WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 (UPI) -- The Bush administration needs to drastically overhaul its policies in Afghanistan, a leading U.S. military expert wrote Monday.
Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a new report called "Building Afghan Army and Police Forces" that the administration had to "provide more U.S. forces to deal with a growing Taliban and Islamist extremist threat."
The United States also had to "work with our NATO allies to create an effective force with similar allied reinforcements and the creation of a truly integrated force in which there are no 'stand aside' military contingents like France, Germany, Italy, and Spain," he wrote.
Washington also had to "put continuing pressure on Pakistan to take far more decisive action to eliminate the de facto sanctuaries for the Taliban and other hostile groups on its soil," Cordesman wrote.
U.S. policymakers had to "accept the reality that the Afghan government will take years of additional aid and nation building to become effective, and must be built up at the local and regional as well national level," Cordesman wrote.
"Blaming the Afghan central government in Kabul for its present weaknesses will not accomplish anything. Sustained effort to help it correct its problems will," he wrote.
The U.S. government had to "provide far more aid than in the past both in economic terms and to build up Afghan military and police forces. This latter effort presents most of the same problems as creating effective Iraq forces," Cordesman wrote. "The main difference is that the main problems in the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police are the legacy of gross under resourcing of the past aid effort, not internal sectarian or ethnic tensions."
