The United States may not have to send more troops to Iraq, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday.
"The real task of security is not to flood a country with more and more troops," Rumsfeld told BBC Television from Istanbul, where he will attend a NATO summit.
"That does not mean that we will necessarily need them, that means we will do the prudent planning," he said.
The United States has about 140,000 troops in Iraq joined by nearly 25,000 other foreign troops.
Defense officials have said the U.S. Army has contingency plans to send more troops if necessary but no additional forces have been requested by U.S. commanders in Iraq.
NATO training
Rumsfeld said he expected leaders in Istanbul to strike a deal to allow NATO troops to train security forces in Iraq.
"We anticipate that at this summit, heads of state will end up agreeing that NATO will in fact have a role in training and equipping the Iraqi security forces," he said.
Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has asked NATO to train Iraqi security forces and NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in a newspaper interview he was optimistic heads of government would sign a deal at the summit in Istanbul.
Rumsfeld said Washington would have hoped for a better security situation in Iraq after the war.
"It is a tough path and Iraqis are going to go through a tough period," he said.
Rumsfeld said it was hard to say whether the war could be won against al-Qaida militants.
"Answering the question as to whether we are winning that is a very difficult one," he said.