By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON, June 18 (Reuters) - The United States has no comprehensive plan to build Afghanistan's army and police, which remain poorly equipped and significantly unprepared to operate without help, U.S. investigators said on Wednesday.

The Government Accountability Office said Congress should not approve any more funding for those forces until the Pentagon and State Department complete a plan to develop them.

"Until a coordinated, detailed plan is completed, Congress will continue to lack visibility into the progress made to date and the cost of completing this mission -- information that is essential to holding the performing agencies accountable," the GAO said in a report.

It said future U.S. investments should be conditioned on such a plan for the Afghan National Security Force.

According to the GAO, both the Afghan army and police are far from ready to undertake security operations without substantial help from U.S. and NATO forces.

Only two of 105 Afghan army units are considered fully capable, GAO said. About 36 percent can conduct their own operations but only with routine international support. All of the rest are much less capable, the report said.

The Afghan police are in worse shape. According to the GAO, no police unit is considered fully capable of performing its mission.

Both the army and police lack the personnel, training and equipment to conduct operations, despite more than $10 billion in U.S. funding over six years. They also suffer from bureaucratic problems and corruption, the report said.

Some of their difficulties, particularly the lack of training, are linked to an unwillingness among NATO member states to send more security trainers into Afghanistan's more restive regions, U.S. officials say.

But Washington's focus on military operations in Iraq also has contributed to shortfalls in equipment and training in Afghanistan, the GAO said, citing U.S. defense officials.

"Officials attributed these shortfalls to competing U.S. priorities for Defense personnel, including the war in Iraq," GAO said.

Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated over the past two years, the bloodiest period since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban in 2001.

Both the Pentagon and NATO have added troops to Afghanistan in response to rising violence -- bringing the total number of foreign troops to about 70,000, some 32,000 of them from the United States.

Still, in the United States, Afghanistan is largely overshadowed by operations in Iraq, where there are 147,000 troops.

The GAO warned, however, that the United States could be training and sustaining Afghan security forces for more than a decade at a cost of $2 billion year.

The Pentagon rejected the GAO's conclusions and said it would release a report on activities in Afghanistan within weeks.

"With respect to the Afghan national security force development program, we believe that it's well reasoned, that it is a successful program, that it's building on the Afghan government's capacity to respond to the insurgency, provide stability and implement the rule of law throughout Afghanistan," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. (Editing by Doina Chiacu)

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