Updated 2 p.m. 
 
 Ten years of war. Two years of an accelerated effort to train Afghans to take over that fight, at an annual cost of $6 billion. And not a single Afghan army battalion can operate without assistance from U.S. or allied units. 
 
 That was the assessment made by the officer responsible for training those Afghan soldiers, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell. Out of approximately 180 Afghan National Army battalions, only two operate “independently.” Except that “independently,” in Caldwell’s National Training Mission-Afghanistan command, means something different than “independently” does in the States. 
 
 Those two “independent” battalions still require U.S. support for their maintenance, logistics and medical systems,” Caldwell admitted when Pentagon reporters pressed him on Monday morning. 
 
 “Today, we haven’t developed their systems to enable them to do that yet,” Caldwell said. 
 
 Building up foreign armies isn’t easy. During 2008′s battle for Basra, Iraqi forces relied heavily on U.S. and British support — and still saw more than a thousand desertions. That was four years after then Maj. Gen. David Petraeus took over the training of the Iraqi military. 
 
 For the past two years, Caldwell’s overseen a big push to expand, professionalize and train Afghan soldiers and cops. Caldwell has gotten bodies into uniforms: the Afghan army and police total 305,516 today, up from 196,508 last December, and they’re “on track,” Caldwell says, to reach 352,000 by November 2012. 
 
 Caldwell praised Afghan police officers during the Taliban’s audacious attack on Kabul earlier this month. Two separate cops “literally did a bear hug” on separate suicide bombers in different places around the city, sacrificing themselves in the process. “Policemen were doing heroic deeds,” Caldwell said. 
 
 But most of Afghanistan’s men in uniform can’t read at a kindergarten level, much less understand the instrument panels on a helicopter or the serial numbers on their rifles. 
 
 That’s one reason why it’ll be years before the U.S. takes its training wheels off the Afghan soldiers’ bikes. Although the Obama administration plans to turn the war over to forces Caldwell trains by 2014, Caldwell told Danger Room in June that the Afghans will need U.S. training until as late as 2017. 
 
 That is, if attrition doesn’t get in the way. Caldwell expressed alarm that 1.4 percent of Afghan cops and 2.3 percent of Afghan soldiers walk off the job every month, saying that if “left unchecked [attrition] could undo much of the progress made to date.” Yet last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified that attrition rates are “as much as three percent per month. 
 
 Asked by Danger Room about the increase, Caldwell simply said that the “goal we’ve set” is a 1.4 monthly attrition level across both forces. In the Afghan National Army, attrition “has been steady over the last year. We have not seen the decline,” Caldwell said. 
 
 Then there’s the nagging issue of human rights. “U.S. officials have for years been aware of credible allegations that newly-installed Kandahar police chief [Brigadier General Abdul] Raziq and his men participated in a cold-blooded massacre of civilians,” writes Matthieu Aikins, in a gut-wrenching new expose for The Atlantic. Yet Raziq has been showered with cash and official praises from the highest level of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan. 
 
 Caldwell has instituted an additional 18 hours of training on respecting Afghans’ rights into the eight-week course that the typical would-be Afghan cop takes. But Caldwell doesn’t train every Afghan cop. Members of a program called the Afghan Local Police — founded in 2010 by Petraeus to recruit auxiliaries against the Taliban — has been implicated in “killings, rape, arbitrary detention, abductions, forcible land grabs, and illegal raids by irregular armed groups,” according to a Human Rights Watch report issued this month. 
 
 Special Operations Forces are responsible for turning these groups into respectable units. When Danger Room asked if it was time for Caldwell to take over that training, Caldwell said, “We’ve not been asked to at this point… If there is a request for us to help and become engaged in that, we obviously would. But at this point, I think the special forces element that has the responsibility for that clearly sees and understands what that report says. We all take that very seriously.” 
 
 With insurgents assassinating the man in charge of negotiating a peace deal, the Afghan security forces are the backbone of the U.S.’ long-term plan for Afghan security. During his Senate testimony on Thursday, Panetta called their development “one of the most notable successes” of the war. 
 
 Yet not only can no Afghan army battalion operate without U.S. aid, the U.S. has been purchasing them a lot of creature comforts. Caldwell said that his command recently stopped buying air conditioning units for Afghan barracks, replacing them with fans instead — part of an effort to pare down the $6 billion that it costs to keep the Afghan security forces going. Caldwell said he expects that number to drop — in part because someday Afghanistan won’t be ravaged by insurgency (maybe, hopefully) — but he doesn’t know how much it’ll drop by, or by when. 
 
 “I’m still very realistic about the challenges out there,” Caldwell said. 
 
 Update: I misheard Caldwell during today’s Pentagon briefing when he discussed the goal he’s set for monthly attrition rates. Thanks to his public-affairs officer, Lt. Col. Shawn Stroud, for alerting me to my mistake. 
 
 Photo: Flickr/DVIDSHUB ||||| U.S. commanders in Afghanistan began investigating allegations Thursday that a top general used military propagandists in an effort to persuade visiting lawmakers to provide more American troops to train Afghan forces. 
 
 An article in Rolling Stone magazine accused Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who is in charge of the U.S.-led coalition's training effort in Afghanistan, of pressuring his information-operations unit to use propaganda and "psychological operations" on visiting members of Congress and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen. 
 
 The Rolling Stone piece quotes Lt. Col. Michael Holmes, whom the magazine identified as the head of the training command's information-operations unit, as saying he was told to use propaganda and psychological-operations techniques to help Gen. Caldwell persuade visiting dignitaries to back the deployment of more trainers. 
 
 Privately, military officers cast doubt on the accusations. Two military officers said that soon after taking command Gen. Caldwell determined that it was inappropriate for troops charged with training Afghan security forces to have officers tasked with using propaganda to influence events. The officers in the information-operations team were given other staff work and never asked to conduct "psychological operations," said one official. 
 
 The officers spoke on condition of anonymity because senior military leaders have told their subordinates not to discuss details of the investigation. 
 
 Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said the investigation will determine the facts and circumstances surrounding the incident. 
 
 The article was by Michael Hastings, the journalist whose profile last year of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the senior commander in Afghanistan, led to the general's ouster by the White House. 
 
 Lt. Col. Holmes told Rolling Stone that Gen. Caldwell asked him to analyze "pressure points" the command could use to "leverage the delegation for more funds." 
 
 "My job in psy-ops is to play with people's heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave," Lt. Col. Holmes told Rolling Stone. "I am prohibited from doing that to our own people." 
 
 But the tasks Lt. Col Holmes describes doing in the article, such assembling basic background information on visiting dignitaries and their views is a routine part of military staff work, officials said. 
 
 Gen. Caldwell has been a vigorous advocate for sending more trainers to Afghanistan and has frequently asked North Atlantic Treaty Organization members to contribute additional forces. Gen. Caldwell didn't respond to a request seeking comment. 
 
 The story identified Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee, as one of the targets of Gen. Caldwell's alleged propaganda efforts. 
 
 The military officials also noted that most of the lawmakers Lt. Col Holmes says he was asked to help pressure are outspoken supporters of expanding the training mission. 
 
 In a statement released Thursday, Mr. Levin said he never needed "any convincing" that the Afghan security forces should be built up. "Quite the opposite, my efforts have been aimed at convincing others of the need for larger, more capable Afghan security forces and that we and NATO should send more trainers to Afghanistan, rather than more combat troops," Mr. Levin said. 
 
 The use of information operations has expanded quickly throughout the military in recent years, but the field remains controversial. Some officers believe information-operations techniques are ineffective at persuading target audiences. Others worry its expansion would lead to military propaganda being pushed on U.S. audiences. 
 
 Under Pentagon regulations and U.S. law, military officials are prohibited from using propaganda on American citizens. Information provided to the U.S. public is supposed to be truthful. 
 
 Col. Lapan said information-operations officers aren't necessarily prohibited from providing data to U.S. citizens—as long as that data is truthful and not propaganda. 
 
 "It is the actions that are important, it is not the assignment of duties, but the actions and whether they comport with law and regulation," Col. Lapan said. 
 
 Write to Julian E. Barnes at julian.barnes@wsj.com ||||| WASHINGTON — A new revelation of young American soldiers caught on camera while defiling insurgents’ remains in Afghanistan has intensified questions within the military community about whether fundamental discipline is breaking down given the nature and length of the war. 
 
 The photographs, published by The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, show more than a dozen soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division’s Fourth Brigade Combat Team, along with some Afghan security forces, posing with the severed hands and legs of Taliban attackers in Zabul Province in 2010. They seemed likely to further bruise an American-Afghan relationship that has been battered by crisis after crisis over the past year, even as the two governments are in the midst of negotiations over a long-term strategic agreement. 
 
 The images also add to a troubling list of cases — including Marines videotaped urinating on Taliban bodies, the burning of Korans, and the massacre of villagers attributed to a lone Army sergeant — that have cast American soldiers in the harshest possible light before the Afghan public. Accordingly, combat veterans and military analysts are beginning to look inside the catchall phrase “stress on the force” to identify factors that could be contributing to the breaches. 
 
 One potential explanation put forth by these analysts is the exhaustion felt by the class of non-commissioned officers that forms the backbone of the all-volunteer force: the sergeants responsible for training, mentoring and disciplining small groups of 18- and 19-year-old soldiers at the small-unit level, hour by hour, patrol by patrol. 
 
 Another factor, they say, may be the demands of a counterinsurgency strategy that has distributed small units across vast distances to serve at primitive combat outposts. Self-reliance required in isolation may promote heroic camaraderie. But the rugged terrain, logistical challenges and the in-your-face violence of the insurgency may also present great challenges to the noncommissioned officers in charge of these small units, operating far beyond the more consistent senior supervision in past wars. 
 
 Officers and analysts express concerns that some of these isolated units are falling prey to diminished standards of behavior and revert to what one combat veteran described as “Lord of the Flies” syndrome, after the William Golding novel portraying a band of cultured British schoolboys reverting to tribal violence when severed from society. 
 
 “Some of these incidents certainly seem to be the fault of a breakdown in leadership at the small-unit level,” said Andrew Exum, a defense policy analyst at the Center for a New American Security who teaches a course on irregular warfare at Columbia University. 
 
 “Where was the sergeant who is supposed to say: ‘Stop, boys. We don’t do that. We don’t disrespect the dead’?” said Mr. Exum, who led a light infantry platoon in Afghanistan in 2002 and then led a platoon of Rangers in both Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004. 
 
 Early reports indicate that the soldiers had been sent to gather fingerprints or retina scans for identification of the suicide bomber. Mr. Exum noted how the horrific experience of being ordered to interact with bloody, severed body parts of an enemy may cause soldiers to develop self-defense mechanisms — in particular dark humor around corpses. “But the line is crossed when you disrespect the dead body,” he said. “It’s one thing to have a psychological release valve, and another thing to take trophy pictures.” 
 
 Pentagon and military officials, noting that the proliferation of soldiers’ carrying camera phones has been involved in many of the cases, said that technology and a changing culture had presented new problems, as well. Troops have behaved badly since the beginning of warfare, of course. But now, those actions can be captured in real time, and spread rapidly without commanders’ control, via social networks. 
 
 Army officials said Wednesday that the service had guidelines and rules for photos — basically, “think before you post” — but they also acknowledged that social media are evolving so rapidly that regulations were not keeping pace. Rules are set by commanders at the company, battalion and brigade level, but those standards are sometimes ignored by small units in the field. 
 
 “Technology today presents definite challenges related to security and propriety,” said Col. Thomas W. Collins, an Army spokesman. “In this case, these photos are probably a manifestation of the soldiers’ relief that this insurgent no longer posed a threat to them or their fellow soldiers. That cannot excuse what they did. We are the United States Army, and the world rightly has very high expectations that our soldiers will do what’s right. Clearly, that didn’t happen in this case.”
– Ten years and $66 billion later, not one Afghan battalion is operating on its own. That was the conclusion of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell today as he set new benchmarks for training Afghan soldiers and expressed alarm over the attrition rates of Afghanistan's men in uniform. In charge of the training, Caldwell admitted that even the two so-called "independent" military units still require US backing for "maintenance, logistics, and medical systems." Most Afghan soldiers read below the kindergarten level, Wired reports, preventing them from using complex equipment. Afghan police are also dogged by corruption allegations that include mass murder as well as rape, arbitrary detention, and abductions. Meanwhile 2.3% of Afghan cops and 1.4% of Afghan soldiers are quitting every day. Caldwell said the US must continue training until 2017 and aim to reduce attrition rates to 1.4% across the board. “I’m still very realistic about the challenges out there,” he said.