Amid growing clamour against the war in Afghanistan, defence secretary Robert Gates has cautioned that large numbers of US troops will remain even after a “limited” July 2011 drawdown.
Despite mounting casualties and public doubts, Gates said on Sunday the US-led force was making headway and Taliban insurgents would not be able to wait out US forces because a major troop withdrawal was not on the horizon.
“I think we need to reemphasise the message that we are not leaving Afghanistan in July of 2011,” said Gates, referring to a deadline set by President Barack Obama for the start of a withdrawal.
“My personal opinion is that drawdowns early on will be of fairly limited numbers,” he told ABC’s “This Week.”
Asked if the Taliban could simply “run out the clock” until the mid-2011 target, Mr Gates said that he would “welcome that, because we will be there in the 19th month, and we will be there with a lot of troops.”
The war has become increasingly unpopular with the American public and among Democratic lawmakers, amid a rising US death toll and a lack of confidence in Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The US also faces questions about whether it can win back Afghans from a resurgent Taliban without remaking Afghanistan in the sort of nation-building exercise it has pledged not to undertake.
Defending the US war effort, Mr Obama told CBS's “Early Show” that Washington's goals were “fairly modest” and that the US States had no plans to turn Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy.
“What we’re looking to do is difficult, very difficult, but it's a fairly modest goal, which is, don't allow terrorists to operate from this region,” he said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.
“That can be accomplished,” he added. “We can stabilise Afghanistan sufficiently and we can get enough cooperation from Pakistan that we are not magnifying the threat against the homeland.”
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks ousted from power the Taliban regime and scattered Osama Bin Laden and members of his Al Qaeda network.
But in almost nine years since, a Taliban insurgency has become increasingly emboldened despite the presence now of almost 150,000 NATO and US troops.
Complicating the situation is a lack of faith in Karzai, who returned to power after elections generally regarded as fraudulent, and faces accusations of corruption and even ties to the drug trade.
The international coalition is also seeing signs of wear — and shrinkage. Dutch troops ended their mission in Afghanistan on Sunday in the first significant drawdown of troops from the Afghan war.