Afghanization - delusion or deceit?

By Charles J Dick

The British government is making much of its belief that the British armed forces will be able to cease active operations in Afghanistan by 2014 at the latest and thus it can withdraw its combat troops without detriment to its aims in the country. What these aims are is not entirely clear any more but they certainly include preventing a Taliban return to political dominance in Kabul. Likewise, the selection of 2014 as the year by which it will be prudent to withdraw is not explained: A cynic might suspect that it is near enough to assuage the doubts of those of those who question continuing with the mission yet far enough away for it plausibly to be argued that there is time enough to rectify the results of eight years of neglect and error and turn the war round.

Currently, the Afghan government and its international backers are losing the war, if only because they are not winning it. Time is on the side of the Taliban and its allies, as they well know. In part, this is because western electorates, including the British and American, are turning against the war and their governments will increasingly find a continuing military commitment politically unsustainable.

The way out that all have seized on, one endorsed by President Karzai in July 2010, is Afghanization of the war. The Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF] will be steadily strengthened so that they can increasingly assume the lead role in the counter-insurgency, a transformation that is to be completed by 2014. This will enable international contributors to withdraw from a combat role and take a back seat as trainers and donors of aid. This in turn will end what so many Afghans persist in seeing as foreign occupation and, with the ANSF achieving success, make possible a political deal with 'moderate' elements of the Taliban. It is, however, far from sufficient, as western governments imply, to train and equip the ANSF to assume roles currently undertaken by their forces. The state of Afghan army and police motivation is vastly more important than the state of their training and weaponry; the attitude of the populace is more important still.

One critical element in this equation is the building-up of the Afghan National Army [ANA] until it can stand up to the enemy without foreign support. This process began in earnest only in 2008 and the programme is said by its western sponsors to be going according to plan. The all-volunteer force was more than doubled to 134,000 by July 2010 and the goal is to almost double it again by 2014.

These numbers must, however, be somewhat suspect. Muster rolls are probably padded so that officers can line their pockets and the turnover rate is said to run at about 25%. The quality of recruits is woeful, the product of conscription by hunger: Malnourishment is the rule, perhaps 90% are illiterate and 30% hooked on narcotics. How many insurgent sympathizers have infiltrated can only be a matter for conjecture.

Attempts to instil discipline meet with decidedly mixed success, with, for instance, up to one third absenting themselves from instruction; on operations, avoidance of combat and looting are far from unknown. Unsurprisingly, there is no technical capability in this force; it has to rely on outsiders for control of artillery and air strikes and it lacks engineers and logistic capacity. It is possible that these are the teething problems of an army very rapidly expanded from a low base, though qualitative problems (including officering) will only worsen with further expansion. Whether they can be sorted out in the mooted time scale while increasingly engaged in combat must be questioned.

There are other defects that are systemic and therefore probably ineradicable. The ethnic balance between the country's two largest groups is around 44% Pashtun and only 28% Tajik (though there are no truly dependable statistics and the CIA holds that Tajiks may account for 38%). Neither are reliable figures made available for the composition of the ANA but it would appear that now perhaps as few as 20% are Pashtuns and as many as 60% are Tajiks with the latter providing over 70% of battalion commanders and filling almost all higher positions. This imbalance is hardly surprising as the heartland of the insurgency is the Pashtun south and east (where Pashtun soldiers are often reluctant to serve) and the Taliban's main enemies in the civil war of the nineties were Tajiks and Hazaras. Dari-speaking (and in the latter case, Shia) troops from formerly Taliban-persecuted areas in the north are not well placed to win over anti-government hearts and minds.

The army is riven in another way too. Selection for senior posts, and not-so senior, is not decided on competence but on the basis of patronage and corruption as well as ethnicity. This, of course, is not exactly unusual for this part of the world, but it appears to be taken to extremes and is divisive. Political factionalism is rife, fueled by competition for the spoils of increased western spending, and the national interest is often subordinated to disparate other, sectional interests. It could be argued that today's Afghanistan is bedevilled by three civil wars — north against south, town against country and secular against Islam. When the fragmented nature of the ANA is combined with the myriad of unofficial but powerful militias that remain, the potential for intensification of these, following the departure of US and ISAF forces, is obvious.

If anything, the Afghan National Police [ANP] are even more important than the ANA in the business of state building. After all, when an area is supposedly secured for the government, it is the police that remain as a permanent presence to uphold the rule of law and keep the local population loyal by ensuring that crime is dealt with and administration is honest and fair. Unfortunately, all the problems that beset the army are mirrored in the police force, only to a greater degree as priority has gone to building up the latter and the Americans have tended to regard the ANP as an auxiliary counter-insurgency force rather than giving priority to law enforcement.

The police are regarded very negatively by most people as ignorant of and uninterested in the law, mere tools of local, predatory power brokers when they are not abusing their authority and weaponry to extort money on their own account. Many a captured insurgent has attributed his recruitment to the depredations of the ANP. The sad fact is that Taliban justice is generally seen in much of Afghanistan (probably in most rural areas) as being superior to the regime's. It is hard (though unimpeachably Islamic) but fair and promptly administered; people prefer to go to Taliban courts than trust the partial, corrupt and dilatory official system.

ISAF's commander and western powers rightly see the legitimacy of the government in Kabul as central to the success of the counter-insurgency campaign. President Karzai's regime has largely destroyed that legitimacy. It nakedly pursues power and riches for its élites, resisting all suggestions of reform. It betrays a lack of interest in the wellbeing of the population as a whole and flagrantly disregards the rule of law. Frustratingly for ISAF contributors and the USA, which deplore this counter-productive behaviour, they are seen by many Afghans as the puppet masters of their corrupt government and occupiers of the country for their own, nefarious ends.

The credibility of the regime as a force for good in the country or as a negotiating partner for its foreign supporters or the Taliban has been undermined, probably fatally. It is readily apparent why Taliban influence is continuing to spread, now even in non-Pashtun areas — and it is not solely a matter of intimidation or outside interference as some would have us believe. There is little in Kabul to inspire loyalty, far less a preparedness to die in its defence.

There is an eerily familiar ring to 'Afghanization' and the desire for a deal with the 'moderate' Taliban. Following the strategic disaster of the communist Tet offensive in 1968, US policy in South Vietnam switched to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnam's forces [ARVN] and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops." At the same time, negotiations with the North were embarked upon.

Whatever faith was initially placed in this 'Vietnamization' and accompanying talks, they became a smoke screen behind which America could withdraw from a war which had become a political liability, both at home and abroad, with its reputation apparently still intact. Actually, it was clear even as the Americans were leaving that the low morale of the ARVN and the unpopularity of its government meant that the war was lost.

The questions we must ask today are: do western governments really believe Afghanization can be accomplished successfully? If it is seen to be failing will they still persist with the war — and if so, then what is the way forward? Or is it disingenuous, a cover for a disengagement already decided on; a retreat which can be blamed on the inadequacies of the Afghans rather than on the failures of western policy and its implementation?

Charles Dick is former head, now retired,  at the Conflict Studies Research Centre