WASHINGTON — The Obama administration sent a forceful public message on Sunday that American military forces would remain in Afghanistan for a long time, seeking to blunt criticism that Obama had sent the wrong signal in his war-strategy speech last week by projecting July 2011 as the start of a withdrawal.

In a flurry of coordinated television interviews by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top administration officials, they said any troop pullout beginning in July 2011 would be slow and that the Americans would only then be starting to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces under Obama’s new plan.

The television appearances by the senior members of Obama’s war council appeared to be part of a focused and determined effort to ease concerns about the president’s emphasis on setting a date for reducing America’s presence in Afghanistan after more than eight years of war.

“We have strategic interests in South Asia that should not be measured in terms of finite times,” said Gen. James Jones, the president’s national security adviser, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“We’re going to be in the region for a long time.”

Echoing Jones, Gates downplayed the significance of the July 2011 target date, and indicated that the United States might withdraw only a small number of troops at that time.

“There isn’t a deadline,” said Gates on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

In his prime-time address at West Point on Tuesday, Obama said that even as he planned to dispatch 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, his administration would “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”

The president’s speech set off alarms inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, as some officials worried about an American pullout before Afghan troops were ready to fight the Taliban on their own. It also set off a barrage of criticism from Republicans that the president was setting an arbitrary withdrawal date that would embolden Taliban insurgents to wait the Americans out.

Bin Laden may slip back into Afghanistan, U.S. officials say

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden may be slipping back and forth from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Or the U.S. might not have a clue, more than eight years after the al-Qaida leader masterminded the terrorist attacks on America.

Given a chance Sunday to clear away some of the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the world’s most wanted terrorist, Obama administration officials seemed to add to it with what appeared to be conflicting assessments.

President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, said bin Laden, believed hiding mainly in a rugged area of western Pakistan, may be periodically slipping back into Afghanistan. But Obama’s Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, said the U.S. has lacked good intelligence on bin Laden for a long time — “I think it has been years” — and did not confirm that he’d slipped into Afghanistan.

The failed hunt for bin Laden has been one of the signature frustrations of the global war on terrorism that former President George W. Bush launched after the Sept. 11 attacks. The main explanation given by both the Bush and Obama administrations for not getting bin Laden is that they simply don’t know where he is.

“If we did, we’d go get him,” Gates said.

Jones, a retired Marine general, stressed the urgency of targeting bin Laden, and spoke of a renewed campaign to capture or kill him. Bin Laden had been sheltered in Afghanistan by Taliban allies while plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. When U.S. forces ousted the Taliban in late 2001, bin Laden fled into Pakistan from his mountain redoubt.

— The Associated Press