Gates visits crucial Afghan battleground

SANGIN: US Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the key battleground of southern Afghanistan Tuesday to meet troops ahead of the planned start of foreign force withdrawals from July.

Flying into the country on Monday, Gates said that US and coalition forces are "well-positioned" to begin a gradual drawdown in four months' time but he has not given a number for how many US personnel could leave then.

On Tuesday he saw the situation on the ground, visiting the US military base at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province before heading to the troubled district of Sangin, where US Marines have suffered high casualties over the last five months.

Gates said the district had been the most dangerous place in Afghanistan and "maybe the whole world" before US Marines arrived. He said they had now "killed, captured or driven away most of the Taliban that called this place home."

A total of 24 marines have been killed and 150 wounded in Sangin since October, the highest casualty toll for any unit in Afghanistan. British forces who were previously in Sangin suffered some 100 deaths there in four years, about a third of their total across Afghanistan at that stage.

As he hailed the progress made by US troops during a speech in Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned this year was critical for forces fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. "This is extremely important and critical," he said. "This is a year in which we will face crises and difficulties... the success that we hope for depends on our unity and statesmanship."

The US-led fighting coalition views the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Around 20,000 marines have been deployed in Helmand alone as part of a wider surge announced by President Barack Obama in December 2009.

The president is due to give details on March 21 of which areas of Afghanistan will be the first to transition ahead of the expected completion of the process by 2014, which should allow all foreign combat troops to withdraw.

He offered a teaser on his plans, saying "five to six places" would be handed over to Afghan forces in the first stage, but did not specify whether these were towns, districts or provinces.

Afghan officials were not immediately reachable for clarification. Gates has said that a US team is due to arrive in Afghanistan next week to begin negotiating a "security partnership" between the United States and Afghanistan beyond 2014.

Any American presence at that stage would be a "small fraction" of the current 97,000 US troops from a 140,000-strong international force now deployed, he added.

There have been calls from some Afghan and US politicians for permanent US bases to be established in Afghanistan and Karzai has said talks are taking place on the issue.

But Gates told a press conference with Karzai Monday that the US had "no interest" in permanent bases in Afghanistan. He added it was "open to the possibility of having some presence here in terms of training and assistance, perhaps making use of facilities made available to us by the Afghan government for those purposes".

Gates visited southern Afghanistan the day after personally apologising to Karzai over a NATO air strike last week that accidentally killed nine young Afghan boys who were collecting firewood.

Karzai, who had already angrily rejected a public apology from General David Petraeus, the US commander of international troops in Afghanistan, told Gates he respected his words but such incidents had to stop.