"The most important piece on the Afghan army you'll ever read"

BruceR. of Flit knows his mentoring:

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I cannot recommend this piece, by USMC Col (retd.) Haynes on how to fix Afghan army mentoring, highly enough. It's a brilliant recap of everything the good mentors have been saying in public and in private about the ANA. Everything he says, pro and con, could have been said about the Afghans I worked with in a different corps in a different part of the country. It's pieces like this that keep my hope alive for this mission: for we really are learning how to do this right, bit by precious bit.

I sincerely hope that when people are looking at operationalizing the President's undoubtedly fine words to come tomorrow night about building up Afghan military capacity, in order that the West can leave, they think of this piece. Like so many other good proposals, it assumes a degree of Afghan government cooperation with the plan that has not often been in evidence to date, but other than that, I only wish I'd written it. If we all fail in the end, it will be because advice this good wasn't followed in the end:

To get more out of the ANA and decrease the requirement for additional US troops, we urgently need a construct that creates a sense of ANA responsibility and accountability of the security situation in a given area...

Exactly, exactly right. In Afghanistan when I was there, there was not even a formalization of a command relationship ("Tactical Control" being the loosest defined in NATO doctrine) as soldiers understand the term with regard to the ANA. They did their thing, and we did ours, in overlapping battlespace...