Afghan general says army is poorly equipped, but ready to fight

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A top general in southern Afghanistan says a lack of supplies, from guns to stationery, is severely hampering his troops and making it hard for the national army to keep order. Nonetheless, the recently trained soldiers stand ready to fight, he said.

"We can't pay the salary of soldiers and they don't even have enough uniforms," Khan Mohammad, chief Afghan commander in the strategically important south, told The Associated Press in an interview this week.

"We have nothing."

Mohammad commands no more than a few hundred men in the 1,000-strong national army. President Hamid Karzai has said he wants to expand the force to 70,000 nationwide in two years, and the force in the south should balloon to many times its current size.

The general said his men were skilled but handicapped by having to rely on weapons dating back to the 1980s war against the Soviets. He said they've received no new equipment from the Americans or from other coalition forces.

A shortage of office space and up-to-date stationery in Kandahar, the largest city in this barren region that was once a Taliban stronghold, has made it difficult even to do the basic paperwork necessary to manage the force, Khan complained.

In contrast, several thousand American troops operating from a base near Kandahar wield some of the highest-tech weaponry made, from night-vision goggles to precision smart bombs.

Still, Mohammad said he was confident his men could defend southern Afghanistan from any type of attack by Taliban or al-Qaida fugitives, or from anyone else seeking to destabilize the fledgling government.

Mohammad said he had seen intelligence reports that the Taliban were linking up with renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but said his men would act aggressively and enjoyed the support of the people in Kandahar, once the Taliban's main stronghold.

"We are ready with our coalition forces, and we have the support of our nation," Mohammad said. "The people don't want the Taliban."

A U.S.-led coalition that ousted the hardline Taliban regime late last year has been hunting for Taliban and al-Qaida fugitives, but U.S. command would like the national army to eventually take over the task.

Regional warlords, who command armies numbering in the tens of thousands, also outnumber the fledgling national force -- and they carry superior arms. Their presence has complicated the Afghan army's effort to exert its control.

Meager support for the military reflected unfulfilled pledges of financial backing for Afghanistan as a whole, Mohammad said.

At a Tokyo conference last year, donors promised $4.5 billion for reconstruction, but only an estimated $100 million has reached the country.