NEW YORK, April 21: A top US general has said that the Afghan army and police forces should be able to secure most of Afghanistan by 2011, allowing international forces to start withdrawing.

“By about 2011 there is going to be some pretty good capacity in the Afghan National Army,” the American commander of the Nato-led force in Afghanistan,

Gen Dan K. McNeill, told The New York Times in an interview in the Kabul headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force.

“It will take them a few more years to get their air transport and air support platforms online, but they should be covering a lot of battle space by some time in 2011, in my view,” he said.

By then, barring any cataclysm, the countries contributing troops to the international force could look at whether such a large international force was still desirable, Gen McNeill said. “I think you begin to get to a juncture and say, ‘probably not, maybe we should be starting to change the way this force works,’ ” he said.

The issue has been important for the discussion within Nato about its mission in Afghanistan. Some members of Nato, which has taken over much of the security for the country, have been reluctant to send troops, or to allow their troops to operate in areas where the insurgency is active.

Gen McNeill said that Afghan forces had already effectively been managing the security for Kabul, for the last year, albeit with Nato support. He also expressed confidence that the Afghans would be able to secure the country well enough for the country to hold presidential elections in September 2009.

“Tactically, on the battlefield, the insurgents did not have a very good year last year,” he said. “The so-called toe-to-toe fights will probably be less common — smaller skirmishes — but the technique of choice for the insurgent will be the improvised explosive device and the suicide bomber.”

He said he had seen intelligence reports that more foreign fighters had been arriving recently in the tribal areas of Pakistan that border Afghanistan, where Pakistani and Afghan members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda continue to find sanctuary.