Obama Cites Afghan Gains as Report Says Exit Is on Track

President Obama, speaking at a news conference on Thursday to discuss a review
of his strategy for the war in Afghanistan, said “We are making
considerable gains toward our military objectives.”

Administration officials said the increased attacks across the Afghan border would help offset the Pakistani government’s continued refusal to move against the Qaeda leadership and their extremist allies, especially the Haqqani network. From havens in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region, those groups have carried out deadly assaults against American troops and have plotted attacks against the West, officials say.

In announcing on Thursday that the 97,000 American troops now in Afghanistan have made some fragile gains in the past year, President Obama said Pakistan was “increasingly coming to realize that the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders who have been given safe havens pose a threat to Pakistan as well as the United States.”

“Nevertheless,” Mr. Obama added, “progress has not come fast enough.” The United States, he said, “will continue to insist to Pakistani leaders that terrorist safe havens within their borders must be dealt with.”

Administration officials said they expected the Pakistani military to finally enter North Waziristan in 2011, based on private assurances from the Pakistani government.

But the real strategy appears to be for the United States to do most of the work itself — at least until the Pakistanis step up. That means even more strikes using Predator and Reaper drones in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and possibly carrying out Special Forces operations along the border.

“There are a lot of, as we say in our building, kinetic actions taking place along that border,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said during a news conference at the White House.

Mr. Gates went to some lengths to praise Pakistan, saying that along parts of the border he was happy to see “the Pakistanis come in behind the insurgents from the Pakistani side and, coordinating with us and the Afghans, we’re on the other side.” He described the insurgents caught in between as “the meat in the sandwich.”

The review was carefully worded and pulled its punches in describing the differences between Washington and its Pakistani and Afghan government allies.

Announced in a series of briefings by the president and his top foreign policy aides, the report is the first full-scale review of the administration’s strategy.

The summary said the United States continued to kill leaders of Al Qaeda and diminish its capacity to carry out terrorist attacks from the region. It cited some signs that the United States and its allies had halted or reversed inroads by the Taliban in Afghanistan and strengthened the ability of Afghan forces to secure their country. But it acknowledged that the gains were fragile and could be easily undone unless more progress was made in hunting down insurgents operating from havens in neighboring Pakistan.

The summary points to a handful of areas where the influx of American troops has had an impact. For instance, night raids by Special Forces operatives and increased security measures in villages, the report said, have reduced overall Taliban influences in the movement’s heartland of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces.

In addition, the Afghan Army has exceeded growth targets set by NATO and American military officials, and the training of the Afghan forces who will be expected to take over the lead from American and NATO troops has improved, the summary said.

Once the report was portrayed as critical to decisions about the course of the conflict and the pace of withdrawal.

But in recent weeks the White House has been playing down the importance of the report, as it has balanced pressure from the military for time to allow the troop buildup to work, and from Democrats who want to wind down the nine-year conflict. Some of those debates have taken place inside the administration itself.

Those internal arguments may flare again next summer, when the White House has to decide precisely how many troops to pull out. Already some crucial players from the earlier debate are no longer on the scene: Rahm Emanuel, who was the White House chief of staff, and Gen. James L. Jones, Mr. Obama’s first national security adviser, have resigned, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, died suddenly this week. Of the three, Mr. Emanuel was the most forceful advocate for deploying the fewest number of troops.

The escalation in Pakistan will largely involve increased drone strikes. The military has also embedded small numbers of Special Operations troops with Pakistani military units carrying out operations in the tribal areas. The Pentagon has rarely blessed cross- border raids from Afghanistan, fearing a sharp backlash for American troops if villagers were killed on Pakistani soil.

The last time the United States tried a cross-border operation — in September — a furious Pakistani government responded by shutting down a critical supply route into Afghanistan, leaving the road open, literally, for insurgents to blow up dozens of trucks, lined up like sitting ducks, which were meant to provide supplies to American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The United States apologized for the helicopter strike that killed three Pakistani border soldiers and ignited the episode, and eventually Pakistan reopened the border crossing.

The drone strikes in Pakistan have already risen significantly over the past year. The Central Intelligence Agency carried out roughly 53 Predator attacks in 2009, which was more than President George W. Bush authorized during his entire presidency. The figure has more than doubled this year, though presidential aides will not publicly discuss the program because it is technically secret.

At the Pentagon, Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday that the United States would send conventional ground troops into Pakistan on their own only as a last resort. “The question of going further to unilateral action, that would be an absolute last measure,” he told reporters on Thursday. “Because it has so many other impacts on the relationship that you’d really hate to end up in that position.”

The July 2011 date to begin withdrawing troops is at the heart of the political quandary Mr. Obama faces. In announcing his troop increase for Afghanistan a year ago, he insisted that the buildup would be limited to 18 months, and then withdrawals would begin — an effort to quiet his restive base of supporters and put pressure on Afghanistan to speed the training of its own troops.

But that training is time-consuming, and while Congressional Republicans have backed Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan strategy so far, he is facing opposition from members of his own party, who will undoubtedly increase the pressure on him next year to withdraw troops quickly.

The president’s new strategy review “seems as finely parsed as last year’s effort,” said Representative Jane Harmon, a California Democrat. “But this time, our ground game is a lot less convincing.” She added that “we need a clear public timetable to end our military mission in Afghanistan responsibly, and soon.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just finished a two-day visit to Pakistan, where he met with Pakistan’s powerful military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

“The review rightfully focused on the criticality of Pakistan in terms of overall success,” Admiral Mullen said. He said that it was crucial for the administration to maintain a “long-term commitment” to Pakistan, which other administration officials said they hoped would help the Pakistani government to begin to view American interests as in alignment with their own.