"Afghanistan Retrograde Nearly One-Quarter Complete" is the headline the Department of Defense put over its article on the U.S. retreat. It sent me scrambling for my Webster's Second Unabridged dictionary, which does list retrograde used as a noun to mean "a downward tendency; decline; as, to be on the retrograde."
Whatever one thinks of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, it is worth noticing the phenomenon of government agencies devising euphemisms for policies that might be less popular if described in plain English.