Afghan President Hamid Karzai, right, talks to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Monday meeting at the Presidential Palace in Kabul. A senior U.S. commander said the U.S. military may not finish sending its Afghan surge until nine to 11 months from now — past the White House’s goal of this coming summer.

Kabul ? The military may not finish its surge of 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan until nearly a year from now, a senior U.S. commander said Monday — a slower pace than President Barack Obama has described.

The White House insisted it was sticking with a goal of completing the buildup by late summer.

The reinforcements begin arriving next week, and the bulk of the troops are scheduled to be in Afghanistan by the end of summer. But it will probably be nine to 11 months before all the troops are in place, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez said.

The sooner the full complement of 30,000 can get there, the sooner the added firepower might have an effect on turning around the war and creating conditions that will allow the Pentagon to proceed with Obama’s promise to begin withdrawing troops in July 2011.

“We’re still working the speed at which they can come in, and so we’ll see how much faster that they can come in,” said Rodriguez, the second-highest U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Differing timelines

Military officials had been hinting in recent weeks that the escalation might take slightly longer than the summer goal. Rodriguez’s comments on Monday set off a flurry of reactions both at the White House and the Pentagon.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama still “believes we should get our troops in there by the end of the summer.”

Several defense officials provided a similar timeline, saying Defense Secretary Robert Gates has indicated that all the troops should be there by summer’s end.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Gates has made it clear that the majority of U.S. forces were slated for arrival by midsummer and the rest by the end of summer.

The sticking point appears to be over how quickly the military can deploy a final brigade of troops — between 4,000 and 5,000 soldiers, officials said. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress last week that 20,000 to 25,000 troops could be in place by the end of summer.

Rodriguez said the calendar is tied to logistical challenges in bringing in so many forces so quickly. Some will move to Afghanistan from the U.S; some material will be shifted from Iraq or Kuwait, which serves as a staging area for the Iraq war.

Tougher logistics

Afghanistan is logistically tougher than Iraq in terms of a troop buildup, because it is landlocked and lacks the more extensive network of highways in the Iraq buildup.

Rodriguez said the rapid influx is a central part of the plan to take total U.S. forces to 100,000 next year.

Obama has not cited a detailed timeline. In his Dec. 1 nationally televised speech, he said the fresh troops would “deploy in the first part of 2010 — the fastest pace possible — so that they can target the insurgency.”

White House aides had indicated the hope was for all the new troops to be in place by summer, and Gibbs said Monday that is still the operative plan.

The apparent discrepancy isn’t large, but the calendar Rodriguez suggested is close to the one his boss, top U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, proposed months ago during the long deliberations about how to expand forces to take on a resurgent Taliban.

Obama wanted to speed up the process as much as possible in part to send a signal of U.S. resolve.