Gates: Taliban reconciliation talks "very preliminary"

(CBS/AP) Afghanistan policy is entering a new phase with the July 31 troop withdrawal deadline approaching, a weakened Al Qaeda in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death and peace talks between U.S. officials and Taliban guerrillas.

Outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, however, said the talks with Taliban leaders happening in unnamed countries are "very preliminary."

"I would say these contacts are very preliminary at this point," Gates told CNN Sunday. "Real reconciliation talks are not likely to be able to make any substantive headway until at least this winter. I think that the Taliban have to feel themselves under military pressure, and begin to believe that they can't win before they're willing to have a serious conversation."

Currently about 100,000 troops are stationed in Afghanistan, three times as many as when President Obama took office. When the president sent an additional 30,000 U.S. forces to Afghanistan at the end of 2009, he did so with the caveat that some of those troops would start coming home in July 2011.

Mr. Obama has said the initial withdrawal will be "significant," but others in the administration, including Gates, have called for a more modest drawdown.

Obama administration officials say they are focused not only on how many troops will leave Afghanistan next month, but how the U.S. will meet its goal of giving Afghans control of their own security by the end of 2014. To that extent, Mr. Obama's upcoming decision on troop levels may clarify the broader path to ending the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan.

Gates also said on CNN that the U.S. long has said that "a political outcome is the way most of these wars end. The question is when and if they're ready to talk seriously about meeting the redlines that President Karzai, and that the coalition have laid down, including totally disavowing al-Qaida."