Gates says Afghanistan strategy on right track

KABUL (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Wednesday he was convinced the war in Afghanistan was on the right track as he toured the country to assess Washington's strategy for reversing the Taliban's momentum.

Senior military officers echoed that view when Gates stopped in southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces -- Taliban strongholds -- saying U.S.-led international forces had made progress in the months since an extra 30,000 troops were deployed.

The deployment was ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama a year ago and was completed over the summer, raising the total U.S. force to about 100,000, the largest component of the 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan.

"As I return to Washington, the United States government will be finishing work on an evaluation off the situation here," Gates told a news conference with President Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

"I will go back convinced that our strategy is working and that we will be able to achieve key goals laid out by President Obama last year, further embraced by other NATO heads of state in Lisbon," Gates said.

At a Lisbon summit last month, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) endorsed Karzai's call for security control to be handed over to Afghan forces completely by the end of 2014.

Obama has pledged to begin handing over control to the Afghans next July.

Asked about the awkwardness of meeting Karzai after last week's release by the website WikiLeaks' of U.S. diplomatic cables referring to the Afghan leader as an erratic and unreliable ally, Gates said the leak had been "extraordinarily embarrassing to the United States".

"I would say that America's best partners and friends, and I include among them President Karzai, have responded to this in my view in an extraordinarily statesmanlike way," he said.

SECURITY "BUBBLES"

The Obama administration plans to complete its review of the war strategy some time next week, but officials have said they do not expect it to result in major strategy shifts.

"It will note that there has been progress, that the additional forces have enabled the expansion of the security bubbles in Helmand and Kandahar and around Kabul and then some smaller areas in the east, but that clearly there is a good deal more work that needs to be done," a senior defense official said.

An administration official in Washington, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said a group of officials from across the U.S. government was preparing the classified report of some 40 pages that will assess how Obama's strategy is faring.

Congress will be briefed on the report before the president makes a statement next week.

"This is not about changing strategy; we have the right strategy," the official said. "This is about looking in depth, at whether that strategy is on the right path and moving along at the right pace."

Gates flew to U.S. bases in eastern and southern Afghanistan over the past two days for a first-hand look at progress in the war, which has waning public support after nine years of fighting and no clear end in sight.

"I'm feeling we're on the right track and we've just got to stick to it," Gates told U.S. Marines at Camp Leatherneck not far from the once hotly contested town of Marjah in Helmand.

"The Marines since coming a year ago last summer have really been in the fight and I think have not just...stopped the momentum of the Taliban but in a lot of places have reversed it as well," he said.

General Richard Mills, commander of NATO forces in the southwest region, said foreign and Afghan forces had uprooted Taliban fighters from many areas and were working on economic and infrastructure development and governance. But he acknowledged tough fighting still takes place in some areas.

"Sangin ... is rough," he said, calling the area in Helmand and its poppy-processing facilities a Taliban "treasury".

General David Rodriguez, the deputy commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, said he thought U.S. forces would be in a position to begin slowly reducing troop numbers in the region in 2011 as more and more Afghan forces are trained.

(Additional reporting by Missy Ryan in Washington; Editing by Paul Tait and David Storey)