During his confirmation hearing last week for his new post at the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency, Petraeus said coalition forces had already shifted out of some parts of the country—including the areas in and around Kabul—and handed security responsibility off to the Afghans. He said coalition forces planned to move to parts of the former Taliban stronghold of Helmand province this fall, with further redeployments set for next spring and next fall. "We're not just going to come out and hand off," he said. "We'll thin out and indeed hand off to Afghan forces." [...] Many of those troops will come from southern Afghanistan, long the focus of the overall war effort. There are currently just over 31,000 troops in eastern Afghanistan, compared with 38,000 in the south. Under some redeployment plans, the officials said, the number of troops in the two regions would gradually equalize. [...] In a little-noticed briefing last week, the top American commander in Helmand offered a detailed roadmap of what those redeployments would look like. Maj. Gen. John Toolan, the senior U.S. commander in the province, said he was preparing to take troops out of areas that appear to be firmly under Afghan or coalition control—like the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah—and redeploy them to northern Helmand and other regions that continue to see regular insurgent violence.