US officials say there aren’t enough Afghans to take control of key Taliban stronghold

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US says too few Afghans to take control in Marjah

WASHINGTON — Not nearly enough trained Afghans are available to take control of key Taliban strongholds like Marjah after the military has pushed out the enemy, U.S. officials told a Senate panel on Thursday.

The lack of competent local officials in southern Afghanistan could frustrate Washington’s aims in the region, and keep the U.S. on the hook — financially and militarily — for several years to come. President Barack Obama has pledged that American forces will begin their exit next year.

“The number of those civilians … who are trained, capable, willing to go into (Taliban-controlled areas) does not match at all demand,” David Sedney, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The assessment didn’t sit well with lawmakers, who have grown tired of committing limited U.S. resources and lives to a war with an uncertain outcome.

“You get the queasy feeling that maybe they either aren’t able to sustain it or they don’t really have the same desire that we as Americans do,” Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, said of the Afghans.

Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the panel’s top Republican, said he is concerned that Afghanistan doesn’t have the potential for the economic growth of oil-rich Iraq and that the U.S. will pay to support the Afghan military for decades to come.

“I see a scenario down the trail that after arduous training exercises … the wherewithal to pay for all this simply is not there,” Lugar said.

The hearing was the first devoted entirely to Marine operations in the southern Taliban stronghold of Marjah earlier this year. The assault was widely regarded as a test of Obama’s new strategy for empowering the Afghan government.

A week into the battle, Marjah’s civilian chief was brought in to raise the Afghan flag over the town center and Marjah residents who had fled began to return. Since then, progress has been slower than U.S. officials had planned. NATO forces still run much of the area.

Army Chief of Staff George Casey told reporters Thursday that a top concern among U.S. troops, expressed to him during a recent trip to Marjah, was the lack of trained Afghan forces to take over the fight.

Testifying on Thursday, the senior U.S. civilian in southern Afghanistan, the State Department’s Frank Ruggiero, said the effort of transferring control of the region could take some time. For one thing, he said, there’s a need to replace the area’s corrupt local police force with new units.

“There is an American speed for doing things, and we can go in with a battalion of Marines or a battalion of Army soldiers and U.S. civilians and we can have an effect in a district without a doubt,” Ruggiero said. “But in the end it has to be an Afghan process, and you have to operate at Afghan speed.”

Brig. Gen. John Nicholson of the Joint Staff told the committee he believes “there’s a critical mass of Afghans who want to do this as a society, enough to make that happen.”

Despite the problems with solidifying the Afghan government’s grip on the Marjah area, Sedney said he’s never been more optimistic about the fate of Afghanistan.