One in three Afghan troops leave army: NATO

One in three Afghan soldiers still leave the army each year, but NATO remains on track to raise the number of security forces to 305,000 by October, an alliance general said Wednesday. The NATO training mission gets enough recruits to keep up with the high number of departures, which reached an annual attrition rate of 32 percent, according to its head, Lieutenant General William Caldwell.
Boosting the ranks of Afghanistan's security forces is a vital element of NATO's plan to begin handing command of the battlefield to Afghans this year, and start withdrawing some foreign troops, with the goal of giving them full control nationwide by 2014.
The attrition rate among Afghan troops is "not a trend across the army," Caldwell told reporters during a visit to NATO and European Union headquarters in Brussels.
But it is particularly high among battalions facing a fierce Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan, the US general said, blaming the attrition in part on weak Afghan leadership.

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