Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty: Obama’s surge in Afghanistan may be insufficient

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Monday that he believes the U.S. should maintain a large troop presence in Afghanistan with no timeline for withdrawal, and specified that there may be a need for even more than the 100,000 boots on the ground included in President Obama’s ongoing surge.

“The surge isn’t complete yet … I don’t presuppose that we need more than that, but we might,” said Pawlenty, who is expected to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, at a breakfast with reporters hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Pawlenty was pressed for his views on the war in Afghanistan, following the release Sunday evening of more than 90,000 military reports by Wikileaks, an independent organization that obtained the documents from a source within the U.S. military and gave them to the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. The reports point to coordination between Pakistan’s military spy service and Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, and confirm that the Taliban continues to gain strength despite renewed U.S. and NATO coalition efforts to defeat them.

Pawlenty, who just returned from his fifth trip to the Middle East, sent mixed signals about whether the war in Afghanistan was headed the right direction.

“You see signs of increasing challenge,” he said.

He also said that during a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he was told that “the momentum of the insurgents is being slowed down, can be halted.”