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Rumsfeld: U.S. military will train Afghan army

A 'cadre' of trained Afghans is expected to teach others

Rumsfeld: "We know that Afghans ... know how to fight."

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. military plans to begin a program to develop and train an Afghan army to help assure the country never again becomes a haven for terrorists, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday.

The United States will enlist the help of its partners in the war against terrorism to raise money and train groups of Afghans to become commissioned and enlisted officers in 10-week cycles over about 18 months, Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing.

The training sessions, which could start in a month, will be led by up to 150 U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers, a Defense Department statement said. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters the U.S. advisers could number in the "low hundreds."

It is possible that the Afghans could take charge of much of the training by the end of the year, Rumsfeld said.

"The total size of the Afghan army is a subject that is under discussion, and very likely will continue to be under discussion for several reasons," Rumsfeld said.

"It's not clear to me that that will even be decided until after the government that follows the interim government is in place."

Myers said providing border security will be part of the training process.

Challenging the 'warlord' system

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In February, Gen. Tommy Franks, commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command who is leading the military campaign in Afghanistan, sent a team to the country to assess the needs for establishing, training and maintaining an Afghan army.

The army, with a centralized command structure, would replace the "warlord" system of power that has ruled Afghanistan for generations -- a potentially difficult transition.

"You are asking a warlord to turn over his soldiers. ... That is a tough thing for them to do," a senior defense official told CNN.

"We know that Afghans are well armed, and we know there's a lot of soldiers, and we know they know how to fight," Rumsfeld said.

"One would think that at some point we may be fortunate enough that they'll decide that it's in their interest to have a national army and military and border and police circumstance rather than simply various provinces having their own military forces," he said.

Although nations pledged more than $1 billion in January toward Afghanistan's reconstruction, no money was committed to training an army, Rumsfeld said. He indicated the State Department may ask Congress for a special appropriation for the project.

Referring to U.S. training of forces in other countries such as Yemen and Georgia to help them combat terrorism, Rumsfeld said, "Our hope is that there will be no new sanctuaries or havens for terrorist networks."

Rumsfeld again declined to indicate how long the U.S. military may be in Afghanistan.

"There's no question in my mind but that the remaining al Qaeda and Taliban would like very much to reconstitute and conduct terrorist operations in the country to attack [the] U.S. and U.S. interests and government interests and coalition interests, and see if they can't chase everyone out, so that they can go back to training terrorists who can fly into buildings in New York and Washington," he said.

"We, needless to say, do not want to leave abruptly in a way that could inject an instability in this situation, which is why we're working with the interim government to see if we can be helpful in getting their army going and up to speed," Rumsfeld said.

-- CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr contributed to this report.