BRUSSELS, Belgium -- A year to the day after he met here with NATO officials on his way to take command of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal today reviewed the progress achieved there over the last 12 months and provided his perspective for the year to come.
McChrystal met with reporters at NATO headquarters here, where the alliance's defense ministers, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, are having two days of meetings.
Though much remains to be done in Afghanistan, McChrystal said, much has taken place with a new approach to the mission over the last year.
"I'm not going to try to tell you that everything changed day-to-day," he said, "because it does not [work] that way, but over the course of the year, it's been pretty significant".
The new approach for the Afghanistan mission began with an exhaustive assessment followed by refinements in strategy and some difficult resource decisions, McChrystal said. The past year also has seen an overhaul of the command's concept of operations, and a retooling of how it develops the Afghan national security forces.
"[The Afghan forces] are the strategic main effort," he said, "and they are key to the long-term stability of the country".
Meanwhile, the numbers of Afghan soldiers and national police continue to increase, McChrystal said.
"A year ago, there were about 150,000 total Afghan national security forces," he said. "Today, there are 230,000. That's a significant growth in a 12-month period. In 18 months - that 12, plus the next six months - we will have equaled the growth of the last seven years, so you can see that pace has accelerated".
But numbers aren't the whole story, McChrystal said. The quality of Afghan forces is moving ahead rapidly over the past year through coalition forces working side by side with their Afghan partners.
"Today, about 85 percent of the Afghan National Army has real partnerships as they go around the battlefield," he said. Though the Afghan forces are many years away from a level of professionalism that would be expected of long-standing forces such as the U.S. Army, the general said, they have made significant progress.
