The drive to stabilize Afghanistan must focus on cultivating local leaders, better training of Afghan troops and police, and pressing Kabul to fight corruption, a report by a U.S. think tank said on Tuesday.

Security in Afghanistan should be rethought to address failures in the seven years since the ousting of the Islamist Taliban after the September 11 attacks, the report published by the U.S. Institute of Peace says.

The top-down approach at nation-building that is focused on the central government in Kabul has not worked well because it ignores Afghanistan''s decentralized history, said the U.S. Congress-funded institute''s report, titled "Securing Afghanistan."

"The weak nature of the Afghan state, the inadequate level of international forces, and the local nature of the insurgency require building a bottom-up capacity to complement national forces," it said.

The international community should work with local leaders and tribal councils to give them legitimacy, provide services and connect them to the central government, said the report.

This approach would also be more likely to reconcile Afghan tribes, sub-tribes, and clans and help them turn against the Taliban, wrote report authors Christine Fair and Seth Jones of the RAND Corporation.