ABOARD A US MILITARY AIRCRAFT (AP) — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Wednesday it was not clear yet how many troops the U.S. will use to battle terrorists in Afghanistan in the coming two years, but he expressed some confidence that the Afghan forces will improve enough to secure and govern their own country.

In his first public comments about the drawdown plans unveiled by President Barack Obama this week, Hagel acknowledged there still were a lot of unanswered questions about how many of the nearly 10,000 U.S. forces remaining in the Afghanistan next year will be devoted to the counterterrorism mission. He said it also was unclear how many troops NATO and other international partners would contribute and what exactly those forces would do.