http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-020305exit_lat,0,5274347,print.story?coll=la-home-headlinesU.S. military officials acknowledged today that they had few ways to gauge the abilities of Iraqi security forces, whose development is considered the key to American hopes of eventually withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
In his State of the Union address Wednesday, President Bush said that the United States would establish no "artificial timetable" for withdrawing from Iraq. The departure of U.S. troops, he said, depended on Iraqi soldiers being able to secure their homeland without the aid of their American benefactors.
Yet the U.S. military is a culture obsessed with timetables and concrete results, and the task now falls on U.S. commanders in Baghdad and Washington to draw up a slate of detailed, measurable factors — what the Pentagon calls "metrics" — to track the progress of the Iraqi troops that have become the principal focus of U.S. efforts in Iraq.
With successful Iraqi elections now behind them, U.S. officials are still struggling to establish such a measure.
During two days of congressional testimony this week, senators pressed senior Pentagon officials for details about how to measure the capabilities of Iraqi forces, growing frustrated with the few details that were disclosed. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a Senate hearing today that such assessments were extremely difficult to make.
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