Here’s a fascinating look at the state of Afghanistan’s National Army.
Military mentors from Britain, France and Canada are helping to train the fledgling force. As the Taliban insurgency displays remarkable resilience, western officials present the ANA as a rare success story – and in comparison with the notoriously crooked police, it is. British trainers say the ANA troops are relatively incorrupt and thirst to fight the Taliban. “The problem is not getting them to fight; it’s in trying to make them stop,” said a British officer.
But five years after it was founded, the ANA is far from being a standalone army. Desertion rates, estimated at 20%, remain unacceptably high. There are ethnic imbalances, particularly within the officer ranks. And the ANA still depends on its western mentors for everything – food, ammunition, even a boot out of bed in the morning.
One recent Sunday morning, Lieutenant Colonel Carew Hatherley, commander of the Grenadier Guards, idled beside his vehicle at Camp Shorabak, the joint British-ANA camp in western Helmand. His men were loading their vehicles for a dangerous mission taking supplies to ANA troops in the Taliban-infested Sangin valley. But something was missing – the ANA.
“We’ve gone to their rooms to wake them up,” he said with a half-exasperated smile. “But it’s not a problem, we have to go with it. We’re working on Afghan time today.”
Like most things with the country, it is an weirdly compelling study in contrasts—tradition and modernity, discipline and habit, western ways of war and afghan ways of war. But what is good to see is that the Afghan Army is one of the least corrupt government institutions in the country (that might not be saying much, but it is important, since the national army is more often one of the most corrupt in other countries), and that there is a real desire to drive the Taliban away. Though things like sleeping through a morning call make the Western advisers a bit annoyed at times, there seems a real esprit de corps developing, even if a lot of the soldiers are driven by revenge rather than service. These things take a lot of time.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust