Washington, November 20: US Defense Secretary Robert Gates says it was too soon to set a timeline for shifting security duties from NATO-led troops to Afghan forces, as proposed by Britain.
Gates told a Thursday news conference in Washington it will be counter-productive to transfer the responsibility before Afghans are ready.
“I think I would rather have those on the ground in Afghanistan make the judgment call about when a province or a district was ready to be turned over, rather than [setting] specific dates.”
The defense secretary, however, stressed that a handover can occur in some Afghan provinces and districts relatively soon.
He added that Washington and its allies want to see Kabul take the lead for security as soon as possible.
British Premier Gordon Brown and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said earlier the alliance should begin handing over security duties next year.
However, Gates ruled out any early handover or withdrawal from the war-ravaged country.
“I think it’s too early to say” Gates said.
This is while US President Barack Obama claimed in an interview on Wednesday that he would bring the Afghan war to an end before he leaves office.
Obama also emphasized that “a multi-year occupation won’t serve the interests of the United States.”
The developments come as differences in stance emerge among the US officials on the handling of the controversial war in Afghanistan.
General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has been warning that the war could be lost unless 40,000 more troops are deployed in the country.
Meanwhile, the US ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, recently expressed serious reservations about a troop surge, saying that Afghan President Hamid Karzai should root out the country’s corruption problem first.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told ABC News on Sunday that the US mission was to eradicate Al-Qaeda militants and not to establish a modern democracy in Afghanistan.
“This is not the prior days when people would come on your show and talk about how we were going to help the Afghans build a modern democracy and build a more functioning state and do all these wonderful things,” she asserted.
Obama and his Afghan war council have been given a series of options with differing numbers of new US deployments, ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 troops.
However, none of the options have called for the scaling back of the US presence in Afghanistan.
Although more than 110,000 foreign troops are currently in Afghanistan, there has been little sign of stability in the war-torn country.
This year has proved to be the deadliest one so far for the US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan. Over 470 NATO troops have died in the violence-wracked country this year.
Thousands of civilians have also lost their lives in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led invasion.
Public approval of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan has dramatically dropped over some past few months.
—–Agencies