KABUL, Afghanistan – This year’s pullout of 23,000 American troops from Afghanistan is at the halfway mark, U.S. Gen. John Allen, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces, said Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press.

It’s a kind of milestone toward wrapping up the U.S. and NATO combat role after a decade in the war-torn nation — but Allen cautioned against putting too much emphasis on the U.S. troop drawdown, because the U.S.-led coalition’s campaign is continuing.

Still, Allen said that he knows the clock is ticking on the NATO coalition’s combat mission, which is to end at the close of 2014 — just 29 months from now.

In a wide-ranging interview in his office at NATO headquarters in Kabul, Allen also said that while Afghan security forces were increasingly taking the lead, more work needs to be done to shore up their confidence in planning and executing operations.

He said this summer’s coalition operations were aimed at pushing insurgents farther from population centers, expanding the security zone around the capital, Kabul, and getting more Afghan forces into the lead in the east, which borders Pakistan.

The Afghan army and police force are battling low levels of literacy, corruption within their ranks and lack of equipment and experience, but Allen said they were showing themselves to be increasingly capable on the battlefield. Getting them into the lead is an essential goal of the next 29 months, he said.

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“We haven’t even recruited the whole Afghan national security force. That’s not going to happen for another couple months, but by Oct. 1, we hope to be at 352,000,” he said. “We don’t finish completely fielding the Afghan forces until December 2013. So just at that level alone there is significant work remaining to be done.”

About 90 percent of coalition operations now are partnered with Afghan forces, and Afghan forces are in the lead more than 40 percent of the time, he said.

“We want to get that number higher, and that will come from battalion and higher units being able to take the lead with respect to planning,” he said.

By the end of this year and into next year, Allen would like to see 5,500 personnel working in police and army advisory teams, but now the mission has 20 percent fewer advisers than it seeks.

As the Afghan forces gear up, the exit of foreign troops continues.

The drawdown of 23,000 U.S. troops this year, now slightly more than half completed, will accelerate in the coming few months, and August will be th heaviest month, he said.

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Up to half of the 23,000 troops being pulled out this year are combat forces, he said. Small numbers are being pulled from the relatively stable northern and western parts. Some will be withdrawn from the east and the south “and a good bit in the southwest,” he said.

Helmand province in the southwest and Kandahar province in the south are areas where the Taliban has its strongest roots. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops and their NATO and Afghan partners have worked the past two years to rout insurgents from their strongholds in the two provinces. Insurgents today are trying to reclaim their influence there.

The NATO mission has concentrated on population centers, and this summer, it is focusing on going after insurgents outside the cities.

 


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