I've not tried inserting animated gif's into Premiere, but I would be surprised if it worked. Correct me if I'm wrong. However, it is quite possible that the program that you might be using to export animated gifs would also be able to export to a video file (e.g. .mov). For example, I use Flash to do any simple animations in my videos and export the animation as a video file (such as .mov) which I can then import into Premiere. I'm not sure of a quicker way of making a counter in Flash than Premiere though, so we're back where we started!!