conflict. The campaigns got a whole new emphasis in 2009 when a leaked report by U.S. and NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal bluntly stated that without more forces and a new counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, failure was likely. The report also said the Afghan government was riddled with corruption.

“Similarly, there has been a consistent effort to provide sensitivity and cultural training to U.S. troops, trying to make them aware trying to make them aware how Afghans see the world and Afghan values,” Cordesman said.

In insurgency campaigns — in Afghanistan’s case the Taliban trying to wrest control from the NATO-backed Afghan government — how civilians perceive each side in a conflict is key to cooperation during the war as well as stability afterward, Cordesman pointed out.

“The history, almost regardless of who does this," he said, "is that very often you get the cultural values wrong. You can’t communicate as well as a movement that is local.”

Speaking to the troops is useful, Cordesman said, but it is not a way of having a large impact on what the Afghans think about Americans in the short run. The Quran burning was a particularly egregious episode culturally — it sparked weeks of violent protests — while urinating on bodies and posing with photographs could be viewed as an act of revenge, which Afghans understand, Cordesman said.

While such incidents are damaging, in the end it will be support for the Afghan government that will allow the United States to claim victory in Afghanistan, Cordesman said.

“It’s not support for us that counts,” he said. “It’s support for them that makes transition to any kind of strategic victory possible.”

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A lot of rhetoric is being thrown about in discussing the Pentagon budget. Reporter R. Jeffrey Smith from the Center for Public Integrity takes a look at what's actually been proposed by President Obama, in his explainer, "Puncturing the hot air balloons on defense spending: A reader's guide to the debate in 2012." The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative reporting group in Washington.

Smith's takeaway summary:

Obama’s national security spending plan does not cut the defense budget. Even if his proposal is enacted, U.S. defense spending will continue to dwarf the rest of the world’s. The new U.S. military strategy was concocted to accommodate the proposed budget trims, not vice versa. Sequestration is a threat, not a promise. And no matter what politicians say or do this year, U.S. defense spending will remain vulnerable to real cuts. The important question in the years ahead is, which military programs will survive and which will go away.

Read the full story here from the Center for Public Integrity.

- Updated at 11:45a.m. ET

President Barack Obama's Democratic allies in the Senate are using a critical year-end spending bill as political leverage to try to force Republicans to negotiate bipartisan legislation to extend payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits due to expire at the end of the year.

An administration official said the president called Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., over the weekend and urged him to hold up the massive $1 trillion-plus spending package until an agreement is reached on the tax cuts and the unemployment benefits.

Republicans controlling the House have instead charted their own course on the payroll tax, rolling it together with a provision to speed permitting of the controversial proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline and other provisions favored by Republicans.

The White House is concerned that if the spending bill were to pass, House GOP leaders could orchestrate House passage of a GOP-tilting version of the payroll tax and jobless benefits legislation that would be unacceptable to Obama and Senate Democrats — but leave them in a political pickle — and then leave Washington. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal administration strategy.

"What Congress can't do is make vague promises, Republicans in Congress make vague promises about a payroll tax cut and then finish its business, the business it has to get done — the spending bill — and then leave town and leave the American middle class holding the bag," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday. "We're just not going to let that happen."

"They're wasting time catering to the tea party folks over there when they should be working with us on a bipartisan package that can pass both Houses," Reid said of the House GOP.

The spending bill had been gaining bipartisan support in a combative Congress. But Reid's White House-backed maneuvering could jeopardize efforts to approve new spending before the current government funding runs out this weekend. That means lawmakers could be faced with the prospect of passing a stopgap measure to keep the federal government operating — or risk a partial government shutdown on Saturday.

Carney said that Congress has already passed a number of stopgap spending bills and passing another one wouldn't be a problem. "This isn't about a shutdown," he said.

But Carney labored to avoid directly saying that Obama and Reid linked the massive year-end spending bill to the payroll tax holiday. Pushed repeatedly on that Washington tactic, Carney ultimately said Obama will "do what he needs to do" to get the tax cut and unemployment insurance extended.

Lawmakers had by Monday reached agreement on most issues on the $1 trillion spending bill, which cuts agency budgets but drops many policy provisions sought by GOP conservatives. It chips away at the Pentagon budget, foreign aid and environmental spending but boosts funding for veterans programs and modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

"I am hopeful that the Senate leaders will come to their senses, allow members to sign this report and move forward. There is no reason to hold this bill," said Republican House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio.

But Democrats said a claim by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky., that a pact had been sealed were incorrect, citing remaining disputes over policy towards Cuba, abortions in Washington, D.C., and Energy Department rules requiring new light bulbs to use 25 to 30 percent less energy beginning in 2012.

The measure generally pleases environmentalists, who succeeded in stopping industry forces from blocking new clean air rules and a new clean water regulation opposed by mountaintop removal mining interests. House Republicans were pressing hard against a White House veto threat over a provision that would roll back administration efforts to ease restrictions on Cuban immigrants on traveling to the island and sending cash back to family members there.

On spending, the measure implements this summer's hard-fought budget pact between the president and Republican leaders. That deal essentially freezes agency budgets, on average, at levels for the recently completed budget year that were approved back in April.

Drafted behind closed doors, the proposed bill would provide $115 billion for overseas security operations in Afghanistan and Iraq but give the Pentagon just a 1 percent boost in annual spending not directly related to the wars. The Environmental Protection Agency's budget would be cut by 3.5 percent. Foreign aid spending would drop and House lawmakers would absorb a 6 percent cut to their office budgets.

The bill also covers money for combating AIDS and famine in Africa, patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border, operating national parks and boosting veterans' health care.

Rogers said bargainers had struck an agreement that he hoped to unveil Tuesday. But other lawmakers insisted a handful of issues remain to be finalized.

A House vote is expected Thursday and the Senate is likely to follow in time to meet a midnight Friday deadline before a stopgap funding measure expires.

Negotiations on the omnibus had largely been smooth and businesslike, a sharp contrast with the ongoing partisan brawl over Obama's demand that Congress extend jobless benefits and a cut in the Social Security payroll tax. The House is slated to vote on a GOP-friendly version of the payroll tax cut Tuesday, and negotiations with the Democratic-controlled Senate on a compromise measure have yet to begin.

Rogers was pushing until the end to block clean water rules opposed by mining companies that blast the tops off mountains, to no avail. Top Appropriations Committee Democrat Norm Dicks of Washington, when asked if the mountaintop mining rider was still a concern, said, "It would be if it were in" the final legislation.

Dicks also predicted failure for several GOP attempts to block the EPA's authority to issue greenhouse gas regulations and new limits on hazardous emissions under the Clean Air Act.

House GOP leaders pressed riders to block the administration's 2009 policy lifting restrictions on travel and money transfers by Cuban-Americans to families remaining in Cuba, and some Democrats backing the administration policy seemed resigned to defeat.

On spending, the measure generally consists of relatively small adjustments to thousands of individual programs. Agencies like the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement would get a boost within the Homeland Security Department, while GOP defense hawks won additional funding to modernize the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. The troubled, over-budget, next-generation F-35 fighter plane program would be largely protected.

Democrats won a modest increase in funding for schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students.