Petraeus: Afghan war faces difficult year ahead - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Petraeus: Afghan war faces difficult year ahead

The general who oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gave a mixed grade to the Senate on efforts in the two conflicts Tuesday, saying that making headway in the former “will be incremental and difficult” and that while “steady progress” is being made in Iraq, “the gains made there remain fragile and reversible — though increasingly less so.”

“The changes in approach launched in 2009 and 2010 … can help turn the tide over time, but we must manage expectations as we continue the buildup in our forces,” Army Gen. David Petraeus said of the Afghanistan war, saying that instability there and in neighboring Pakistan “poses the most urgent problem” for his U.S. Central Command.

“We will endeavor … to wrest the initiative from the Taliban,” Petraeus said.

Despite sporadic bomb attacks in Iraq last year and during the recent elections, and renewed insurgent activity sparked by the ongoing Kurdish-Arab dispute in the north, however, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the plan to reduce U.S. troop strength in Iraq to 50,000 by Sept. 1 remains on track.

Theater-wide, Petraeus said he has “critical shortages” that “continue to degrade mission effectiveness.” These include specialists in intelligence, document exploitation and detainee operations; counterintelligence and human intelligence collectors; interrogators; engineers; and military police.

The tension in the north of Iraq could produce a shift in the makeup of the force in place by late summer, Petraeus said.

“We may reconfigure the force a little bit over what we originally were thinking three or four months ago or so — there’s a possibility that we may want to keep an additional brigade headquarters, as an example,” he said. “Headquarters really matter. They’re the key element of engagement. And indeed, if we think there’s a particularly fragile situation, say, in a certain area in the north, then we might do that.”

Petraeus acknowledged the need to develop more capable Afghani Security Forces and in particular, the gap between raw numbers and actual ability to perform. The total forces in the national army and police forces have grown from 156,000 in January 2009 to more than 206,000 assigned today.

But, he added, “significant work remains in improving the quality of the Afghan force through enhanced partnering, training and recruiting.”

To that end, more trainers are needed — and more may come out of U.S. forces. NATO countries, Petraeus said, have supplied only about half of the total U.S. officials recently pressed for.

“We have to figure out how to get the rest of those, and we are looking at various options for doing that on the U.S. side while still urging NATO to generate the remainder,” he said.