Gates Wants Afghan Withdrawal to Leave Combat Troops

“I would try and maximize my combat capability as long as this process goes on — I think that’s a no-brainer,” he said. “I’d opt to keep the shooters, and take the support out first.”

Mr. Gates also said he anticipated that the administration would conduct a review of force levels in Afghanistan that went far beyond simply announcing the number of troops returning home starting in July, as pledged by President Obama.

The administration was likely to create what Mr. Gates called “bookends,” an initial number to be withdrawn beginning in July and a date by which all of the 30,000 reinforcements sent last year would have departed Afghanistan.

His comments came during a farewell tour across south and southwestern Afghanistan, home to most of the 30,000 additional troops sent by Mr. Obama to push back a tenacious insurgency.

At each stop, the troops asked Mr. Gates about future force levels. He noted that many of the logistical, engineering and construction units sent to build housing and lay runways to support the surge now could be sent home while leaving the combat force undiminished.

He said that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Afghanistan, had not yet given the president formal options for withdrawing the 30,000 surge troops. A separate timetable would manage the departure of all foreign troops, including the rest of the American combat force beside the surge units, about 70,000 troops, by the end of 2014 as agreed by NATO and the Afghan government.

The decisions on forces in Afghanistan could mirror how Mr. Obama managed the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. While a status of forces agreement between Washington and Baghdad requires American combat forces to leave by the end of this year, Mr. Obama unilaterally set an earlier date by which the military first reduced its presence to 50,000.

Senior Pentagon officials noted that after Mr. Obama set a firm deadline for dropping to 50,000 troops in Iraq, he then let his commanders in Baghdad manage the specifics of which units to order home and when, so long as they met the president’s ultimate timeline.

A similar system may be decided by the administration to manage the withdrawal of the surge units from Afghanistan, officials said, with General Petraeus, and his nominated successor, Lt. Gen. John R. Allen, given the leeway to decide how to draw down forces to meet the president’s deadline.

Mr. Gates advocated sustaining the combat force to continue pressing the insurgency to give up the fight and negotiate reconciliation with the government in Kabul. With continued success on the battlefield, Mr. Gates said, such talks could begin in earnest by late this year.

Mr. Gates also said the reduction of American troops should be carefully calibrated so as not to give allied nations “reason to rush to the exits.”

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Gates Wants Afghan Withdrawal to Leave Combat Troops

 

“I would try and maximize my combat capability as long as this process goes on — I think that’s a no-brainer,” he said. “I’d opt to keep the shooters, and take the support out first.”

Mr. Gates also said he anticipated that the administration would conduct a review of force levels in Afghanistan that went far beyond simply announcing the number of troops returning home starting in July, as pledged by President Obama.

The administration was likely to create what Mr. Gates called “bookends,” an initial number to be withdrawn beginning in July and a date by which all of the 30,000 reinforcements sent last year would have departed Afghanistan.

His comments came during a farewell tour across south and southwestern Afghanistan, home to most of the 30,000 additional troops sent by Mr. Obama to push back a tenacious insurgency.

At each stop, the troops asked Mr. Gates about future force levels. He noted that many of the logistical, engineering and construction units sent to build housing and lay runways to support the surge now could be sent home while leaving the combat force undiminished.

He said that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Afghanistan, had not yet given the president formal options for withdrawing the 30,000 surge troops. A separate timetable would manage the departure of all foreign troops, including the rest of the American combat force beside the surge units, about 70,000 troops, by the end of 2014 as agreed by NATO and the Afghan government.

The decisions on forces in Afghanistan could mirror how Mr. Obama managed the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. While a status of forces agreement between Washington and Baghdad requires American combat forces to leave by the end of this year, Mr. Obama unilaterally set an earlier date by which the military first reduced its presence to 50,000.

Senior Pentagon officials noted that after Mr. Obama set a firm deadline for dropping to 50,000 troops in Iraq, he then let his commanders in Baghdad manage the specifics of which units to order home and when, so long as they met the president’s ultimate timeline.

A similar system may be decided by the administration to manage the withdrawal of the surge units from Afghanistan, officials said, with General Petraeus, and his nominated successor, Lt. Gen. John R. Allen, given the leeway to decide how to draw down forces to meet the president’s deadline.

Mr. Gates advocated sustaining the combat force to continue pressing the insurgency to give up the fight and negotiate reconciliation with the government in Kabul. With continued success on the battlefield, Mr. Gates said, such talks could begin in earnest by late this year.

Mr. Gates also said the reduction of American troops should be carefully calibrated so as not to give allied nations “reason to rush to the exits.”

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With Withdrawal Looming, Trails Grow Cold for Americans Missing in Iraq

But the lives of the eight men — seven private contractors and the only American service member who remains unaccounted — are a painful fragment of the war’s legacy, a haunting piece of unfinished business that the military will leave behind when it withdraws by the end of the year.

“He called and said, ‘I’m catching a plane tomorrow and I’ll be home,’?” said Jim Ake, whose son Jeffrey, a businessman from Indiana, vanished in 2005. “It didn’t happen. That was the last we heard from him.”

Like scores of other tasks — running convoys, flying helicopters and tracking incoming mortar fire — the military will soon leave the job of determining the fates of the missing largely to civilians. The military is still finalizing its plans, but the cases of the seven contractors are expected to be handed over to the American Embassy, with the missing soldier’s case going to the United States Central Command.

“It’s not like anybody’s saying, ‘O.K., we’re done, let’s forget these guys,’?” said Col. Michael Infanti, who supervised a unit that searches for the missing. “It ain’t happening.”

Even so, hope has drifted into a nagging uncertainty about the men’s fates, leaving families afraid that they will never find answers. Relatives who once received daily updates from F.B.I. agents and diplomats now go months without hearing from investigators. When they do, there are few breakthroughs. Years have passed without fresh leads, videos or phone calls from their kidnappers.

“We don’t know if he’s dead or alive,” said Kazwan Elias, whose brother, Aban, an Iraqi-American engineer from Denver, was kidnapped seven years ago. “We don’t know if they beheaded him or he’s in a jail somewhere. We just don’t know.”

The military has declared other kidnapping victims dead, even without recovering their bodies, and some family members have bowed to what seems like that inevitable conclusion. Others, though, hang their hopes on the transom between an administrative classification of “missing” and “deceased.”

In a fifth-floor Baghdad apartment overlooking the American Embassy and the heavily secured Green Zone, Sabriya Mahdi Naama clutches the belief that her husband, Abbas Kareem Naama, who was known as Tim, is alive after more than five years missing.

“I still believe he’s somewhere,” Ms. Naama said. “I am sure.”

Mr. Naama was a colonel in Saddam Hussein’s army who fled Iraq with his family in 1991, settling in San Diego. They became naturalized American citizens and supported Mr. Hussein’s ouster.

Mr. Naama met with Pentagon officials before the war, his family said, and his grown daughter wrote op-ed articles calling for the liberation of Iraq’s people.

In 2003, he returned to Iraq on the heels of the American Army. After a brief stint with the Coalition Provisional Authority, Mr. Naama, who was also a pharmacist, went to work with the health office of Iraq’s Defense Ministry, his family said.

He was taken one morning in 2005 as he left home to buy a newspaper. He was 58.

Three months later, the family received a phone call demanding $150,000 in ransom. They did not know who the callers were — Al Qaeda? The Shiite militias from the slums of Sadr City? — or if they were even the real kidnappers. But the family decided to pay them anyway, dropping off the money near an old soda factory.

Numerically speaking, the missing Americans — Jeffrey Ake, Aban Elias, Abbas Kareem Naama, Neenus Khoshaba, Bob Hamze, Dean Sadek, Hussain al-Zurufi and Staff Sgt. Ahmed Altaie — are little more than a footnote in Iraq. Their number pales in comparison to the thousands of Iraqis who disappeared during the bloodletting following the United States invasion. More than 10,000 Iraqis were kidnapped by criminal gangs, Sunni extremist groups and Shiite militias during the bloodiest years of sectarian fighting.

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