The US military is proposing to double the size of the Afghan army by late 2008 and improve its firepower and equipment to face a growing threat from the Taliban, a top US commander said on Tuesday.
Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry made the rounds in Washington with Afghan Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak to discuss their plan to accelerate the training and equipping of both the Afghan army and the national police.
"First of all, the threat that the enemy poses on the battlefield right now is more significant than it was several years ago," Eikenberry said at a Pentagon press conference with Wardak.
The Afghan army and police "need a higher level of protection," he said. "They need more mobility; they need better logistics systems; they need increased firepower."
Eikenberry, who commands US forces in Afghanistan, said the proposals were drawn up by the US military together with the Afghan defence and interior ministries. He said they have not yet received final approval from their respective governments.
But they appear to echo a parallel effort by the US military in Iraq to shift responsibility for security from US to Iraqi forces through an intensified training and equipping program.
"I would like to make one principal point to you: The formula for success in Afghanistan is to enable the Afghan national security forces to defend the Afghan people," Wardak said.
"We have made progress along these lines. We have a plan to accelerate this process," he said.
The plan calls for fielding a 70,000-member Afghan army by October 2008 instead of by 2011, as originally planned, Eikenberry and Wardak said. That would double the size of the current force, which officials said now numbers 35,000.
The police would grow from 50,000 to 62,000, the officials said.
Security for Afghanistan now falls mainly to a 31,000-member NATO-led force, which includes some 12,000 US troops. Another 11,000 US troops are pursuing separate counter-terrorism and training missions.
But NATO has had trouble finding countries willing to contribute troops for Afghanistan and restrictions imposed by their home governments keep many of those out of combat roles.
The US military, for its part, is badly strained by the nearly four-year-old conflict in Iraq, and needs all the spare troops it can get.
The Taliban, on the other hand, has made a comeback over the past year, launching more numerous attacks across southern Afghanistan that have employed larger forces and tactics drawn from the war in Iraq.
Wardak said, "The number of incidents and the geography of the country stretched us and we need to ensure we are prepared for further offensives.
Eikenberry would not say how much it will cost to equip a larger Afghan army so that it can conduct increasingly independent operations.
"When you look at the cost of our forces in Afghanistan, versus the cost of Afghan forces, well, that's a much more expensive proposition for the United States of America," he said.
The US military has already begun to procure armoured Humvees and better Kevlar helmets and body armour to equip new elite Afghan infantry battalions at a cost of some 47 million dollars.
"That's the examples of the kind of equipment we'd be looking at; including helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft for transport," he said.