Helmand and ANSF problems

From BruceR at Flit:

ANSF deployment limits: people starting to notice?

NYT:

One week after several battalions of Marines swept through the Helmand River valley, military commanders appear increasingly concerned about a lack of Afghan forces in the field.

Oh, there's plenty of Afghans. They just can't be moved to Helmand, some of the reasons for which I tried to explain here. And for reasons explained by Dorronsoro in the post below, one could argue they probably shouldn't be, either.

What I don't understand is why this would come as such a surprise, the way the reporter tells it. The deployment and laydown limitations and other related ANSF problems have been totally self-evident to anyone who has worked with them regularly in theatre recently. I could have told the Americans they weren't going to get another brigade's worth in Helmand by June, as could any number of other people I worked with or for. If the linked report is to be believed, that would imply that in our effort to certify their success, someone has been glossing over deep weaknesses in their capability in their reports to higher. Of course, to misquote Feynman, "reality can't be fooled," so in the end, the only risk there is that we'd end up fooling ourselves. Which, again if the linked report is to be believed, would be implied by what is happening now.

No, I don't buy that the Americans are "increasingly concerned" now, because I honestly don't know who could have dissembled here so badly, and told Gen. Nicholson or his superiors confidently that he'd be getting the numbers of Afghan soldiers he felt he needed for his plan to work, or that having that information he would not identify it as a critical flaw before, you know, the operation actually was launched. But I'll tell you right now it wouldn't have been mentors working at my level... or the ANA, for that matter. They know the score better than we do in that respect. I also recall reading or hearing at least two Western officers of Nicholson's rank level in theatre making statements roughly congruous what I'm saying in this post in semi-privileged forums there, too, and that was months before Nicholson would have arrived. So if there was any wishful thinking about the Afghan security forces in evidence before the operation, where exactly would it have been coming from?

UPDATE: For that matter, I can recall a couple Helmand operations that were cancelled or called off in the last year precisely because it was clear the ANSF were not going to be able to materialize in the numbers required for success. Surely the initial read-in into their area of operations would have brought that to staff planners' attention. No, having this complaint come to the fore just now makes no sense at all from a planning perspective.

No, the Marines knew the problem going in, all right. Perhaps the only person "increasingly concerned" here is the reporter himself. Hey, TIA, man. ("This Is Afghanistan", to misquote Blood Diamond).

Today's essential Afghan reading

Gilles Dorronsoro again, one of the more clear-eyed Afghan commentators:

The ANA’s command and control is still weak and does not enable it to operate
on its own, independent of [international] leadership. Observers in direct contact with the ANA report that operations involving more than 100 troops cannot be effectively conducted autonomously.

True dat. Also of interest:

[Helmand] is not the main base of the Taliban—even though the
opposition is extremely strong there, the organization of the insurgency is not
classically Taliban. Overall, the core territory for the movement is Kandahar, Zabul, and from Ghazni to the south of Wardak. In this area, the Taliban have the support of a significant part of the population and its elites (mostly mullahs, but also landlords and tribal leaders).

Note this is exactly counter to all the planning assumptions that have gone into Western strategy in the south the last two years: that insurgents were primarily crossing into Helmand from Pakistan and then moving west to east toward Kandahar City. Dorronsoro's thesis is that the inflow we need to worry about is actually primarily the other way, with Zabul province "totally under Taliban control."

Now these things do change, and change back, over time. Dorronsoro says Zabul has been the route of choice for guerrilla infiltration historically, but what's not clear is whether he sees this as something that's been the case throughout, or might have recently changed back to something more like the historical norm after the large Western deployments in Helmand started in mid-2008. I can't believe we were so entirely misguided in our earlier assessments there, but certainly it's fair to say that the increased effort in Helmand in the last 12 months has not had the positive effects on the rest of the south we might have hoped for.

How long?