The truth hurts
Posted By Bouhammer on November 6, 2009
It was just the other day when I wrote about the struggle we have in finding qualified and trustworthy Afghans to fill the jobs in both the army and police force. In fact if you go back and look at my archives, you will see where I wrote about the struggle to maintain any decent number of soldiers and police many times. I agree with Gen McChrystal that he needs to grow the Army and Police, but if they get too desperate to grow the forces to fast then it is obvious that some will make it in the system who are sub-standard. Soldiers and especially officers in the Afghan army going AWOL is a huge problem and was an issue that my ETT team spent countless hours dealing with and trying to stop.
The article below is grim and not the greatest news, but I have to tell you it is the truth and sometimes the truth hurts.
WASHINGTON — A series of internal government reviews have presented the Obama administration with a dire portrait of Afghanistan’s military and police force, bringing into serious question an ambitious goal at the heart of the evolving U.S. war strategy: to speed up their training and send many more Afghans to the fight.
As President Barack Obama considers his top commander’s call to rapidly double Afghanistan’s security forces, the internal reviews, written by officials directly involved in the training program or charged with keeping it on track, describe an overstretched enterprise struggling to nurse along the poorly led, largely illiterate and often corrupt Afghan forces.
In September, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan, recommended increasing the Afghan army as quickly as possible — to 134,000 in a year from the current force of more than 90,000, instead of taking two years, and perhaps eventually to 240,000. He would also expand the police force to 160,000. The acceleration is vital to McChrystal’s overall counterinsurgency plan, which also calls for more U.S. troops but seeks more protection against the Taliban for the Afghan population than the Pentagon could ever supply.
While McChrystal knew of the latest assessments when he wrote his plan, their completion just as Obama considers the general’s proposal has given fresh ammunition to doubters.
Story continues below“Nothing in our experience over the last seven to eight years suggests that progress at such a rapid pace is realistic,” said Rep. John F. Tierney, D-Mass., who is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on national security.
The latest reports offer new details that show just how difficult it will be to meet McChrystal’s training goal. Among the previously undisclosed conclusions: one out of every four or five men in the security forces quit each year, meaning that tens of thousands must be recruited just to maintain the status quo. The number of Afghan battalions able to fight independently actually declined in the past six months.
“The most significant challenge to rapidly expanding the Afghan National Security Forces is a lack of competent and professional leadership at all levels, and the inability to generate it rapidly,” concluded one of the reviews, a grim assessment forwarded to Washington in September from the U.S.-led training headquarters.
Another September report, the Pentagon inspector general’s annual review of the training program, warned that any acceleration “will face major challenges.”
A third assessment, a quarterly report sent to Congress last week, revealed that despite the formation of new army battalions, fewer of them were capable of operating independently. One reason may be that the Afghan army’s jerry-built logistics system, a relic of the Soviet era and one of the training program’s orphans, has become a drag on the combat forces.
The problems have been a recurring topic during Obama’s policy review, broken out for separate discussion among the president and his top advisers. Accelerated training has been one of the constants among the various options before them. “We’re aware that it’s an enormous challenge,” one senior administration official said. “We feel, though, this is essential for any strategy going forward.”
Among other problems, one of the reports found, the U.S. military’s training headquarters simply does not have enough people to do all it is already being asked to do, a flaw that “has delayed and will continue to delay” building the Afghan forces and that unless corrected would only prolong the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
(Despite the obstacles, few disagree that Afghanistan’s forces must eventually become bigger and better. And senior Pentagon and military officials insist that it can happen faster, too. But it may take 10,000 to 15,000 more trainers from the United States and NATO, which have just agreed to overhaul the training program.
Story continues belowToday, only about one in 10 Afghan police units is capable of operating wholly independently, according to the latest report to Congress. Despite that, the police force is constantly attacked and is suffering casualties at an even greater rate than the Afghan or U.S. military, it said.
The Afghan National Police currently fields 92,000 people, but only 24,000 have actually completed formal training, according to Pentagon records. The attrition rate is 25 percent, the training command in Afghanistan reported. The situation is not much better in the army, with 19 percent attrition.
“Clearly we will have to continue generating new forces at the small-unit level,” Caldwell said. “But leader development also has to be a priority. For us to have enduring and sustainable Afghan security forces, we have to put commensurate time and effort into the leader portion of the training effort.”
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