By David Nather, CQ Staff

Sen. Barack Obama , D-Ill., said Monday that his visit to Afghanistan has convinced him that the United States needs to begin planning now to send additional brigades to the country to fight the increasingly deadly attacks from al Qaeda and the Taliban.

“There’s starting to be a growing consensus that it’s time for us to withdraw some of our combat troops out of Iraq, deploy them here in Afghanistan,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said in an interview on the CBS “Early Show,” echoing remarks he had made a day earlier on the network’s “Face the Nation.”

“I think it’s important for us to begin planning for those brigades now,” Obama said Sunday. “If we wait until the next administration, it could be a year before we get those additional troops on the ground here in Afghanistan, and I think that would be a mistake. I think the situation is getting urgent enough that we have got to start doing something now.”

Obama also repeated his suggestion that the United States should be willing to attack al Qaeda and Taliban forces within Pakistan if that government was unwilling to do so itself — though he conceded that “I believe it is the current policy” of the Bush administration to do that anyway. He added that “what we’d like to see is the Pakistani government take out those training camps” in their country.

Obama met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and visited with U.S. troops in Afghanistan over the weekend before flying to Iraq with Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island.

In a joint statement Sunday, Obama, Hagel and Reed said they had talked to Afghan leaders and U.S. military and diplomatic leaders about “whether we have the right strategy and the right resources to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, and to support lasting stability.”

“Our message to the Afghan government is this: We want a strong partnership based on ‘more for more’ — more resources from the United States and NATO, and more action from the Afghan government to improve the lives of the Afghan people,” the senators said in the statement.

Obama’s presidential rival, Sen. John McCain , R-Ariz., also has promised to send more brigades to Afghanistan. But McCain says other changes will be needed as well, such as a more unified military command and a “nationwide civil-military campaign plan that is focused on providing security for the population.”

In a radio address Saturday, he renewed his criticism of Obama for opposing the “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq, saying it is “the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to victory over the Taliban” in the Afghanistan war. He also said Obama has complicated the war by talking openly about attacking targets within Pakistan.

“In trying to sound tough, he has only made it harder to enlist the full support of Pakistan in the fight against terrorists,” McCain said.

McCain kept up his jabs at Obama on Monday, as his rival began his visit to Iraq, where he was expected to meet with top U.S. and Iraqi leaders. He said he hoped the trip would convince Obama that he had erred in opposing the U.S. troop surge of the last year, once he sees for himself the reduction in violence in war-torn Iraq.

“I hope that the people will have a better focus on the fact that we have succeeded in our strategy in Iraq, we are winning the war, and Senator Obama was wrong,” McCain said on the CBS “Early Show.”

“He railed against it, he voted against the surge, and he said it would fail. He was wrong there,” McCain added, accusing Obama of “a gross misjudgment.”

First posted July 19, 2008 9:32 a.m.