Are Afghan forces up to the job?
Doubts remain despite years of preparation
KABUL — The new Afghan armoured vehicles swing into action, kicking up dust as French and British army officers observe how wellprepared their trainees are for combat.
More than a dozen of the $800,000 vehicles are involved in this latest exercise, but that’s just a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars that countries, including Canada, have poured into creating and sustaining Afghanistan’s security forces.
The official line from the officers observing the training on the outskirts of Kabul is that things are going well. Unofficially, though, they have their doubts. They question whether the Afghan military will be able to hold its own against a determined and resilient enemy after international forces pull out this year.
As the vehicle crews open fire at targets downrange, French commandos circulate among the western journalists and French, Canadian and British officers, keeping a close protective watch. Each has a rifle equipped with a specialized grenade and all are ready to fire at the Afghan vehicles if the heavily armed turrets point in the direction of the foreigners.
“We don’t expect a problem, but I told them if those guns swing around towards us then we’ll kill them,” a French officer said.
It’s a reflection of the current situation in Afghanistan, where so-called insider attacks are still a problem, although they are not getting as much attention in the western news media as they once did.
Last year, Afghan soldiers and police killed 14 of their coalition trainers. Some of the killings are the result of insurgent infiltration into the ranks. In other cases, Afghans have opened fire on the foreign soldiers because of perceived slights.
Still, officers say the massive coalition effort will result in a properly trained and equipped indigenous force able to take responsibility for the country’s security and end — or at least hold back — the insurgency.
Such a strategy has been tried before. When the Soviets pulled out their troops in 1989 they left Afghanistan with what they hoped was an effective military. Although smaller than the current force, it was better equipped; its weapons inventory included fighter jets, attack helicopters, transport planes, artillery, tanks and Scud missile launchers. Many leaders, including some now serving in today’s Afghan National Army, were trained in Moscow.
But that military fell apart when Russian funding and supplies ground to a halt as the Soviet Union collapsed. Civil war erupted and eventually the Taliban emerged to rule the country.
After the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, a new Afghan military was formed. Training began in 2002 and within a year troops were sent into the field. By the following year, coalition soldiers had trained a force of 38,000 Afghans. But attrition was high and numbers continued to fluctuate, dropping to 21,000 by 2005.
Canadian Forces officers generally painted a positive picture of the situation over the years. Afghans, they pointed out, were natural warriors. Indeed, the Afghan National Army, or ANA, was so successful it was planning and conducting its own military operations in Kandahar by 2007, officers noted.
Canada’s allies and their soldiers were, however, more blunt. Some ANA soldiers were suspected of cooperating with insurgents or stealing equipment, they said. Afghan police forces were more akin to criminal gangs.
During an August 2008 ambush of U.S. and French troops just 40 kilometres east of Kabul, Afghan soldiers ran away, leaving their equipment on the battlefield, according to a confidential NATO report.
The Guardian newspaper highlighted a video in which U.S. trainers were brutally honest about the incompetence and rampant drug use among the Afghan soldiers.
In June 2008 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a damning in-depth assessment of the training of Afghan security forces. The government watchdog agency found that $16.5 billion had been spent from 2002 to 2008 on training the ANA and the Afghan National Police (ANP). For that money, only two of the 105 ANA units were assessed as being fully operational. And although the ANA claimed 37,866 combat troops, the actual number was significantly lower because of attrition, absenteeism, and casualties.
The ANP was worse off, the GAO determined. Although the U.S. had spent $6 billion training and equipping the police, no ANP unit was assessed as being fully capable of performing its mission. Of 364 units, only 12 were seen as being capable of leading an operation without NATO support.
Other U.S. government investigations were also finding disturbing evidence that all was not well with the ANA. Military officers investigating an October 2009 attack on a U.S. outpost near the Pakistani border, in which eight Americans were killed and 22 injured, discovered widespread cowardice among the ANA. Afghan soldiers hid or remained in their barracks during the intense fighting.
Another U.S. trainer in Baghlan province, Capt. Michael Bell, recounted a 2009 firefight in which American and ANA troops were caught in an ambush. After returning some initial fire, the troops simply lay in a ditch, refusing to budge, Stars and Stripes newspaper reported. Bell tried for an hour, under fire, to get them to shoot back but was unsuccessful.
In May 2010 the Canadian public got a similar glimpse of the situation during the court martial of Capt. Robert Semrau, the soldier accused of murder in the 2008 shooting death of a wounded insurgent. Semrau had been in charge of a training team, working with the ANA at a forward operating base west of Kandahar City.
During their testimony at his trial, the Canadian members of Semrau’s team described the reality of working with the ANA. The Afghans were unmotivated and tired offighting.ANA officers were lacking in skills. Lower-level soldiers couldn’t understand maps. Drug use was common. Since the Afghan soldiers had few supplies, they would often strip the bodies of dead in surgents for ammunition and weapons.
By late 2009, with the Afghan training program in a shambles, the U.S. decided major changes had to be made. U.S. Lt.-Gen. William Caldwell put an end to the practice of churning out thousands of ill-prepared recruits, instead focusing on quality training. More foreign instructors were brought in. Pay was increased.
The situation now has significantly improved, according to Afghan and Canadian generals. “Currently the ANA is in its best shape, ready for all kinds of combat operations,” Lt.-Gen. Mohammad Akram, the ANA’s vice-chief of the general staff, told Postmedia News during an interview at his Kabul headquarters.
Afghan troops are conducting missions across the country without the help of foreign troops, he added.
A short distance from Akram’s office, Canadian Maj.-Gen. Dean Milner, who is in charge of NATO’s training mission, has a similar assessment. Milner says Afghan security forces have come a long way. They are capable and well-equipped, he adds. “Is it perfect?” he said. “It’s not perfect but they get better every day.”
Other organizations have pointed out those imperfections. In 2012, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction warned that an estimated 50 per cent of ANA soldiers were using drugs.
SIGAR, as the government watchdog is known, also questioned the accuracy of the ANA and ANP numbers. In a 2013 audit, SIGAR noted coalition forces had no way to determine if the police and army numbers were even accurate as they relied on the Afghans themselves for those figures. In addition, there had been previous attempts by some commanders to defraud NATO by claiming non-existent soldiers or police in the ranks in order to collect their salaries.
A Pentagon report written last year also raised concerns about how committed Afghan forces were. In some cases, troops had negotiated deals with insurgents to avoid coming under attack.
Another concern focuses on Afghan casualty rates. In 2013 the figure skyrocketed to around 100 a week, with most caused by improvised explosive devices.
It is now estimated that 25 Afghan soldiers and police are either wounded or killed each week.
Casualties aside, another key problem is the sheer size of the Afghan security force, which now numbers more than 340,000. Afghanistan doesn’t have the money to pay for a force that size. The bill for fielding and equipping that many troops and police officers is around $6 billion annually. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is about $19 billion.
Milner acknowledges the situation is financially unsustainable; he says the international community will have to continue supporting Afghan security forces. Over the longer term there is a plan to reduce the size of the Afghan military and police, he adds.
The insurgency, however, will factor prominently when and if that reduction can happen. And those fighters have provided no indication they are prepared to lay down their arms.