WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (AFP) - US Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Tuesday that more work was needed to train local security forces in Iraq and declined to give a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops.
Testifying at her Senate confirmation hearings, Rice also defended the troop levels deployed by Washington for its occupation of Iraq amid criticisms that it was too weak to head off a growing insurgency.
Rice said more than 120,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained to stand along with 150,000 US troops confronting a stubborn insurgency less than two weeks before crucial elections for a new national assembly.
"It is a process that takes some time," she said of efforts to train the Iraqis. "We believe we have made some progress. We have more progress to make."
She said the Americans were working "to address some of these problems of leadership and morale and desertion in the armed forces and in the police forces and to look at some of the equipping of the police forces."
US officials have said their goal, nearly two years after their March 2003 invasion, was to build up Iraqi forces and eventually use them to phase out the deployment of American troops.
But Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee she would not speculate on a date for a US pullout. "I'm really reluctant to put a timetable on that," she said.
Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking minority member on the committee, who has made several trips to Iraq, took issue with her figure of 120,000 trained Iraqis and said he was told the figure was closer to around 4,000.
"The exit strategy for America is a trained force of several hundred thousand people. We are talking about a year or more to get anywhere close to that," he said. "We should level with the American people about it."
Critics of President George W. Bush's administration have said that he failed to provide sufficient troops to stabilize Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. Rice disagreed.
"I do believe that the plan and the forces that we went in with were appropriate to the task," Rice said. Asked whether she would have changed the force structure at any point, she said, "I don't think I would."
01/18/2005 16:15 GMT - AFP