Levin: hold off on Afghan troop decision

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Obama should wait until the Afghan election process is concluded before deciding whether to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, the leading Senate Democrat on military matters said on Monday.

Senator Carl Levin also said he believed the United States could demonstrate its resolve in Afghanistan without sending significantly more combat troops, and indicated many of his fellow Democrats in Congress agreed with him.

"I think it would be far better that that outcome be resolved, before the president makes a decision," Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said of the Afghan elections at the Reuters Washington summit.

"It's important to a counter-insurgency strategy, which I believe is the likely strategy that is going to be followed here, that this be resolved in a credible way," Levin said.

A U.N.-backed fraud watchdog has invalidated tens of thousands of votes for Afghan President Hamid Karzai from August's first round, giving him less than the 50 percent needed to avoid a run-off, international election observers said on Monday.

Karzai plans to announce on Tuesday how he intends to proceed. The process has complicated U.S. President Barack Obama's deliberations on whether to send thousands of additional troops to turn the tide in the eight-year war against a resurgent Taliban.

Levin last month called for more efforts to bolster Afghan security forces before considering whether to send more U.S. combat troops to Afghanistan.

On Monday he said the United States and other NATO countries could show resolve in Afghanistan by working together to strengthen the Afghan army much faster, and "not put so much focus on the additional combat forces."

Levin suggested that Obama might want to follow the model set recently by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who last week said that Britain was ready to raise troop numbers in Afghanistan by 500 to 9,500, providing certain conditions are met. These included Kabul agreeing to provide Afghan troops to be trained and fight alongside British forces.

"If President Obama stood next to three or four leaders of other NATO countries and announced this is a plan for Afghanistan ... and laid out a whole lot of things the way Brown did, and included in that was a small number of combat forces ... I think you would probably get support for it among even many Democrats in Congress," Levin said.

Casualties are rising among the 68,000 U.S. troops already in Afghanistan and Americans are tiring of war. U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal has recommended sending 40,000 additional troops.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell, editing by Anthony Boadle)