KABUL, Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Robert Gates, heartened by recent military operations to push back the Taliban from major population centers, said the United States was likely to begin pulling out some troops from Afghanistan this summer.

But he cautioned that any reductions in U.S. forces will likely be small and that a significant U.S. force will remain engaged in combat for the rest of 2011 throughout large swaths of the south and east where the Taliban are strongest.

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Afghan men shout anti-American slogans during a protest in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Monday. The demonstration came as Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the country. The Associated Press

“While no decisions on numbers have been made, in my view we will be well-positioned to begin drawing down some U.S. and coalition forces this July even as we redeploy others to different areas of the country,” Gates told reporters.

When President Obama announced an increase of more than 30,000 troops in late 2009, he pledged that some of those troops would start to come home this summer.

The planned reductions likely wouldn’t lead to a significant change in the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in the near term. “Come September, October and beyond there will still be substantial numbers of coalition forces here, still partnering with Afghans and still maintaining unrelenting pressure on our enemy,” the defense secretary said.

Gates appeared with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, after a meeting in which the defense secretary apologized for a recent air strike that killed nine Afghan boys in Konar Province in eastern Afghanistan.

The killings initially drew a heated condemnation from Karzai, who complained that the U.S. response to the deadly incident had been insufficient. On Monday, however, Karzai’s criticism had moderated.

The Afghan president praised the United States. for its role in helping to rebuild Afghanistan after three decades of war, even as he said America must do more to prevent civilian deaths on the battlefield.

“This has been an issue that has been for long at the heart of some of the tensions in an otherwise healthy relationship,” Karzai said. “Civilian casualties are an issue that the Afghans fail to understand.”

Gates, meanwhile, began his prepared remarks with a lengthy apology for the killings, which occurred outside Forward Operating Blessing, a base that U.S. forces turned over to the Afghans last week after more than five years of heavy fighting and little progress in damping violence or extending the reach of the Afghan government to the area.

“This breaks our heart,” Gates said of the accidental killing of the Afghan boys. “Not only is their loss a tragedy for their families, it is a setback for our relationship with the Afghan people whose security is our chief concern.”

The sparsely populated area around the base in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley has been one of the most violent areas of the country in recent years. U.S. commanders have said that the local opposition to the presence of outsiders in the isolated valley fueled much of the violence in the area.

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