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Just back inside some more civilized wire. I haven't seen much war out there, but that doesn't surprise me. The wars always seem worse on CNN than they are in real life because CNN and the rest of the media don't report on things that do not go boom.
For the past few days I've been with the Afghan Army and a couple teams of Americans that have a unique role in the fielding of the Afghan National Army. There is a lot to report and even more for me to study and research, for now I'll hit some of the high-lights.
Ultimate victory over the Taliban will be won by Afghans, not US Soldiers and Marines. US/NATO/ISAF military forces can contain the Taliban, but ultimate destruction of the Taliban will be done by Afghans, which is why I've been so interested into digging into the Afghan National Army.
My tour guides were the Validation Transition Team Kabul and VTT 201. The latter going by the nickname 'Zombie Killers' for their firm belief that the ultimate test of readiness is being ready for the Zombie Apocalypse.
The Afghan National Army as whole is not ready for the Zombie Apocalypse, but Colonel Zalmat Nbard, a former Mujahadeen Commander in the Northern Alliance and now Commanding Officer of an Afghan Army Battalion is as close to being ready to take on the Taliban as any ANA unit gets.
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| Colonel Zalmat Nbard and JD |
Colonel Nbard, an ethnic Tajik, fought against the Soviets in the 1980s. He became an officer in the short-lived post-communist government before going back to the Panjushir valley to rejoin Masood's Northern Alliance in the civil war. In the late 1990's up to 2001, Col. Nbard fought the Taliban to a stand-still. After 9/11 Nbard and others swept south with US Special Forces routing the Taliban. Nbard is a leader of Afghans and the personification of the Afghan way of war which looks nothing like the US way of war.
The Afghan way of war is conventional. Irregular? Yes. Guerilla? Yes. But still conventional. The Taliban used artillery and armored personnel carriers. On the open fields of the Shibar pass there are trenches and fighting positions where the Hazarajat Milita engaged in a fire-power battle against the Taliban. The Taliban's defensive battle in 2001 against the US was irregular but conventional. The Taliban did not morph into an insurgent/terrorist fighting force until after the initial rout was completed in 2002.
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| The Shibar pass, 9,400 ft. |
The Afghan way of war is not planned or well organized. There is no coordinated maneuver. Missions are not thought out, reconed, briefed and executed with multiple check-down contingents. Most Afghans, even the ones who can read and write, do not know how to read a map. The Afghan way of war is done on the fly, driven by the personality of the commander.
Ultimate victory over the Taliban will be won or lost by Afghans and men like Col. Nbard. If they go out and fight, they will win. But NATO/ISAF have to set them up and allow them to win.
The Afghan National Army is an infant Army. The British General Richard L. Clutterbuck said it takes 30 years to build a nation and an Army. The 30 years is based on the simple fact that it takes about 30 years to train up a legitmate General Officer Corps and Senior Non-Commissioned Officers. Thirty years also makes sense because that is how long it takes to develop a competent Chief of Police, respected prosecutor or Judge.
If Clutterbuck is right, Afghanistan has 21 years to go and I feel like the last few years may have been wasted.
If for some reason you wanted to build an complex organization with lots of expensive moving parts, complicated tasks and lots of action and motion and hard work in a dangerous environment but get only marginal results, you would recreate the NATO/ISAF system for training and fielding the Afghan National Army.
The current Frankenbureacracy of how the Afghan Army is trained and fielded has undoubtedly drifted far afield from the original design. It is layers of patchworks and modifications derived from the input of too many partners needing to be pleased. The fact that it works as well as it does is a testament to the hard work of the officers and NCOs on the ground.
In theory enlistees would go to boot camp first, and some do. Some find their way to a line unit without going to boot camp. It is possible for a raw recruit to be rapidly promoted to sergeant just because he can read and write.
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| Afghan basic training. Raw recruits look the same in every country. |
Officers come from a mix of backgrounds. There is a healthy contingent of former Mujahadeen like Col. Nbard along with officers from the communist era trained by the Soviets. Some of the younger officers are new to military service.
Usually only half of the members of a unit are actually present for duty during the training and even fewer actually seem to deploy to the fight.
They are all thrown together at what is called the Consolidated Fielding Center and trained by either US, British, French, German, Turkish, Australian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Austrian, Hungarian, Italians or some other NATO/ISAF military contingent.
The training at the CFC lasts a few weeks at which point they are assessed by the VTT that gave me a guided tour of the ANA and then sent to the fight.
The Validation Transition Team also does assessments of units operating in the field, which was how I found myself spending last week with former Mujahadeen Commander Nbard and the Zombie Killers.
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| JD and Zombie Killers. MSGT Reynold, MAJ Gries, JD, Omar, CPT LIY. |
The VTT does a lot of work that could be explained as an audit of readiness, tactics and ongoing operations. Initally I thought it might be pretty easy for an ANA unit to hide the skeletons, but the Captains and Senior NCOs of the VTT have become experts at walking back the cat. And Afghans are terrible liars. When the officers and NCOs of the VTT fanned out, there was nowhere to hide the dirt.
Recently the Washington Post published an article about a report by the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction blasting the way the Afghan Army is being trained and fielded. The IG report noted that few Afghan units recieve the top marks and said the process of evaluating Afghan Units was flawed because it measured only quantity instead of quality.
After being on the ground with the US Soldiers of the VTT who assess the quality of Afghan units, it is obvious the IG report is slightly outdated and the WaPo cut and paste of it a misleading.
Yes, very few Afghan units recieve high marks because the officers of VTT are tough in their assessments and the units are being graded to a high standard.
The second is that the rating system has changed, making the IG report outdated. The current rating system has broad swaths dedicated to grading performance and abilities of the Afghan units. And here again, the team I was with were tough graders and don't pull any punches.
Yes, the system of training the Afghan security services is a mess and easy to criticize--but actually implementing the ideal would be impossible given the current situation on the ground--a point frequently lost on IG inspectors and reporters. That the improved grading system has been implemented even before the report was released shows that ISAF/NATO is moving in the right direction.
The key part of the assessment is to go along with the unit on a real mission, outside the wire, in a combat to see how they actually perform in real life.
The early assessments of the unit were pretty good. The soldiers were getting paid and the barracks were clean. The soldiers were all in uniform, had boots and basic gear. The trucks were opearble as were the radios. The platoons not on missions cycle were doing some ongoing training.
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| An Afghan Army platoon in their barracks |
At that point I was pretty impressed. They far surpassed any Iraqi Army unit I had encountered.
Things fell apart a few hours later when MAJ Ted Johnson, commander of the Kabul VTT asked Col. Nbard about the upcoming mission.
The response from the Afghan was pretty close to "mission, what mission?"
(to be continued in a day or so)
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