Brian Stewart's Blog
Thoughts from one of Canada's Most Prominent Foreign Correspondents
Monday, November 9th, 2009
NATO members who yearn mightily for the time they can start packing up to leave Afghanistan in “a few years” are now being shaken to realize one of the most critical exit signs is not glowing as brightly as hoped. Actually, it’s flickering rather badly.
One gets a distinct impression from military sources that the biggest disappointment this year is not that the Taliban is stronger at this stage of the war; it’s that the Afghan National Army (ANA) is far weaker than planned.
This is ominous. For until this international mission can create a viable Afghan Army to take over most of the counterinsurgency war on its own, there is no clear way in the foreseeable future for NATO to draw down its involvement.
The full realization of major failures in this area is late in coming. Whenever the media or visiting VIPs inquired into the state of the ANA, they were shown bright graphs of recruitment and training, and usually introduced to some well-rehearsed platoons working with allied mentors during limited patrols. The harder you probe for the real state of ANA strength, however, the more illusory it seems.
The “Order of Battle” of the ANA this month consists of 91,000 troops in 117 formations. Far fewer soldiers, however, serve in the roughly 800-man kandaks (battalions) that can take part in the counterinsurgency effort. Even fewer are deployed in southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban are strongest.
After eight years of allied training and mentoring, only 53,000 Afghans are in kandaks rated by NATO capable of “operating independently,” and even this figure is highly suspect. Few units have been able to rise above a normal desertion rate of 9 percent and a very high turnover among troops to be able to function adequately. Many units are 30 percent under strength as most soldiers refuse to re-enlist.
Only now, however, is the sense of frustration with the Afghan Army (forget the police!) starting to show in public. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave vent to his own growing anger in the House of Commons last month after a miserable showing by some ANA units during recent fighting in Helmand province. The PM told the House that heavily engaged British units asked repeatedly for ANA reinforcements, but the few units sent proved virtually useless:
“Although those units arrived, they were below strength and not yet fully ready for the task. In a province that faces 30 percent of the violence in the country, we need more and better Afghan participation—and we need it now.”
Brown has insisted he won’t send reinforcements to Afghanistan until he sees proof the ANA has improved. He has also discussed his disappointment with President Obama, and the Americans are equally upset. In fact, worry over the weakness of the ANA is playing a considerable part in White House debate over whether or not to launch a surge of up to 44,000 new US troops.
So far, media attention has centred on the mere numbers debate, rather missing the point that much of General Stanley McChrystal’s report zeros in on NATO/ISAF’s failure to properly prepare the Afghan Army. He wants much more from all NATO countries, including “tighter, reconstructed training programs” to deliver “some ‘clear’capability while closely partnered with coalition forces.”
Its well known in military circles that McChrystal believes only a complete overhaul of the way NATO/ISAF operates will allow him to boost the ANA by another 40,000 up to 134,000 within a year, and 240,000 further down the road. Some in the Obama Administration think this is a pipe dream, given the mess the ANA is in. There’s general agreement, however, that urgent measures are need to improve the ANA
It’s not just that most of the ANA is not involved in the counterinsurgency, rather it’s that the Afgan military structure is hopelessly rigid because Afghan kandaks can rarely be deployed outside the province they trained in. NATO’s bizarre and much criticized command structure, which assigned individual nations to train kandaks as best they could, has resulted in a balkanized force that makes no military sense, especially in terms of counterinsurgency war, which is what current fighting comes down to.
ANA troops, in those kandaks, have been trained by a wide variety of foreign mentors—French, Italian, Dutch, Canadian, Polish, Mongolian, to name a few—and generally are prepared to only fight alongside the national contingent that trains them.
In a remarkably revealing essay in a recent issue of the journal of the Royal Canadian Military Institute (RCMI), a former mentor of Afghan soldiers in Kandahar, Capt. G.B. Rolston, writes that the few good Afghan units in the south are overworked and suffer the greatest casualties because “we don’t allow them [the Afghans] to move their units around.”
“It’s hard enough to bridge the cultural divides between Afghans and the West without also bringing in any potential element of friction between a battalion commander from one NATO country and a senior mentor from another. All well and good, but now you’ve tied that Afghan kandak and all its personnel to the province that country is operating in.”
Nor do many NATO countries trust the Afghan units they’ve trained enough to let them move away without close supervision. The level of frustration is so great some NATO units seem ready, according to Capt. Rolston, to grade units as ready for combat just to get rid of them and hurry up their own departure home:
“An unfortunate side effect of this has been a series of attempts to certify ANA units as fully capable combat-wise, so that their mentor support can be drawn down and reassigned or withdrawn. Unfortunately, those never really seem to translate into real independence in combat setting.”
Canada is credited with mentoring its kandaks well enough, but progress is grindingly slow. It’s supposed to have four out of five running “near autonomous operations” by this time next year, but so far has only one up to even this limited status.
Meanwhile, a major Rand Corporation study of the ANA, while conceding progress, noted the force is still largely illiterate, often unable to read maps, and rife with tension among its many often traditionally hostile ethnic groups that make up Afghanistan.
“Tensions run high among the groups,” the report warned, “and their numbers have little first-hand experience associating with people from other groups. Adapting to such an intense cultural change takes time, and many do not make the transition.”
From the beginning, eight years ago, NATO/ISAF took on the monumental task to build a new national army out of the rubble of decades of war, all the while in the midst of an ongoing insurgency.
General McChrystal insists there’s still time to correct failures, but only if the US and NATO allies have the will to commit massive resources, including many more billions of dollars and, also, to work much more closely together as an alliance. Given the mixed results so far, however, such an effort will require allies to find a much higher degree of faith in the mission than they’ve collectively shown in recent years.
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Have a comment / question about the above entry? Write me at: stewart.mcis@gmail.com
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More from Brian Stewart at CBC.ca:
CBC News - Canada - CIDA and the emasculation of Canadian altruism
Brian Stewart on the mess that is the Canadian International Development Agency.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/11/18/f-vp-stewart.html
CBC News - Canada - Too early to sign the death warrant
Brian Stewart on the tough decisions ahead for Afghanistan.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/11/10/f-vp-stewart.html
CBC News - World - The untold story of how bad it really is
Brian Stewart describes the poor state of Afghanistan's army.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/11/06/f-vp-stewart.html
CBC News - World - And now for the good news
Brian Stewart on a promising Canadian-sponsored pilot project in Ethiopia.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/10/15/f-vp-stewart.html
CBC News - World - A country you can never stop worrying about
Are we underestimating Ethiopia's fragility, Brian Stewart asks?
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/10/09/f-vp-stewart.html