NewYorkTimes
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates signaled on Thursday that he was open to an increase in American troops in Afghanistan and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there was now a “sense of urgency” about the eight-year-old war and that “time is not on our side.”
In a joint news conference with Admiral Mullen at the Pentagon, Mr. Gates said his previous concerns about the American “footprint” becoming too big in Afghanistan had been “mitigated” by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, President Obama’s hand-picked commander who took over American and NATO forces in the country in June.
Mr. Gates said that although he had long been worried that a large number of American forces would alienate the Afghan population, as happened when the Russians had 120,000 troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s, he was taking seriously the views of General McChrystal, who has indicated that the size of the force is less important than what it does.
“Where foreign forces have had a large footprint and failed in no small part has been because the Afghans concluded they were there for their own imperial interests and not there for the interests of the Afghan people,” Mr. Gates said. But he said that Mr. McChrystal’s efforts since June to reduce civilian casualties and interact more with Afghans “has given us a greater margin of error in that respect.”
The change of view on the part of Mr. Gates is important because he is expected to be an influential adviser to Mr. Obama as the president weighs in the next weeks whether to add more American troops to Afghanistan. In the past, Mr. Gates has expressed some skepticism about a buildup.
The defense secretary made his remarks two days after General McChrystal submitted a report to his superiors at the Pentagon on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Mr. Gates said he has since forwarded the report, which has not been made public, to Mr. Obama, and that he and Admiral Mullen would be offering their views to the president next week. General McChrystal is expected to ask for additional forces within the month.
Military strategists close to the Pentagon say that General McChrystal might offer three options for troop increases, with what he sees as associated risks for the American effort in Afghanistan. A high-risk option, the strategists said, might be 10,000 to 15,000 additional troops. A medium-risk option could be 25,000 troops and a low-risk option might be 45,000 troops.
Defense analysts said it was possible that Mr. Gates might recommend to the president what Pentagon officials call the “Goldilocks option,” the medium-risk one in the middle.
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, cautioned that talk about troop levels was speculation. “Anyone who tells you that they know how many troops the commander is going to ask for and the options he may or may not present doesn’t know what he’s talking about because that has not been determined yet,” Mr. Morrell said. He said that Mr. Gates had not made up his mind about any level of troop increase he would recommend to the president.
A wily former C.I.A. director who has worked for eight presidents of both parties, Mr. Gates will also take cues on troop increases from Mr. Obama, whose schedule and public speeches have been dominated this summer by the health care debate.
At the news conference, Mr. Gates said he understood why public support for the war in Afghanistan was slipping, but counseled patience. “The fact that Americans would be tired of having of their sons and daughters at risk and in battle is not surprising,” Mr. Gates said.
He asked that Americans give the strategy time to work. “Our new commander appeared on the scene in June,” he said, adding that not all of the 21,000 additional American troops Mr. Obama approved for Afghanistan in March are in place yet.
When they are, sometime this fall, the United States will have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan.
Mr. Gates, a Republican who served as defense secretary in 2007 and 2008 for President George W. Bush, also said he was not of the same view as the syndicated columnist George F. Will, who wrote in a column published Tuesday that the United States should significantly reduce its presence in Afghanistan.
“I have a lot of respect for Mr. Will, but in this case I do disagree with him,” Mr. Gates said. “I absolutely do not think it is time to get out of Afghanistan.”
Asked if the administration needed to do more to clarify for the American public the reason for the war, Mr. Gates said he thought that the president had been “crystal clear” in a recent speech about Afghanistan to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Mr. Gates also said that “I don’t believe that the war is slipping through the administration’s fingers.”
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