ANA vs. ANP

Interesting stuff from BruceR at Flit:

Good UK Channel 4 clip on British soldiers and mentors in Helmand...

The Afghan army officers of 2008-09 I worked closely with had internalized at a deep level (I'm not really sure how we managed it) that suppression of internal unrest was really an activity for the police, while the army existed to repel foreign aggressors. In that sense, they were really sort of the opposite of COIN-trained. If the enemy ever gathered in large numbers, of course, they'd probably have been more inclined to do something. But the insurgents we were actually facing they saw as really none of their business, because the IED-layers were locals, and not Pakistanis, making it a "police matter." As far as the day-to-day counterinsurgency fight went, these attitudes often proved problematic.

The ANA at the time would not detain people, for instance...

It's obviously difficult to fight an insurgency if you and your indigenous forces can't/won't either detain people or enter occupied dwellings. That's why by the end of tour I was seeing larger payoffs per unit of effort spent in military mentoring of ANP units than the ANA...

And more interesting stuff on the ANA itself at another post:

...
There is a significant risk right now of history [recent in Iraq] repeating itself here in Afghanistan. As the report correctly notes, raising troop quality and quantity rapidly at the same time is extremely difficult. A rapid rise in the number of security forces will almost always seem to result in a short-term decline in their average capability, as the few competent individuals are thin-sliced across a larger force. (See also Kitchener's Army, 1915.) This is why recent statements by Western leaders that we need to rapidly create Afghan forces capable of fighting a counterinsurgency, AND rapidly increase the numbers of them at the same time, are at least partially contradictory...

Virtually all the brigades in the Iraqi Army can now be deployed throughout the country.

This is not not currently true in Afghanistan, where most ANA brigades cannot be effectively deployed far outside their home provinces. This is not their problem: it's a limitation of the multi-national ISAF mentorship approach, as explained in a previous post...

This is really why Iraq and Afghanistan army creation efforts are so different from previous attempts in history. When the British created the Indian army, it was to enrol locals at junior ranks to fight in a British regimental structure. As the decades past, gradually Indians took over larger and larger roles in their own leadership, to the point where in 1947 the Indian and Pakistani armies had no major issues transitioning at independence. We're trying to help these countries build large armies from zero in the space of a few years, without exerting any authority over their finances, logistics, administration or operations. Successful examples of this in history are extremely rare, and failures common (ARVN, etc.). If Iraq is successful, it will pretty much be the first, and Afghanistan the second. Graduating private/corporals is easy. Building an army to modern, counterinsurgency-capable standards is hard...

...The United States needs to focus on essentials and not on trying to create a mirror image... in short, there seems to be too much U.S. emphasis on changing the entire culture and structure of the Iraqi legal system rather than in improving the existing system."

A valuable observation in the Afghanistan context, as well...

...Our brigade HQ, as this press release correctly states was one of only a few rated at CM1, the highest rating possible. The same brigade HQ also deployed repeatedly during the same period on operations without any maps, or the plastic for waterproofing them, tents, chairs, or a working generator... even though in many cases we'd given a new issue of those items to them just before we left ourselves. Until you can keep those two facts in your head at the same time (and all those above, as well), you really haven't grasped the IA [Iraqi Army]/ANA mentoring experience.

Long road...