Doubts Raised On U.S. Training Goal for Afghan Forces

Summary

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WASHINGTON -- A series of internal government reviews have presented the Obama administration with a dire portrait of Afghanistan's military and police force, bringing into serious question an ambitious goal at the heart of the evolving U.S. war strategy: to speed up their training and send many more Afghans to the fight.

As President Barack Obama considers his top commander's call to rapidly double Afghanistan's security forces, the internal reviews, written by officials directly involved in the training program or charged with keeping it on track, describe an overstretched enterprise struggling to nurse along the poorly led, largely illiterate and often corrupt Afghan forces.

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Extract

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Doubts Raised On U.S. Training Goal for Afghan Forces

In September, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan, recommended increasing the Afghan army as quickly as possible -- to 134,000 in a year from the current force of more th...

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