WASHINGTON — The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, scheduled to begin in July 2011, will “probably” take two or three years, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday, although he added that “there are no deadlines in terms of when our troops will all be out.”
The Pentagon, meanwhile, quietly acknowledged slippage on the front end of the 30,000-troop deployment that President Barack Obama authorized for the first half of 2010.
“They are not all going to be there in six months,” a senior military official said. The current thinking, the official said, is that the Pentagon will be able to push about 20,000 to 25,000 troops into the country by late summer, but that the final brigade — about 5,000 troops — will probably not arrive until early fall.
The details fleshed out the revamped strategy Obama outlined Tuesday night as Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before Congress on the plan for a second day.
Meanwhile, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani sparred with reporters in London who asked him to respond to British and U.S. charges that Pakistan has been lax in locating al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in sanctuaries along its border with Afghanistan.
“I doubt the information which you are giving is correct,” Gillani said, “because I don’t think Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan.”
Clinton left Washington immediately after Thursday’s hearing for Brussels, where she was to brief NATO allies on the strategy and solicit more allied aid. In the first of what the administration hopes will be a series of announcements, Italy said it will send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Upon her arrival in Brussels, Clinton’s aides said she had recorded two video messages directed at the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan to “echo the themes and messages” from Obama’s speech on his Afghan war plan. The Clinton videos are available online at in Arabic, Dari, English, Pashto and Urdu.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
