"Seven reasons why Afghan army building is a slow process"

BruceR at Flit:

Yglesias asks, WRT training the ANA: why is it taking so long?

I don't have a complete answer to that question. There's a couple issues here, that I've tried to hint at in posts below going back to April when I got back. What I can say fairly certainly is this: at some point in this game, saying something takes a long time is going to be the equivalent of saying it's impossible. And raising an army in a country where security is this uncertain may well be impossible in a realistic timescale for us.

Now, you say, jeez, lots of countries have raised armies during wars, so what's the big deal? Here's what I would characterize as some of the major unresolved issues we're facing:

1. Building anew is harder than renovating.
2. Multinational coalitions are inherently less efficient at army building.
3. Force protection measures in a warzone limit mentoring.
4. We still have limited experience with the culture at our command levels.
5. Giving someone independence before you give them an army limits what you can do later.
6. Growing in size and in quality at the same time is hard.
7. Risk aversion: in some ways, we've taught them too well.

More below the fold [see 2. esp.]...

UPDATE: Please note that in this analysis I am implicitly rejecting many of the common arguments why ANA mentoring has not been a fast process to date: both cultural (ie, Afghans are inscrutable or implicitly corrupt) and motivational (their soldiers are poorly paid or have divided loyalties), based purely on my own limited experience working alongside them from last September to April. The Afghans I worked with didn't have an outsized number of either rogues or heroes in their ranks by my reckoning. Goodwill between us was consistently mutual and culture no barrier: every issue we came across as a team, we managed to find a solution for. Afghan soldiers are not poorly paid, compared to the average national wage right now, and all those I worked with were professional soldiers and officers, who keenly wanted the government side to win in the fight they were engaged in, even if they were as skeptical as I would eventually become about the prospects for success.

I'm also rejecting excuses of literacy and language barriers. Illiterate armies have been trained to fight before*, and the language barrier has not only also proven historically surmountable, but seems utterly solvable here with the proper application of our resources to the problem. No, the argument I'm making above is that the really difficult issues are structural, relating to the assumptions behind our entire counterinsurgency approach, and are not unique in any way to the Afghan milieu. The next time we go to apply our Counter-insurgency Manual [more here and here] to any part of the world, a manual which clearly states that victory only comes when you can hand the fight off to indigenous forces, these same problems are prone to recurrence.

*The same goes for most other technology-related excuses. Yes, the ANA could use more computers. But while the complexity of the task would be enabled by digitization, it does not require it. Armies have self-organized with much less.

And earlier at Flit:

On mentoring and the ANA

Why isn't army-building working (pt. 2)?