Operation Moshtarak, and ANA problems/ANP Update

BruceR. at Flit discusses them, pointing out many are of ISAF's own making:

1) Marja: not going too well

The ISAF move into Marja, in Helmand province, which Canadian OMLT personnel are participating in, seems to be turning into more of the usual Afghan story. WashPost:

The civilian team's most important immediate task will be to assist the newly appointed district governor, Haji Zahir, who recently returned to Afghanistan after 15 years in Germany. Zahir plans to make his first trip to Marja in the coming days...

2) Marja: not going too well, 2: the ANA performance

The ANA in Helmand is not acquitting itself well in the eyes or Marines or accompanying reporters:

Statements from Kabul have said the Afghan military is planning the missions and leading both the fight and the effort to engage with Afghan civilians caught between the Taliban and the newly arrived troops.

But that assertion conflicts with what is visible in the field...

...They have become our door-kickers. And for that they don't need their own leaders: in fact, stronger leadership on their part would now be an even greater inconvenience to us than the lack of it. Note how the story is about a platoon of Iraqis joins a company of Marines and then is split up among its squads, not treated in any way as an extra, discrete platoon. So what exactly is that Captain commanding it, Amanullah, leading? Yes, he may be an unimpressive leader, but was he unimpressive before he was deprived of any real authority, or because of it? And how exactly now will he reclaim it in the eyes of his men as well as his own mind, short of passively resisting Marine authority until they are rotated somewhere else?..

Chivers and the Times portray this as an ANA failing: "officers and soldiers follow behind the Americans and do what they are told." But that is what we demanded they do. Why is it not an ISAF failing that they could not give this operation, or a significant part of it, to an Afghan battalion or higher level organization with imbedded enablers, working in their own box? Would they have done things differently? Certainly. Badly? Probably...

Update: Excerpts from a story by an American ANP trainer on the still serious problems on that front:

Afghan mess bigger than we thought
...
At the operational level, where I worked with the Afghan National Police (ANP) for 15 months, things look a lot worse.

Operationally, the effort is broken. Assets are misdirected, poorly managed and misused. Graft and corruption in the Afghan forces are endemic, and coalition forces unwittingly enable that corruption. Let's break that into two parts:

Misdirected, mismanaged and misused:

There are several related facets to this issue. Aid agencies, nongovernmental agencies and coalition state and defense departments have all poured money and materiel into the country in poorly coordinated efforts. The Afghan National Army (ANA) has received orders of magnitude more money than the ANP. In any counterinsurgency effort, the police play a vital role in maintaining the rule of law at the local level, but the Afghan police force is pathetically underresourced and undermanned.

It is misemployed. At a meeting of regional police commanders, one commander complained about the use of his police to fight the Taliban. The police are neither trained nor armed adequately to fight the Taliban. He complained about orders to accomplish an army mission...

...length of tour for those mentoring ministry-level efforts is simply too short. Six to eight months is barely enough time to gain an understanding of system dynamics, let alone effect meaningful change. The attitude this engenders in the Afghans is "wait and see." They are reluctant to embrace recommendations from the current mentor because he will change in six months - so they push back out of wariness and fatigue...