Afghan Army Attack Shines Light on Unpopular Occupation

A member of the Afghan National Army opened fire on a group of
British soldiers yesterday, killing three and wounding four others.

The attack occurred on a NATO base outside of Kandahar when the
soldier opened fire with a machine gun and rocket-propelled grenade
launcher before fleeing.

British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the attack stating
"it is absolutely essential that we don't let this terrible incident
change our strategy. It is the right thing to do to build up the Afghan
national army". British Defense Secretary Liam Fox echoed him, saying
that the attack "will not undermine the real progress we continue to
make."

But a good look at the state of the Afghan National Army (ANA), the
Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF, the national police) and the
ever-rising casualty rates among NATO troops seems to contradict the
idea of "continued progress".

In fact, it reveals that this unpopular and prolonged occupation will probably continue to worsen.

This June was by far the deadliest month for NATO forces since the
occupation started in 2001, with 102 deaths. This latest attack brings
July's death toll to 34, which puts it roughly on par with the second
deadliest month of the occupation, last August, when 77 troops were
killed

Casualty rates among NATO troops have been increasing consistently
since the end of 2002, when 69 coalition troops died. 2008 saw 295
coalition troops killed in combat, with last year's total reaching 521.
If the current rate continues, nearly 650 could die by the end of the
year.

With major fighting approaching in Kandahar, all signs point to an expanding and increasingly deadly conflict.

Brock McIntosh, a U.S. National Guardsmen who served in Afghanistan
from November 2008 to August 2009, described the rising violence to me
in a interview. "The longer we are there, the worse it will get", he
states bluntly. "The more sophisticated our armor, the bigger the
explosions will be."

On top of this worsening violence, the Afghan National Army's
desertion rate, which has remained at similar levels since the start of
the war, is starting to poke holes in the myth that NATO forces are
approaching some sort of stability in the country.

In the first two years of the occupation, according to the Naval
Postgraduate School's Culture and Conflict Review (pdf), the desertion rate
among the ANA was between 20 and 22 percent.[iv] Of the 100,000
soldiers currently in the ANA, over 9 percent are said to be AWOL or
missing at any given time. Within that, there is a 19% desertion rate
when we look at just Afghan combat troops.

Along with these desertions, there have been numerous attacks by ANA soldiers against NATO troops.

In December 2009 an Afghan soldier shot and killed a US soldier and
wounded two Italian soldiers on a joint-NATO/Afghan base in Badghis
Province. A month earlier, an Afghan policeman "possibly in
conjunction with another" killed five British troops at a checkpoint in
Helmand Province. In 2005 "around 300 men simply walked away (pdf) from
the 205th Corps in Kandahar, or one-twelfth of the entire force."

While those reading the news may be shocked by these stories, soldiers who have served in Afghanistan are not.

"It's really not surprising at all", says Jacob George, who served 3
tours in Afghanistan from 2001-2004 as a Combat Engineer with the U.S.
Army's Special Operation Command. "The ANA is just... it's there. I
wouldn't consider it a functioning unit."

An anonymous U.S. official interviewed in December of last year told
a Washington Times reporter "we're out here fighting, and there isn't
one Afghan face in the mix fighting alongside us." McIntosh,
interviewed in the same article, said Afghan soldiers would often "just
be following behind without actively participating" in missions.

"Most people that we were training with had absolutely nothing but
an AK-47 and a pair of clothes, George says. "They were hoping to get a
meal at the end of each day." Others, according to George, joined "to
get training to bring to the resistance, or to form alliances to funnel
weapons and training into the hands of the resistance."

Along with sympathies with those fighting the NATO occupation,
McIntosh says there are also a lot of Afghan soldiers who are just
trying to make a bit of money. "When there's 50 percent unemployment, a
lot of people will do a lot of things for a paycheck", he says.

In August of 2002 George was stationed at firebase Asadabad in
Kundar Province, which was used for refueling helicopters and
interrogating prisoners. Before arriving there, NATO troops had found a
cache of Soviet weapons and explosives nearby. One day the cache
disappeared. Local Afghans told George and others that it was
trafficked out of the military into the hands of resistance groups.

This led to an attack that happened after he had arrived at
Asadabad. The cache was found and those found with it were killed. "I
wound up carrying a bag of body parts back to the base so they could
try to identify who they had just killed", George told me.

Brock McIntosh was stationed at a Forward Operating Base (FOB) in
Paktika Province in Eastern Afghanistan in 2009. "I was on tower guard
for a month, doing general lookout for the base", he told me. "A lot of
times we would get a call saying something like 'a person in an ANSF
uniform entered such and such base and blew up'."

It is certainly possible that resistance groups or groups linked to
the Taliban utilized such uniforms as cover, but it's also likely that
Afghan police officers or soldiers carried out such actions.

Either way, McIntosh says there is a huge distrust between U.S.
forces and the Afghans. The ANA were also "high all the time", he told
me, but he doesn't fault them for this. "They had a really dangerous
job.", he says. "They were going around looking for IEDs in Ford
Rangers, that's all we bought them. A Ford Ranger can't even stop a
bullet."

In this context, when 6,000 combat-troops desert in areas with heavy
resistance, it leaves one wondering where they've gone. And the likely
scenario is that they have joined the armed resistance to foreign
troops, a reflection of the unpopularity of the U.S./NATO occupation.

Afghanistan's recent history points in this direction too. This is
what tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers did during the Soviet
occupation throughout the 1980s when an estimated 20[i] to 70[ii]
percent of the Afghan military deserted, with many soldiers joining the
ranks of the Mujahideen resistance.

In July of 1980 the Kabul garrison attempted to overthrow the
Soviet-backed government, while their counterparts in Ghanzi seized
their garrison. 4,500 of the 5,000 troops stationed there soon deserted
to the Mujahideen.[iii] In 1982 1,000 of 8,000-10,000 Afghan soldiers
deserted to the ranks of the Mujahideen during one battle in the
Panjshir Valley.[iv]

Even in the first year of the Soviet occupation the Afghan Army was,
in the words of one Mujahideen commander, a "room with two doors".[v]

According to George, it's been that way since the U.S./NATO
occupation started too. "I never saw any significant improvements in
the ANA from the initial invasion up to 2004", he says.[vi]

Current reports come to the same conclusions. The ANA's combat
desertion rate is at the same level it was in 2005, if not higher, and
their role is increasingly questioned by U.S. service-members.

From George's perspective, this is because most Afghans want the
U.S. and NATO out of their country. "An insurgency of this scale and
sophistication is only possible if there are a lot of people supporting
it", he explains. "That's one of the deeper things we might want to
look at when we consider people in the military switching sides or
deserting."

McIntosh says there are various things at play, but believes that "a
lot of them (Afghan deserters) are probably going over to the Taliban".

"There's deeper cultural complications there too" George adds".
"Many people in the provinces depend on Taliban leadership to provide
things that the central government fails to provide. They will continue
to support them for this reason."

McIntosh describes an ANSF Police Commander stationed across from
his FOB whose cousin was that same region's Taliban commander. "They
had sympathies with them as Pashtuns and for various other reasons", he
explains, "but in general, they are tired of being occupied and treated
paternalistically".

George sees it similarly. "The people by and large don't want
occupation", he says. "Especially when you have an illegitimate
government like Karzai's. It's corrupt to the bone."

When asked what this means for the U.S./NATO occupation in general,
George sees it plain. "We stepped into the middle of a civil war when
this occupation started, and that will continue when we leave."

[i] https://books.google.com/books?id=RUSNyMH1aFQC&pg=PA65&dq=Ghulam+Dastagir+Panjsheri&hl=no#v=onepage&q=Ghulam%20Dastagir%20Panjsheri&f=false, page 162

[ii] Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, Henry S. Bradsher, Duke Press, page 206

[iii] Afghanistan Will Not Die, R. B. Bain

[iv] https://books.google.com/books?id=RUSNyMH1aFQC&pg=PA65&dq=Ghulam+Dastagir+Panjsheri&hl=no#v=onepage&q=Ghulam%20Dastagir%20Panjsheri&f=false, page 162

[v] https://books.google.com/books?id=RUSNyMH1aFQC&pg=PA65&dq=Ghulam+Dastagir+Panjsheri&hl=no#v=onepage&q=Ghulam%20Dastagir%20Panjsheri&f=false, page 162

[vi] Personal interview