Gates Says U.S. Is in Position to Start Afghan Pullout

NYtimes

March 7, 2011

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

KABUL, Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday that the United States was “well positioned” to begin withdrawing some American troops from Afghanistan in July, but he said that a substantial force would remain and that the United States was starting talks with the Afghans about keeping a security presence in the country beyond 2014.
At a joint news conference in the Afghan capital with President Hamid Karzai, Mr. Gates said that no decisions had been made about the number of troops to go home. His remarks were tempered with enough caveats, however, to suggest that the July drawdown promised by President Obama could be minor.
“As I have said time and again, we are not leaving Afghanistan this summer,” Mr. Gates said.
Currently about 100,000 American troops are in the country.
Mr. Gates also used the news conference to offer an extended apology to Mr. Karzai for the killings by mistake last week of nine Afghan boys. Mr. Karzai accepted the apology.
On Sunday, Mr. Karzai had rejected an apology for the killings from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan.
“This breaks our heart,” Mr. Gates said as he stood beside Mr. Karzai in the Afghan presidential palace. “Not only is their loss a tragedy for their families, it is a setback for our relationship with the Afghan people.”
One boy who was wounded but survived described a helicopter gunship that hunted down the children as they gathered wood outside their village. The gunners apparently mistook the children for insurgents who hours earlier had fired on an American base. The boys were 9 to 15 years old.
Mr. Karzai, after responding that civilian casualties were at the heart of tensions between the United States and Afghanistan, said of Mr. Gates that “I trust him fully when he says he’s sorry.”
Mr. Gates, who was on an unannounced two-day trip to Afghanistan, spoke more positively than he had in recent months about what he cited as progress in the nearly decade-old war.
“The gains we are seeing across the country are significant,” he said, citing improvements in security in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces in the south, as well as some progress on Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan.
Mr. Gates made similar remarks to American troops at Bagram Air Base earlier in the day, when he told them that “you’re having success, there’s just no question about it.”
He added, “I know you’ve had a tough winter, it’s going to be a tougher spring and summer, but you’ve made a lot of headway, and I think you’ve proven with your Afghan partners that this thing is going to work.”
Despite the optimism in Mr. Gates’s remarks, American commanders in the east and north have seen continued violence in 2011 and two of the most lethal suicide bomb attacks in nearly two years occurred in the last four weeks. One in the eastern city of Jalalabad killed 40 people and another in Kunduz Province in the north killed 32.
On Monday, a bomb blast in Jalalabad killed two more people and injured 19.
Although fewer American troops are dying this year than last, commanders say it is hard to tell whether that is because of a weakening in the Taliban offensive or the traditional winter hiatus in fighting. But if Afghan troops prove able to keep the violence under control, that could signal a growing ability to protect difficult patches on their own.
Training Afghan troops well enough to defend their own country is the long-term goal of the United States and Mr. Obama’s strategy for ending the war.
Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the top American commander in eastern Afghanistan, told reporters traveling with Mr. Gates that violence in his region on the border with Pakistan was up from a year ago and that it had also increased in the last 30 days.
“I think the enemy is trying to get an early start on what they call their spring campaign,” General Campbell said.
In recent weeks American forces have withdrawn from remote parts of the Pech Valley, which is part of General Campbell’s command, to concentrate more forces in the border area.
General Campbell refused to call the thinning of forces in the valley, once deemed vital to American interests, a retreat, although the fighting there had dragged on for years with no clear result. “When somebody says you’ve abandoned the Pech, that’s absolutely false,” he said.
Despite the rise in violence in the east, the general said the attacks by insurgents were less effective than a year ago. His office produced statistics stating that American and coalition forces had killed 2,448 insurgents in his region between June 2010 and February 2011 and had captured 2,870 in the same time period.
As for an American military presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014, Mr. Gates said an American team would be in Kabul next week to begin negotiations on what he called a security partnership, which he predicted would require a “small fraction” of the American forces in Afghanistan today.