The Torch: Afghan training... and performance? Plus two book reviews of<i> War</i>

1) Washington Post:

Training of Afghan military, police has improved, NATO report says

A U.S. military review in Afghanistan has concluded that the addition of more than 1,000 new U.S. military and NATO troops focused on training has helped stabilize what had been a failing effort to build Afghanistan's security forces, but that persistent attrition problems could still hinder long-term success.

"We are finally getting the resources, the people and money," said Army Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who heads the NATO training effort in Afghanistan [site here] and oversaw the review of his command's past 180 days. "We are moving in the right direction."

U.S. war plans depend on Afghan forces maintaining security in areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the U.S. military is adding 30,000 troops this summer. More broadly, the Obama administration's counterinsurgency strategy places a heavy emphasis on an expansion of the Afghan security forces before the United States begins to withdraw troops in July 2011.

Caldwell's report card on the training effort, which The Washington Post obtained in advance and is expected to be released within the next couple of days, paints a mixed picture...

U.S. and Afghan officials are weighing the possibility of increasing combat pay and giving soldiers a break from battle. "We are working real hard to set up a system to rotate units" out of areas where combat is heaviest [emphasis added], Caldwell said.

U.S. commanders have said the performance of Afghan police and army forces in Kandahar, the country's second-largest city, is essential to the military campaign planned for the area this summer. There are concerns that, as fighting with the Taliban increases, recruitment and retention could suffer...

That bolded bit is very important--from BruceR. at Flit almost a year ago:

...we should also understand that a lot of the pressure the army is under, in places like Helmand and Kandahar, is an artificiality we've imposed on them. Because we don't allow them to move their forces around.

I mean, really, there are a lot of Afghan soldiers, or at least a lot more than there used to be: 95 out of a planned 160 kandaks, all kinds, at last report. So why is Helmand Province, where the fighting is the worst, limited to less than half a dozen, and always the same ones? Well, that'd be our influence. For reasons alluded to above, Western military planners are extremely uncomfortable with unmentored Afghan soldiers using heavy weapons within their own battlespace. The mentors, shadowing their charges, if nothing else at least give the other Western soldiers some positional awareness on what the Afghans are up to, significantly reducing the potential for fratricide and confusion. The better ones by their example elevate the Afghans to a higher operational tempo than they otherwise might attempt on their own, and the really good ones provide an occasional lesson that maybe Afghans can learn from. But the liaison element is key. You always need someone on the inside of an Afghan kandak or higher headquarters to work together.

The teams that do this are drawn from all over NATO. For obvious reasons, the NATO country that's providing the ground force element in a specific province or region tends to also provide the ANA mentors. It's hard enough to bridge the cultural divides between Afghans and the West without also bringing in any potential element of friction between a battalion commander from one NATO country and a senior mentor from another. All well and good, but now you've tied that Afghan kandak and all its personnel to the province that country is operating in.

Suppose the Afghan Army high command wanted to reinforce a province like Helmand with another few Kandaks right now. Well, you've got two alternatives there. You can either deploy the Afghans unmentored, at which point it now becomes a new burden on the Western forces in that area to take a couple hundred soldiers away from their other duties, because they're sure as heck not going to be able to have ANA in the battlespace, intermixed with their own units, without that liaison. (Plus another couple hundred Western mentors in the originating region would be out of a job, which the donating country might not appreciate.)

Or you bring the other country's mentors along with you. Which could create all kinds of impossible-to-solve problems for NATO chains of authority and logistics. The mentoring nations may have caveats that prevent them from deploying to a combat zone, to start with. So in the end, the path of least resistance prevails, and the mentors -- and their Afghans -- stay right where they are.

This doesn't just affect the reinforcement of problem areas. In the south of the country, mentor teams are desperate to find training time to help their Afghan charges with their new vehicles and weapons, or to, god forbid, conduct a training exercise of some kind. Well the best way to do that would be to focus those kinds of efforts on the Afghans in the relatively quiet north and west of the country, in 207 or 209 Corps (where the majority of mentors are drawn from Italy and Germany respectively, with a supporting role played by a mix of other NATO countries), and rotate the battalions in and out of the operating theatre (you know, the way we do). They may be very well getting good training in 207 and 209; I have no visibility. But those now highly-trained soldiers they've produced are not likely to ever come south to spell off the soldiers already in the south in order to get any kind of fighting-training rotation thing happen. Because they can't come without mentors, and their mentors can't move.

Even a one-for-one swap of just a kandak or a brigade between mentor teams on opposite sides of the country would be extremely difficult (I've never heard of it actually being done): neither mentoring country involved would likely trust the outcome, if only because Afghan logistical administration is so appallingly poor, with most of the equipment of both kandaks likely "disappearing" during the handover in mentoring. So left unchanged, depending on which corps they were assigned to, some Afghan soldiers in some areas will fight until they die or quit, and some will see very little action for years...

And from a month ago:

Ain't easy training the ANA

2) NY Times:

Taliban Push Afghan Police Out of Valley

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban fighters took control of a remote district near the Pakistani border on Saturday, scattering the forces of the Afghan government, who said they had run out of ammunition.

A force of Taliban attackers entered the district of Barg-e-Matal around 8 a.m. Saturday, after the local police retreated, Colonel Sherzad, the deputy police chief, said in an interview.

“Our forces retreated because they did not have enough ammunition,” he said, echoing other officials in the area. Only 24 hours before, Afghan officials had claimed that they had driven the Taliban from the district into neighboring Pakistan [see here].

The fall of Barg-e-Matal, while embarrassing to the Afghan government, is not necessarily strategically significant. The district sits on an isolated valley in Nuristan Province, one of the most inaccessible places in the country.

The Americans, who provided limited air support over the past few days in clashes with the Taliban, provided none on Saturday. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander here, has emphasized protecting population centers, even at the expense of writing off smaller inaccessible areas.

Barg-e-Matal would seem to qualify. Last year, a group of American soldiers spent two months in the valley to help the Afghan government clear and hold the area and pulled out in September.

Last month, the Americans closed their outposts in the nearby Korengal Valley, an equally remote place, after four years of trying to pacify local Afghans . Local Taliban quickly moved in.

[More here on the Korengal, and do read this review of Sebastian Junger's War about his time with the US Army there--the Toronto Star reviewer liked it too.]

Afghan officials said the Taliban fighters in Barg-e-Matal were Pakistanis, other foreigners and members of Al Qaeda, although they offered no evidence to support that assertion...