WASHINGTON, April 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The U.S. military is likely to remain in Afghanistan at least until an Afghan national army is trained and able to keep former Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from regrouping in the countryside, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday.

"You'd want to have an environment that was reasonably hospitable to the government, people going about their business, going to school, trade with other countries, and that'll take a little time, I would think," Rumsfeld said. 

His remarks at a Pentagon press conference came just hours after an apparent assassination attempt against Afghan Defense Minister Mohammed Qasim Fahim in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, which followed mass arrests last week to break up an alleged plot against the central government. 

Afghan officials said at least four people were killed and 18 injured by an explosion detonated in a roadside stall as Fahim's convoy was about to pass, they said. 

Rumsfeld played down the incident, dismissing suggestions that it signaled an unraveling of the security situation there. 
"There isn't a country in that region that doesn't have attacks from time to time," he said. 

"I think it's just a sign of the times," he said. "What you have is a government that is going to field problems as they occur. It is going to successfully stop some of them, it's going to capture people after the fact in the case of others, and life will bump along in a somewhat imperfect, untidy way," he said. 

Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke earlier said the incident involving Fahim appeared to be the result of internal tensions and not linked to the ousted Taliban regime or al-Qaeda, the group being hunted down by the U.S. military. 
She said such incidents were to be expected as the Kabul government attempts to consolidate power among a mosaic of fiefdoms. 

"The Afghan interim government is trying to pull all the parts and pieces together but it's not going to happen overnight," Clarke said. 

"We used to have this mosaic, if you will, of fiefdoms, and how do you put these parts and pieces together?" she said. 

At the center of the process is the national army, which the Pentagon envisions as a combination of forces drawn from various Afghan tribes and ethnic groups. 

USA Today comments that the U.S.’s training of an Afghan national army offers a way out for the U.S., which desires to limit its military commitment in the country. 

The Pentagon leadership has opposed calls for an expansion of the 4,500-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from Kabul to other cities around the country to keep peace in the meantime. 

Instead, it intends to rely on various militias around the country to help prevent a comeback by the Taliban until a national army is available to do that job, Army General Tommy Franks, the top U.S. commander, said last week. 

And Pentagon comments concerning the U.S. military mission have been deliberately vague as Franks has asserted that "The outcome is not in doubt…The timing may be, but the outcome is not." 

But as political and military officials have said U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan for months, and not years, Rumsfeld acknowledged that it would probably be impossible to rid Afghanistan entirely of al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters. 

He said the U.S. military would likely wait until a national army and other Afghan security forces were capable of maintaining "a reasonably stable environment so that the Taliban and al-Qaeda didn't come back in and seize control or start training terrorists again or doing that we went in to stop them from doing." 

However, uncertainty over the length of U.S. military role continues in the U.S. as the Pentagon predicts that deploying a credible Afghan force will take at least two years, a time frame U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration is unwilling to commit, and for his equal disregard for peacekeeping operations in the country. 

Such uncertainty has caused some congressional members, like Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), as quoted in USA Today, to state, "There's no end in sight in our mission in Afghanistan."