Gates upbeat about Afghan pullout

Mr Gates’s visit has been overshadowed by last week’s civilian deaths

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has arrived in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on an unannounced visit.

He is due to meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai, US troops and allied commanders during his two-day visit.

Later this month, Mr Karzai will announce the schedule for the handover of security responsibility from foreign forces to Afghans.

The visit comes at a time when Kabul’s ties with its Western allies are strained over civilian casualties.

On Sunday, President Karzai told Gen David Petraeus, the US commander of foreign troops in Afghanistan, that his apology for the deaths of nine children in an air strike last week was “not enough”.

The children were killed in a Nato strike on Tuesday.

“This is not a decision-making trip,” news agency AFP quoted Geoff Morrell, Mr Gates’s press secretary, as saying.

“We are going to go south, we are going to go east, and he will come away from this visit hopefully with a better sense of how far we’ve come in the past three months,” he said.

The Obama administration has said it will begin withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan in July and the exercise will be complete by 2014.

But Mr Gates is yet to indicate how many of the 97,000 US forces in the country will be withdrawn.

The issue of civilian casualties is a source of widespread public anger and of tension between the Afghan government and the US.

Hundreds of people rallied on Sunday to denounce the killing of civilians.

The protesters condemned both Nato and the Taliban for killing civilians.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.