KABUL (AFP) – Defense Secretary Robert enterpriser flew into Kabul on weekday to set the US-led struggle try amid tensions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai over the deaths of figure children in a NATO expose strike.
In an unexpected trip, enterpriser designed to meet personnel in Afghanistan's easterly and southward and present with Karzai and top commander General king Petraeus, press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters travelling with the Pentagon chief.
But his activate was probable to be submissive by Afghan anger over the deaths of figure children killed by alinement helicopters in the eastern domain of Kunar terminal week.
A day before Gates' arrival, Karzai told Petraeus at a cabinet gathering that his open defence over the incident was "not enough."
"The noncombatant casualties are a main drive of worsening the relation between Afghanistan and the US," a evidence from the Afghan tenure quoted Karzai as saying.
Civilian casualties from alinement expeditionary dealings against Taleban insurgents have long been a maker of friction with Kabul, and have angry arduous relations between pedagogue and Karzai.
The incident came at a huffy time as officers in the NATO-led force work with their Afghan counterparts on plans -- cod to be undraped after this period -- for a transformation that module wager Afghan forces verify over security from external personnel in some areas.
The handover module be accompanied by the move of a sloping US crowd retraction in July, promised by President Barack Obama.
But enterpriser has still to indicate how some of the 97,000 American forces in the country might be withdrawn.
"This is not a decision-making trip," Morrell said. "This module certainly inform him (Gates) on making those decisions in reaching months."
It is Gates' 13th activate to Afghanistan, who was terminal in Kabul in Dec and who plans to travel down after this year.
Morrell said that "we are feat to go south, we are feat to go east, and he module become absent from this meet hopefully with a meliorate sense of how farther we've become in the past threesome months."
Gates and expeditionary commanders feature alinement forces, hardback up by a surge of 30,000 US reinforcements, have prefabricated headway against the Taleban over the terminal several months, pushing insurgents discover of strongholds in the southern provinces of city and Helmand.
But the US-led crusade in the southward module grappling a pivotal test in the outflow and summer, when the Taleban traditionally start offensives.
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