By Susan Cornwell
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - There is no way to tell how ready Afghan forces are to take over security from U.S.-led troops because the system used until recently to assess the Afghans is unreliable, U.S. auditors said on Monday.
Transferring responsibility for security to Afghan forces is one of the linchpins of President Obama's strategy for the war against Taliban insurgents.
Obama is sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan this year, but wants to start withdrawing them in mid-2011.
The report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found big failings in the methods U.S. and coalition forces have used since 2005 to assess the readiness of Afghan army and police who will be left behind.
"We don't really know at this point in time what the capability of the Afghanistan security forces really is," Arnold Fields, the chief inspector, told reporters.
The rankings used to grade Afghan forces varied greatly from one region to another, the report said. Personnel numbers for the Afghan army were overstated and didn't take absenteeism into account. Afghan forces often backslid even if they did get high marks from their mentors.
"The ANP (Afghan police) will simply stop doing what we asked them to do as soon as we leave the area," one team mentoring Afghan police complained to auditors.
Recently U.S. officials have focussed on the need for more trainers to bolster the Afghan security forces. The long term goals for the army are 134,000 by October 20101 and 171,000 by October 2011. Goals for the police are 109,000 by October 2010 and 134,000 by October 2011.
But the auditors zeroed in on deficiencies in the way progress towards these goals was being monitored.
Fields said coalition commanders recently scrapped their system for ranking Afghan forces and replaced it with a new one after auditors pointed out problems. The auditors visited 18 Afghan army and police units between October 2009 and May.
"I would be hard pressed to be able to convey to the senior leaders of this country exactly where we are in terms of the training and equipping and the capability of the Afghanistan security forces," Fields said when asked what he would tell Obama's new nominee to command U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus.
So far $27 billion has been spent training and equipping Afghan security forces, including the army and police.
PILFERED GUNS, DRUG ABUSE
Widespread corruption and drug abuse among Afghan security forces as well as logistics nightmares plagued the effort to develop independent Afghan forces, the auditors said. Trainers were overstretched and sometimes ill-trained themselves.
There were multiple reports of Afghan police skimming fuel, pilfering weapons, and shaking down travellers for money at checkpoints, the report said. Drug abuse affected 17 percent of police, according to one Afghan assessment in February that NATO officials thought was low, it said.
Things were so dangerous in some areas, some of the police mentoring had to be done over the radio. Auditors could not visit a police district in the northern Afghan province of Baghlan that got top marks from mentors from August 2008 to June 2009. By February 2010 it was "overrun with insurgents."
Delays in construction projects restricted training too. Afghan army personnel were housed in temporary facilities at a project in Kunduz province when auditors appeared in February.
"We observed Afghan army personnel coping with deep mud, freezing conditions, unsanitary shower and bathroom facilities, inadequate dining facilities, medically unsafe food storage, and sewage being openly discharged on the surface of the compound," the report said.
(Reporting by Susan Cornwell, editing by Anthony Boadle)
