"I don't think there's any discussion about this affecting transition," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Frankly our position is this was a careless act, but we've already apologized for it and we want to move on."

Whether the planned transition in Afghanistan is affected or not, the apologies over the Koran incident and the NATO strikes pose some political peril for Obama at home in an election year. Republican presidential candidates have been regularly accusing Obama of appeasement and, as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has put it, "apologizing for America."

On Thursday, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who has grown increasingly immoderate in his statements as he has faded in the polls, called the U.S. apology to Afghan authorities over the burned Korans "astonishing'' and undeserved. Other Republicans have not joined in the criticism as yet. Neither Mitt Romney nor Rick Santorum's campaigns responded to requests from National Journal for comment on the killings of the officers on Saturday -- underscoring not only the distance those campaigns have put between their operations and Gingrich's but their reluctance to wade into the snarled issue of U.S.-NATO operations in Afghanistan.

As one senior congressional GOP adviser told National Journal Saturday: "The military made a mistake, even if there were radical sayings written in the Korans, we should have sought the help of a local cleric on how to dispose of them. It was a stupid mistake by our military that undercut the very essence of our strategy. When similarly unfortunate events occurred, President Bush apologized as well. There are a thousand things to criticize about the president's handling of two wars. But this ain't one of them."

Whether Obama can escape similar criticism over the apology to Pakistan that his administration is quietly preparing remains to be seen.

The latter apology, linked to an official Pentagon investigation that partially blamed mistakes made by U.S. forces for the NATO incident, was put off indefinitely after the Koran incident, but U.S. officials say they still plan to deliver it in coming weeks.

The administration initially had refused to apologize for the NATO strikes. The White House, Pentagon and State Department rebuffed the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, early on when he pressed for an immediate apology following the Nov. 27 incident. But prodded by the new Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Sherry Rehman, the State Department resurrected the idea in recent weeks, and this time the White House and Pentagon signed off on it.

As one Defense Dept official put it this week, the administration realized that something had to be done to "try move past the rough patch" with Pakistan. Last month, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, sent a top-secret cable to Washington concluding that Taliban havens in Pakistan were jeopardizing the success of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.