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National Security

Afghan security force’s rapid expansion comes at a cost as readiness lags

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran,October 20, 2012

(Page 3 of 4)

The U.S. military has imposed unnecessary methods and impractical equipment on the Afghans. American commanders funded large, U.S.-style division headquarters with command centers that feature wall-mounted plasma screens and staff officers schooled in making PowerPoint slides, even though many of those facilities lack reliable electricity. Critics within the U.S. ranks contend that dry-erase boards and paper maps would have been sufficient.

The construction of big bases around the country has encouraged Afghan soldiers to copy a base-centric way of war adopted by some U.S. Army units — they wake up, eat, go for a patrol and then return in time for a hot meal before falling asleep in their beds — instead of staying in the field for weeks on end, which was how Afghans fought the Soviets in the 1980s. “We’ve taught them our worst habits,” said a former Navy SEAL who has served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Afghanistan.

Instead of equipping Afghan soldiers with AK-47 rifles, which Afghans are well versed in firing, the U.S. military gave them M-16s, which are far more complicated to maintain and tend to jam when not cleaned properly. The decision was the result of pressure from former defense minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, who argued to Pentagon officials and members of Congress that American weapons would make his army appear more professional, despite concerns from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan that the soldiers would be unable to care for the guns.

Numerous senior U.S. military officials contend that the army’s development has been hindered by Wardak’s insistence on making his force appear as American as possible — a goal that found ready support from U.S. commanders — and designing it to repel a foreign invasion, not wage a domestic counterinsurgency fight. He urged the Pentagon to give Afghanistan F-16 fighter jets and M1 Abrams battle tanks.

Although those requests were rejected, he succeeded in beating back other U.S. efforts to reshape the security services for counterinsurgency operations, including proposals to make the police larger than the army. He also sought to deploy the army into many remote areas, creating enormous logistics burdens. Because his commanders lack the ability to provide supplies and air support to those forces, U.S. and NATO troops have been forced to fill the gaps and probably will have to keep doing so for years.

Wardak, who was removed by the country’s parliament this summer, told Americans that his approach to weaponry and battlefield tactics was aimed as building a close relationship with the U.S. military. “He figured this would be the best way to get us to keep supporting them for years and years,” said a senior U.S. military official who has had numerous conversations with Wardak.

Training experience

The U.S. and NATO training command in Kabul did not cut corners to reach the 352,000 goal, but several veteran U.S. officers and civilian experts involved in the force development effort contend that the rapid expansion foreclosed approaches used by the military to more successfully build armies in other parts of the world.

The only U.S. troops who have extensive experience training foreign militaries are Army Special Forces soldiers, but the commanders chose not to rely on the elite Green Berets, because there were not enough available units to build such a large Afghan army. Instead, the focus on size drove the Pentagon to assemble a rump squad of National Guard soldiers, reservists and individual active-duty personnel pulled from installations around the United States.

The result, said one officer involved in the effort, was “a hodgepodge of mentor teams composed of guys who had never worked together.”

The need to expand the force rapidly meant jettisoning other long-held tenets of security force development: small group instruction, careful vetting to weed out infiltrators, and restrictions on creating systems and structures that cannot be sustained once foreign advisers leave.

New recruits had their fingerprints and iris scans run through a database of suspected insurgents, but that was largely the extent of the screening. The Defense Ministry and the Afghan intelligence service did not have the manpower to conduct meaningful background checks on so many applicants.

Had there been fewer Afghans to vet, and had there been more allied mentors within the ranks, the chances of spotting potential insurgent infiltrators and other problematic soldiers might have increased, according to the officers and specialists who supported a smaller force. “The best way to spot the bad apples is to be constantly with these guys — eating with them, sleeping with them — but we didn’t do that nearly often enough,” said the Special Forces major who worked with Afghan soldiers.

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