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 ||||| Photo 
 
 KABUL, Afghanistan — For the second time in two days, a suicide bomber used an Afghan uniform to elude early detection and approach his target, killing five NATO service members attending an early Saturday meeting at the headquarters of the Afghan 201 Corps in the country’s east. The bombing was one of the worst attacks of its kind, NATO and Afghan military officials said. 
 
 The explosion at Forward Operating Base Gamberi on the border of Laghman and Nangarhar Provinces in eastern Afghanistan also appears to have killed at least four Afghan National Army soldiers, according to Baz Mohammed Sherzad, the director of the public health hospital in Nangarhar, which received the bodies of the dead. Eight other Afghans were wounded, including four Afghan soldiers and four interpreters who were accompanying the foreigners in the meeting, Afghan officials said. 
 
 Two other NATO troops were killed Saturday in a bomb attack in southern Afghanistan, according to a statement from the military here. 
 
 The suicide attack at the eastern base was one of the most lethal attacks involving the penetration of a military installation by an assailant — a style of attack that appears to be increasingly favored by the Taliban. In November 2010, six American soldiers were killed by a man wearing a border police uniform at a military training area in Nangarhar, and a year earlier five British soldiers in Helmand Province were killed. There have been a number of other attacks with lower death tolls by people wearing the uniforms of the security forces. Typically, even predominantly Afghan bases and many smaller outposts have some NATO troops partnered with the Afghans. 
 
 “The Afghan and foreign forces had a meeting as usual, and an explosion took place, and the area is now surrounded,” said Maj. Mohammed Osman, a spokesman for the 201 Corps. “We found one leg that we expect might be from the suicide bomber.” 
 
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 The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and said it was the beginning of their spring campaign, which they said would focus on infiltration of the security forces. “We had recruited this man one month ago, and he was serving as an Afghan soldier for the last month,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s spokesman for the north and east of Afghanistan. 
 
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 “Today, he got a very good chance to attack because Afghan and foreign military officials had a meeting at the base,” Mr. Mujahid said. He added that these kinds of attacks were “very useful for us — recruiting someone and working inside the Afghan forces. These attacks inflict more casualties to the enemy and do not inflict any civilian casualties.” 
 
 The attack on Saturday followed a Friday attack in which a suicide bomber wearing a police uniform killed Gen. Khan Mohammed Mujahid, the police chief of Kandahar Province, a revered figure both in Kandahar and around the country. 
 
 American officers have said privately that they are concerned with infiltration of the military and the police as they rapidly grow in numbers. In recent months, the military’s leadership has taken steps to deal with it, said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who leads the United States and NATO training mission in Afghanistan. 
 
 In a speech last week at Chatham House, a military and strategic research institute in London, General Caldwell said that the training mission had begun to train counterintelligence agents to help find Taliban and insurgent infiltrators in the ranks of the security forces. About half of the target of 445 agents have completed the training, Reuters reported that he said. 
 
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 “We’re bringing counterintelligence personnel into the lowest level of all the organizations,” General Caldwell said, adding of the new personnel that their “sole mission in life is to look for those who may be attempting to infiltrate in or turn somebody who was already in toward the Taliban.” ||||| Many Afghan army units are running out of key equipment, including Humvees, because of their inability to do repairs or find replacements. 
 
 Oct. 9, 2013 Many Afghan army units are running out of key equipment, including Humvees, because of their inability to do repairs or find replacements. Javier Manzano/For The Washington Post 
 
 After a tough fighting season, Afghan soldiers are finding that a significant portion of their vital equipment is broken and cannot be easily replaced. 
 
 Their fighting season nearly over, members of an embattled Afghan army unit recently inspected their equipment, most of which was in two heaps on their base. There were Humvees shredded by roadside bombs, armored trucks damaged by rocket-propelled grenades and other vehicles in need of repair after hard use in one of the country’s most volatile areas. 
 
 The Afghan soldiers could not fix any of them, and replacements hadn’t come. Seventy-five percent of the battalion’s armored vehicles were out of commission. There were so few Humvees that some soldiers walked for 20 hours to get from base to base. 
 
 “How can we fight a war like this?” asked Col. Hamidullah, the battalion commander, who like many Afghans uses one name. 
 
 The problems plaguing Hamidullah’s battalion represent what might be the biggest threat to the fledgling Afghan army: an inability to repair or replace vital equipment once it is broken. The U.S. military shouldered that responsibility for years. But just as the Afghan army started doing the bulk of the fighting, the Americans stopped repairing Afghan equipment. 
 
 The U.S. military said that turning over the job to the Afghans was an inevitable part of the transition process. But with the Afghan supply chain still undeveloped and the Defense Ministry still hobbled by corruption, army units across the country aren’t getting the gear and parts that they need. 
 
 Afghan commanders are now taking stock of how many vehicles they have lost during the fighting season, which typically lasts from spring until fall, when many Taliban commanders return to Pakistan. Nabiullah, a battalion commander in the Arghandab River valley in southern Kandahar province, said by telephone that 20 percent of his Humvees have been blown up or have fallen into disrepair. Khan Agha, a battalion commander in Kandahar’s Panjwai district, said his unit lost about 15 percent of its Humvees in the past four months. 
 
 “We don’t have enough trained professionals to take care of this equipment,” Nabiullah said. 
 
 By nearly all measures, it was a brutal fighting season for the Afghan security forces. About 400 soldiers and police officers were killed every month. Even in districts where there wasn’t much combat, improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs, took an enormous toll on the army and its equipment. U.S. officials have praised the Afghans for their resilience in the face of such heavy losses. 
 
 Afghan soldiers say that they haven’t lost their willingness to fight but that the lack of functional equipment has restricted their ability to conduct operations. In Hamidullah’s battalion, for example, the team charged with locating and disarming roadside bombs is down from four Humvees to one, seriously reducing the number of patrols it can conduct. 
 
 Even the much-lauded Afghan special forces teams are plagued by the logistical problems. 
 
 “The Americans gave us the Humvees, but they didn’t give us the spare parts,” said Sgt. Mohammad Safi, who is part of the special forces team based in Wardak province’s Nerkh district. His team lost three Humvees this fighting season, and none have been replaced. 
 
 Lack of spare parts 
 
 It’s hard to overstate the importance of the armored vehicles to Afghan troops. This month, the Taliban fired two rocket-propelled grenades at a personnel carrier from Hamidullah’s battalion while the soldiers were on a routine patrol. The windshield was shattered, the roof was mangled and the engine was damaged, but the men inside were unharmed. 
 
 Days later, three Afghan mechanics were hard at work trying to repair the damaged engine. The Americans had left them a manual to fix the vehicle, full of diagrams and pictures of spare parts. But the Afghans had received few of those parts. They were even out of engine oil. 
 
 It didn’t take long for the mechanics to realize that they couldn’t get the vehicle running again. 
 
 “Of course it feels bad when I can’t fix something — but I know I could if I had the spare parts,” said one of the mechanics, Pvt. Sardar Mohammad. 
 
 To get them, the soldiers would have to fill and send a series of forms to the Defense Ministry — and wait. Some battalions have waited three years to get key parts or to have their Humvees replaced, because of bureaucratic inefficiency. It’s much easier to replace the army’s Ford Rangers, but because those trucks aren’t armored, they are not as desirable, especially in violent eastern Afghanistan. If the soldiers had been in a Ranger when the RPGs struck, they probably would have been seriously injured or killed. 
 
 “When we go on operations, either 10 guys cram into one Humvee, or we walk,” Pvt. Rahmatullah said. “A Ranger is made of paper.” 
 
 The Afghan Defense Ministry has acknowledged nagging problems with the army’s ability to repair and replace valuable equipment, despite a massive U.S. investment in Afghan forces. Earlier this year, Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a spokesman for the ministry, cited that weakness as a reason why continued Russian financial assistance was so important. 
 
 Procurement troubles 
 
 The logistical hurdles go beyond getting new vehicles or spare parts. A procurement debacle at the Defense Ministry has prevented tens of thousands of soldiers from getting army- 
 
 issued boots. Instead, they have to buy shoes themselves, sometimes wearing tattered running sneakers. Hamidullah’s unit has also run out of rockets that can be used with the launchers it was provided. 
 
 Still, Hamidullah considers himself lucky. Because his unit is only 70 miles from Kabul, the capital, he typically gets the fuel he needs. For units far from headquarters, their allotted fuel shipment never arrives in full. Both Afghan soldiers and U.S. officials suspect that some of it is stolen. 
 
 The fighting is expected to die down in the coming weeks. Afghan commanders want to know: Will their gear be fixed before spring comes and the violence picks up once again? Another tough fighting season could wipe out what’s left of Hamidullah’s vehicles. 
 
 U.S. officials say that they are aware of the Afghan security forces’ logistical problems but that they have seen signs of improvement. 
 
 “The fighting season raises the stakes and exacerbates the problems of any military,” U.S. Brig. Gen. Eric Wesley said. “We recognize the problem and so do they, but we think we’re on our way to a solution.” 
 
 That solution would involve NATO forces helping the Afghans improve the supply chain that connects far-flung bases to the Defense Ministry in Kabul and ensuring that Afghan mechanics have the skills and tools to fix their equipment. 
 
 This week, Maj. Gen. Dean Milner of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan announced that the alliance would redouble efforts to improve supply processes and prevent waste and fraud in the Afghan Defense Ministry. 
 
 But the push comes as the Americans are rapidly withdrawing from Afghanistan, removing advisers working with Afghan battalions and attaching them to higher levels of leadership. At those more-senior levels, officials say, these advisers will be able to identify and monitor systemic problems. But they are less likely to assist when a battalion or platoon is handicapped by an isolated logistical issue, particularly compared with a few years ago, when the Americans were fixing Afghan vehicles themselves. 
 
 Hamidullah’s battalion recently launched its last significant operation of the fighting season. Soldiers piled into the remaining Humvees. Others reluctantly took Rangers. The mechanics stayed behind, tinkering with the broken vehicle they knew they couldn’t fix. 
 
 “I’ll send it to brigade,” said Sardar Mohammad, the mechanic. “But I already know they don’t have the capacity to fix it.”
– 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.