WASHINGTON — Senior U.S. military officials are developing plans to speed the deployment of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, including possibly pulling the next brigade scheduled to go to Iraq this fall and sending it to Afghanistan instead.
President Bush has already committed to beefing up the U.S. presence in Afghanistan next year. But Defense Department officials said the recent efforts of military planners would accelerate the process and could allow the new brigade of 3,500 soldiers to deploy there before the end of this year.
The change comes amid growing violence in southern and eastern Afghanistan, prompting U.S. commanders in that country as well as other military brass to push the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff to reevaluate troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Sunday, nine U.S. soldiers were killed at a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan during a sophisticated offensive by hundreds of Taliban fighters, the largest single American loss of life in Afghanistan in three years.
The U.S. and Afghan troops who manned the outpost have been ordered to abandon the base, a NATO spokesman said Wednesday. The post is a small, recently constructed facility near the village of Wanat, close to the border with Pakistan.
In an indication of the shifting troop-deployment effort, Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said at a news conference that he expected to be able to recommend a resumption of withdrawals from Iraq in September.
"I won't go so far as to say that progress in Iraq, from a military perspective, has reached a tipping point, or it is irreversible; it has not and it is not," said Mullen, who this weekend returned from a weeklong trip to both theaters. "But security is unquestionably better, and remarkably better."
In recent months, Pentagon planners have said they would not be able to move a significant number of new forces to Afghanistan until Iraq withdrawals resumed. Mullen's comments were the clearest yet by a senior military official that such reductions are likely to begin again soon.
The Bush administration's buildup of forces in Iraq, known as the troop surge, is to end this month. After that, the next brigade to be withdrawn, the 1st Brigade of the Army's 10th Mountain Division, is scheduled to depart in late fall. Another unit, the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 4th Infantry Division, was scheduled to take its place.
