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From December 2006:
What is the status of training Iraqi forces?
U.S. officials say 85 percent of the training mission is complete and that the military has trained five Iraqi divisions, twenty-five brigades, and eighty-seven army and police battalions capable of leading security operations in select areas, according to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index. But Anthony Cordesman, a counterinsurgency expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes that “such reports are misleading to the point of being actively dishonest.”
The problem, he says, is the U.S. estimates do not accurately reflect the large number of Iraqi soldiers who are trained but then desert the army. Gauging the development of these forces is increasingly difficult because the U.S. Defense Department has stopped declassifying material about Iraqi troop readiness (its previous Level One to Level Four grading system), instead only releasing information on the numbers of units “ready and equipped” and “in the lead.”
“These are vague, if not meaningless categories,” Cordesman writes. “‘In the lead’ does not indicate the level of independence from U.S. support, and we do not know how many ‘ready and equipped’ soldiers quit or deserted the force.” Cordesman and other experts say plans by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to turn over security duties to Iraqis by June 2007 look unlikely to be fulfilled.
When will Iraqi forces be ready to take over security responsibilities?
Experts expect it will take at least three to five years, however previous projections by Pentagon officials did not pan out. For instance, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who oversees U.S. forces in Iraq, told reporters in September 2005 “we have built enough Iraqi capacity where we can begin talking seriously about transitioning this counterinsurgency mission to them.”
But more than a year later, the Washington Post reports that of the Iraqi army’s 134,000 men, only about ten battalions are effective—well under ten thousand men. Cordesman expects major U.S. military aid and advisory programs will be in place in Iraq probably until 2015.
www.cfr.org/publication/12243/
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