Military Faces Challenges in Deploying More Troops to Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — The senior allied operational commander in Afghanistan warned Monday that the military faced stiff challenges to deploying 30,000 additional American troops here on the tight schedule that President Obama has ordered.
The officer, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the deputy commander of American and NATO forces here, said that bad weather, limited capacity to send supplies by air and potential attacks on ground convoys carrying equipment for the troops from Pakistan and other neighboring countries presented formidable hurdles to meeting the goal of sending all of the reinforcements by next fall.

Under Mr. Obama’s order early this month to accelerate the troop deployments, the White House initially said the additional forces would be in place within six months. Pentagon officials quickly amended that to say the bulk of the forces would be on the ground by next summer, but it would take a few months after that before all troops were in place.

General Rodriguez did not back away from that timeline, saying that all of the additional troops would be in Afghanistan within 9 t0 11 months. But he spoke in some of the bluntest terms yet about the difficulties in achieving that goal. “There’s lots of risks in here, but we’re going to try to get them in as fast as we can,” he said in an interview at his heavily fortified headquarters. “There’s a lot of things that have to line up perfectly.”

A central tenet of Mr. Obama’s revised strategy for Afghanistan is to knock the Taliban on their heels with a wave of American forces, providing security and buying time for the Afghan Army and the national police to train and take over security duties.

Underscoring General Rodriguez’s concern, bad weather here last week grounded Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for two days, preventing him from flying to visit several military outposts in remote parts of the country.

General Rodriguez spoke to reporters who were traveling with Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who arrived here on Monday to confer with American military commanders and senior Afghan officials, as the first of thousands of reinforcements bound for Taliban-controlled southern Afghanistan arrive later this week.

In a news conference here, Admiral Mullen restated the American goal of working closely with the government of President Hamid Karzai to wrest control of Taliban-controlled territory, particularly in Afghanistan’s south and east.

He acknowledged that the timing of the troop deployment has decreased the time American forces scheduled to deploy here will have to prepare for their assignments, particularly troops that had been initially ordered to go to Iraq and were readying for duty there.

Admiral Mullen, who is scheduled to visit many of the outposts Mr. Gates could not, said American forces at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Fort Campbell, Ky., and other installations sending troops here should “learn all they can” about Afghan culture, language and customs to be more effective in their counterinsurgency mission.

“We must protect the Afghan people,” he said. “We must put their lasting security first. They must know and must feel safe.”

Admiral Mullen also met on Monday with Mr. Karzai, as well as the government’s defense and interior ministers, to discuss the training of Afghan security forces. He said he underscored to the Afghan leaders the importance of quality, not just quantity, in producing competent soldiers and police.

Last week, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American commander in charge of training the Afghan security forces, acknowledged the serious difficulties ahead in the training program under which the United States hopes to increase in size and efficiency the Afghan Army and the police — to as many as 282,000 people from nearly 192,000 — before Mr. Obama’s goal of beginning to withdraw American troops in July 2011.

Admiral Mullen said that during his weeklong swing through Central Asia, he would stop in Pakistan and meet with Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief of staff. It will be Admiral Mullen’s 14th meeting with General Kayani since becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

The United States has praised the Pakistani Army for its recent offensive in the mountainous border area of South Waziristan. But American officials have pressed Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders to take aggressive action against two groups that use Pakistan as a haven from which to attack allied forces in Afghanistan — the Haqqani network and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban, who are believed to operate from the southern city of Quetta.

The Pakistani military has rebuffed the American pressure to go after the Haqqani network, whose fighters pose the biggest threat to American forces, Pakistani military officials said.