White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that "important progress" has been made in Afghanistan, and a formal review of the situation indicates that the U.S. troop withdrawal President Obama vowed last December would begin in July 2011 will be able to take place as scheduled. The review will be published Thursday after the President speaks about it. Gibbs did not specify how many of the approximately 100,000 U.S. troops now in Afghanistan might be part of that withdrawal. The administration made clear last month that the review is diagnostic and examines only what is going right and what is going wrong. No policy changes are expected. Gibbs said Obama "feels confident that we are on track."
Meanwhile, two new National Intelligence Estimates reports, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan, "paint a bleak picture of the security conditions in Afghanistan and say the war cannot be won unless Pakistan roots out militants on its side of the border, according to several U.S. officials who have been briefed on the findings." The reports were shared in detailed briefings of the Senate Intelligence Committee and some aspects shared with members of the House Intelligence Committee last week.
Two key areas of concern, according to unnamed sources familiar with the estimates, are failure to build infrastructure in a timely fashion and a lag in training the Afghan security forces that are slated to take over in 2014. Training police and Afghan National Army recruits has been a problem for years, and plagued by large rate of desertions and defections. Sometimes, the defectors have turned their weapons on U.S. personnel or Afghans allied with the United States. Last September, the Pentagon estimated the desertion/defection rate for the ANA at more than 30 percent.
A military official familiar with the reports said the gloomier prognosis in the Afghanistan report became a source of friction as a preliminary version was passed among government agencies.
Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged the contrast between the Afghan estimate and Petraeus' reports.
"It's a very disciplined, structured process, so it's got a cutoff date that's substantially earlier in the game than, say, the military review," Cartwright said in a recent interview.
Six American soldiers based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, were killed and 11 wounded Sunday in a suicide attack on an outpost of the 101st Airborne Division in Kandahar province. Nearly 500 American military personnel have died in Afghanistan in 2010, by far the largest fatality rate since the war began in 2001. Last month, a member of the Afghan Border Police shot and killed six other soldiers from Fort Campbell during a training exercise in Nangahar province.