WASHINGTON, Dec 21: Afghanistan's fledgling government is making good progress in developing its national security forces but may need at least some foreign troops indefinitely, the US ambassador to Kabul said here on Tuesday.

Mr Zalmay Khalilzad insisted he was making no comparison with Iraq. But his upbeat assessment of the situation in Afghanistan contrasted sharply with US concerns about the uneven performance of US-recruited and trained Iraqi security men.

Mr Khalilzad told a press briefing that Afghanistan had raised an 18,000-strong national army from scratch after the US-led ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001 "and they don't run away from a fight."

"Our (US) troops love to have them with them," he said. "There has been not a single instance in which an Afghan unit has shied away from the battle and run home." The ambassador said 33,000 police officers had been trained, the intelligence services were being reformed and a secret service to protect President Hamid Karzai was near completion.

But he made it clear Afghanistan still needed foreign troops, which currently number 8,400 in a NATO-controlled International Security Assistance Force and 18,000 in a US-led coalition tracking Taliban and Al Qaeda militants.

"They will need our help for some time to come," Mr Khalilzad said. "But the trend is clearly towards Afghans taking more and more responsibility. ... Over the longer term, I'm projecting lesser need for lesser numbers."

He said there was talk of combining the two forces but refused to speculate on how long the troops would stay, saying only, "There may be, either in a NATO context or a bilateral context, some residual presence indefinitely."

Mr Khalilzad, an Afghan-American, said the security situation in Afghanistan had improved significantly since Karzai's election as president in October. He said some 28,000 of the country's estimated 50,000 militiamen had been persuaded to rejoin civilian life and 92 percent of the heavy weapons had been placed under the control of the national army.

Of the 10,000 Taliban followers still at large in Afghanistan or across the border in Pakistan, about 2,000-3,000 are looking for some sort of reconciliation, the US envoy said.

He said polls showed US troops with a 70 percent popularity rating. Mr Khalilzad declined to compare the experience in Afghanistan with the picture in Iraq. -AFP