PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - The U.S. remains on track to withdraw most of its troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and the relationship between American and Pakistani leaders is improving, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed said Thursday after returning from a visit to the troubled region.
"We are on track to have significant forces out of Afghanistan by 2014," Reed told WPRI.com. "We've made real progress on the ground with the Afghan national forces, both their army and their police. Our military commanders ... are very confident about our being able to withdraw."
American and NATO forces have already withdrawn from a small number of forward operating bases and are identifying equipment and other assets that will need to be removed from the country, Reed said. He downplayed recent speculation that the Obama administration may leave no American troops in the country after 2014.
"At this juncture my sense is the administration is looking at a whole set of options, but that the situation is such - not only in terms of what's happening on the ground but also our own requirements - that the legacy force is going to be as small as possible," he said. The U.S. has about 66,000 soldiers in Afghanistan currently.
The American soldiers that are left in Afghanistan will likely be focused on training local forces and dealing with any international terrorist groups that remain in the country, he added.
Reed spent two days visiting Afghanistan and one day visiting Pakistan along with Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Reed is the No. 2 Democrat. It was the Rhode Island senator's 14th trip to Afghanistan since 2001, when the second-longest war in U.S. history began.
The two senators left Washington last Thursday and returned early Wednesday morning. Asked how long the trip takes, Reed quipped: "Forever." The total travel time for the pair was about 20 hours each way including stops in Doha, Qatar, and Dubai.
"You spend a day traveling and then you try to get as much as you can from dawn until way beyond dusk," Reed said. He visited a few Rhode Island national guardsmen who were part of a security detail in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and brought them Dunkin Donuts coffee from home.
Reed and Levin met with officials including lame-duck Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is in Washington this week for talks with President Obama about the long-term U.S. presence in the country, and Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, whose government is a key American ally in the region but also a frequent source of conflict.
Reed said he saw "a definite and positive change, at least in the atmospherics and the attitude" from Pakistani officials compared with the situation after they were blindsided by the 2011 American operation that killed Osama bin Laden and angered by a later friendly-fire incident that killed a number of Pakistani soldiers.
Reed said that during a meeting in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, the new foreign minister emphasized to him that she and other leaders "no longer view any of these terrorist groups in Pakistan as assets."
"But the real question is translating what I think their policy has evolved to into real action against these groups and to effectively deny safe havens for our forces operating in Afghanistan," he said. "They're not there operationally yet, but we have to keep pushing them."
The U.S. embassy in Islamabad said the two senators' visit was part of a larger series of conversations between top American officials and their Pakistani counterparts "that seek to identify shared interests and act on them jointly."
"Senators Levin and Reed reaffirmed the United States? commitment to work with Pakistan to fight terrorism, support a stable and secure Afghanistan, increase economic opportunity, and strengthen civilian democracy, tolerance, pluralism, and civil society," the embassy said in a statement.?
Ted Nesi ( tnesi@wpri.com ) covers politics and the economy for WPRI.com and writes the Nesi's Notes blog. Follow him on Twitter: @tednesi
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