US Marine Corps commandant General James Conway said Tuesday he expects there will be a continued Marine presence in Afghanistan well beyond July 2011. "I honestly think it will be a few years before conditions on the ground are such that turnover will be possible for us," Conway said in Washington after returning from a recent trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Romania and Germany. In a news release Tuesday, the Defence Department quoted Conway as saying he does not believe conditions in Helmand or Kandahar provinces "are going to be such that we think we can simply turn over to Afghan forces and leave." "When we think that we have sufficiently beaten down the insurgency in the area, we have sufficiently built up the Afghan capability to deal with what's there, then I think we have done the essence of what we were sent there to do," he said. Conway said military leaders need to do a better job of persuading the American public that U.S. forces need to stay in Afghanistan. It was by far the most sharply worded public remark from a senior military commander about the White Houses timetable for starting to wind down the war. Conway also said that if you follow it closely, and of course we all do, we know the president was talking to several audiences at the same time when he made his comments on July 2011. The general apparently meant that Mr. Obamas deadline was set for a domestic political audience as well as for the Afghans. But the general, who is retiring this fall, said he thought the deadline might not ultimately comfort the insurgents, who could find that only a small number of United States forces leave Afghanistan next July, a possibility increasingly set forth by Pentagon officials and senior commanders. He predicted that Taliban fighters, who he said have been told repeatedly by their commanders that the Americans would leave en masse, would be demoralized when they realized that the United States was staying. What is he going to say to his foot troops, he said of a Taliban commander, when, come the fall, were still there hammering them like we have been? I think it could be very good for us in that context, in terms of the enemys psyche and what he has been, you know, posturing now for, really, the better part of a year.