Afghanistan's Sham Army

Success in
Afghanistan is measured in Washington by the ability to create an
indigenous army that will battle the Taliban, provide security and
stability for Afghan civilians and remain loyal to the puppet
government of Hamid Karzai. A similar task eluded the Red Army,
although the Soviets spent a decade attempting to pacify the country.
It eluded the British a century earlier. And the United States, too,
will fail.

American military advisers who work with the Afghan National Army,
or ANA, speak of poorly trained and unmotivated Afghan soldiers who
have little stomach for military discipline and even less for fighting.
They describe many ANA units as being filled with brigands who
terrorize local populations, exacting payments and engaging in
intimidation, rape and theft. They contend that the ANA is riddled with
Taliban sympathizers. And when there are combined American and Afghan
operations against the Taliban insurgents, ANA soldiers are fickle and
unreliable combatants, the U.S. advisers say.

American military commanders in Afghanistan, rather than pump out
statistics about enemy body counts, measure progress by the swelling
size of the ANA. The bigger the ANA, the better we are supposedly
doing. The pressure on trainers to increase the numbers of the ANA
means that training and vetting of incoming Afghan recruits is nearly
nonexistent.

The process of induction for Afghan soldiers begins at the Kabul
Military Training Center. American instructors at the Kabul center
routinely complain of shortages of school supplies such as whiteboards,
markers and paper. They often have to go to markets and pay for these
supplies on their own or do without them. Instructors are pressured to
pass all recruits and graduate many who have been absent for a third to
half the training time. Most are inducted into the ANA without having
mastered rudimentary military skills.

"I served the first half of my tour at the Kabul Military Training
Center, where I was part of a small team working closely with the ANA
to set up the country's first officer basic course for newly
commissioned Afghan lieutenants," a U.S. Army first lieutenant who was
deployed last year and who asked not to be identified by name told me.
"During the second half of my tour, I left Kabul's military schoolhouse
and was reassigned to an embedded tactical training team, or ETT team,
to help stand up a new Afghan logistics battalion in Herat."

"Afghan soldiers leave the KMTC grossly unqualified," this
lieutenant, who remains on active duty, said. "American mentors do what
they can to try and fix these problems, but their efforts are blocked
by pressure from higher, both in Afghan and American chains of command,
to pump out as many soldiers as fast as possible."

Afghan soldiers are sent from the Kabul Military Training Center
directly to active-duty ANA units. The units always have American
trainers, know as a "mentoring team," attached to them. The rapid
increase in ANA soldiers has outstripped the ability of the American
military to provide trained mentoring teams. The teams, normally
comprised of members of the Army Special Forces, are now formed by
plucking American soldiers, more or less at random, from units all over
Afghanistan.

"This is how my entire team was selected during the middle of my
tour: a random group of people from all over Kabul-Air Force, Navy,
Army, active-duty and National Guard-pulled from their previous
assignments, thrown together and expected to do a job that none of us
were trained in any meaningful way to do," the officer said. "We are
expected, by virtue of time-in-grade and membership in the U.S.
military, to be able to train a foreign force in military operations,
an extremely irresponsible policy that is ethnocentric at its core and
which assumes some sort of natural superiority in which an untrained
American soldier has everything to teach the Afghans, but nothing to
learn."

"You're lucky enough if you had any mentorship training at all,
something the Army provides in a limited capacity at pre-mobilization
training at Fort Riley, but having none is the norm," he said.
"Soldiers who receive their pre-mobilization training at Fort Bragg
learn absolutely nothing about mentoring foreign forces aside from
being given a booklet on the subject, and yet soldiers who go through
Bragg before being shipped to Afghanistan are just as likely to be
assigned to mentoring teams as anyone else."

The differences between the Afghan military structure and the
American military structure are substantial. The ANA handles logistics
differently. Its rank structure is not the same. Its administration
uses different military terms. It rarely works with the aid of
computers or basic technology. The cultural divide leaves most
trainers, who do not speak Dari, struggling to figure out how things work in the ANA.

"The majority of my time spent as a mentor involved trying to
understand what the Afghans were doing and how they were expected to do
it, and only then could I even begin to advise anyone on the problems
they were facing," this officer said. "In other words, American
military advisers aren't immediately helpful to Afghans. There is a
major learning curve involved that is sometimes never overcome. Some
advisers play a pivotal role, but many have little or no effect as
mentors."

The real purpose of American advisers assigned to ANA
units, however, is not ultimately to train Afghans but to function as a
liaison between Afghan units and American firepower and logistics. The
ANA is unable to integrate ground units with artillery and air support.
It has no functioning supply system. It depends on the American
military to do basic tasks. The United States even pays the bulk of ANA
salaries.

"In the unit I was helping to mentor, orders for mission-essential
equipment such as five-ton trucks went unfilled for months, and winter
clothes came late due to national shortages," the officer told me.
"Many soldiers in the unit had to make do for the first few weeks of
Afghanistan's winter without jackets or other cold-weather items."

But what disturbs advisers most is the widespread corruption within
the ANA which has enraged and alienated local Afghans and proved to be
a potent recruiting tool for the Taliban.

"In the Afghan logistics battalion I was embedded with, the
commander himself was extorting a local shopkeeper, and his staff
routinely stole from the local store," the adviser said. "In Kabul, on
one humanitarian aid mission I was on, we handed out school supplies to
children, and in an attempt to lend validity to the ANA we had them
[ANA members] distribute the supplies. As it turns out, we received
intelligence reports that that very same group of ANA had been
extorting money from the villagers under threat of violence. In
essence, we teamed up with well-known criminals and local thugs to
distribute aid in the very village they had been terrorizing, and that
was the face of American charity."

We have pumped billions of dollars into Afghanistan and occupied the
country for eight years. We currently spend some $4 billion a month on
Afghanistan. But we are unable to pay for whiteboards and markers for
instructors at the Kabul Military Training Center. Afghan soldiers lack
winter jackets. Kabul is still in ruins. Unemployment is estimated at
about 40 percent. And Afghanistan is one of the most food-insecure
countries on the planet.

What are we doing? Where is this money going?

Look to the civilian contractors. These contractors dominate the
lucrative jobs in Afghanistan. The American military, along with the
ANA, is considered a poor relation.

"When I arrived in theater, one of the things I was shocked to see
was how many civilians were there," the U.S. officer said. "Americans
and foreign nationals from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia were
holding jobs in great numbers in Kabul. There are a ton of corporations
in Afghanistan performing labor that was once exclusively in the realm
of the military. If you're a [military] cook, someone from Kellogg
Brown & Root has taken your spot. If you're a logistician or
military adviser, someone from MPRI, Military Professional Resources
Inc., will probably take over your job soon. If you're a technician or
a mechanic, there are civilians from Harris Corp. and other companies
there who are taking over more and more of your responsibilities."

"I deployed with a small unit of about 100 or so military advisers
and mentors," he went on. "When we arrived in Afghanistan, nearly half
our unit had to be reassigned because their jobs had been taken over by
civilians from MPRI. It seems that even in a war zone, soldiers are at
risk of losing their jobs to outsourcing. And if you're a reservist,
the situation is even more unfortunate. You are torn from your life to
serve a yearlong tour of duty away from your civilian job, your friends
and family only to end up in Afghanistan with nothing to do because
your military duty was passed on to a civilian contractor. Eventually
you are thrown onto a mentoring team somewhere, or some [other]
responsibility is created for you. It becomes evident that the
corporate presence in Afghanistan has a direct effect on combat
operations."

The American military has been largely privatized, although Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in
Afghanistan, has still recommended a 40,000-troop increase. The Army's
basic functions have been outsourced to no-bid contractors. What was
once done by the military with concern for tactical and strategic
advancement is done by war profiteers concerned solely about profit.
The aims of the military and the contractors are in conflict. A scaling
down of the war or a withdrawal is viewed by these corporations as bad
for business. But expansion of the war, as many veterans will attest,
is only making the situation more precarious.

"American and Afghan soldiers are putting their lives at risk,
Afghan civilians are dying, and yet there's this underlying system in
place that gains more from keeping all of them in harm's way rather
than taking them out of it," the officer complained. "If we bring peace
and stability to Afghanistan, we may profit morally, we might make
gains for humanity, but moral profits and human gains do not contribute
to the bottom line. Peace and profit are ultimately contradictory
forces at work in Afghanistan."

The wells that are dug, the schools that are built, the
roads that are paved and the food distributed in Afghan villages by the
occupation forces are used to obscure the huge profits made by
contractors. Only an estimated 10 percent of the money poured into
Afghanistan is used to ameliorate the suffering of Afghan civilians.
The remainder is swallowed by contractors who siphon the money out of
Afghanistan and into foreign bank accounts. This misguided allocation
of funds is compounded in Afghanistan because the highest-paying jobs
for Afghans go to those who can act as interpreters for the American
military and foreign contractors. The best-educated Afghans are enticed
away from Afghan institutions that desperately need their skills and
education.

"It is this system that has broken the logistics of Afghanistan,"
the officer said. "It is this system of waste and private profit from
public funds that keeps Kabul in ruins. It is this system that manages
to feed Westerners all across the country steak and lobster once a week
while an estimated 8.4 million Afghans-the entire population of New
York City, the five boroughs-suffer from chronic food insecurity and
starvation every day. When you go to Bagram Air Base, or Camp Phoenix,
or Camp Eggers, it's clear to see that the problem does not lie in
getting supplies into the country. The question becomes who gets them.
And we wonder why there's an insurgency."

The problem in Afghanistan is not ultimately a military problem. It
is a political and social problem. The real threat to stability in
Afghanistan is not the Taliban, but widespread hunger and food
shortages, crippling poverty, rape, corruption and a staggering rate of
unemployment that mounts as foreign companies take jobs away from the
local workers and businesses. The corruption and abuse by the Karzai
government and the ANA, along with the presence of foreign contractors,
are the central impediments to peace. The more we empower these forces,
the worse the war will become. The plan to escalate the number of
American soldiers and Marines, and to swell the ranks of the Afghan
National Army, will not or defeat or pacify the Taliban.

"What good are a quarter-million well-trained Afghan troops to a
nation slipping into famine?" the officer asked. "What purpose does a
strong military serve with a corrupt and inept government in place?
What hope do we have for peace if the best jobs for the Afghans involve
working for the military? What is the point of getting rid of the
Taliban if it means killing civilians with airstrikes and supporting a
government of misogynist warlords and criminals?

"We as Americans do not help the Afghans by sending in more troops,
by increasing military spending, by adding chaos to disorder," he said.
"What little help we do provide is only useful in the short term and is
clearly unsustainable in the face of our own economic crisis. In the
end, no one benefits from this war, not America, not Afghans. Only the
CEOs and executive officers of war-profiteering corporations find
satisfactory returns on their investments."