Billmon: Going Backwards

From today's Wall Street Journal:

In a joint appearance on Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and three senior generals acknowledged significant political and military obstacles and emphasized that it might take as long as nine years before Iraq's insurgency is defeated. The commanders said the number of Iraqi army battalions capable of operating without U.S. help had decreased to one from three over the past year. They declined to specificially explain the decrease but said many Iraqi units had suffered from a lack of stability and managerial expertise within Iraq's Ministry of Defense as successive Iraqi government shuffled the ranks of both the ministry and the armed forces. At the same time, the commanders said, the country's police and army units have become riddled with insurgent sympathizers. (emphasis added).

At this rate, we're going to be in Iraq longer than the British were in India.