Kabul: Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, on Monday arrived in Kabul, on a surprise two-day visit to meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai, US troops and allied commanders.
The Afghan president is due to announce the schedule for the start of the handover of security responsibility from foreign forces to Afghans.
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 was “not enough”.
“This is not a decision-making trip,” a news agency quoted Geoff Morrell, 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But Gates is yet to indicate how many of the 97,000 US forces in the country will be withdrawn.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.
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