Local Afghan ranks too thin to take on Taliban

PAUL KORING
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
July 31, 2007 at 8:30 AM EDT

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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Afghan soldiers are tough, brave and willing to fight, say Canadians who have watched them take on the Taliban. The proof is grimly evident in the surgical ward at the main NATO base hospital where wounded Afghan soldiers fill nearly every bed. But what they have in courage they lack in numbers, which argues that the Afghan National Army is far from ready to take over the battle against the Taliban from Canada and its allies. There will only be 1,400 fully trained – and still woefully under-equipped – Afghans ready for battle by the time fighting season begins next year, according to officials here. That's up from roughly 500 available last fall, thanks to a ramped-up training program, say Canadians shaping the effort, and the army is vastly improved. Soldiers with the fledgling Afghan National Army take a break from their duties this month in Ma’sum Ghar, about 25 kilometres west of Kandahar. (Finbarr Still, even that is far from a fighting force capable of replacing the combat punch of the heavily armed Canadian battle group with its tanks, artillery, night-fighting ability and tight integration with helicopter gunships and fighter-bombers capable of raining death from the skies. And it's far short of the 3,000 combat-ready Afghan soldiers that Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor predicted would be operational early next spring.

Even as the Afghan forces grow in numbers and fighting ability, they still have no armoured vehicles, no body armour, sometimes no helmets, no artillery bigger than mortars and no way of calling in air strikes. They fight with worn Kalashnikovs and drive around in open pickup trucks.
“They are making great progress,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Wayne Eyre, who heads Canada's 70-soldier Operational Mentor Liaison Team (OMLT), attempting to transform Afghan soldiers deployed in Kandahar into combat-capable formations that will eventually supplant the heavily armed foreign forces now leading the fight against the Taliban. “These guys can fight – it's almost a joy to watch them fight their way through enemy positions,” Lt.-Col. Eyre recounts front-line Canadian commanders as saying. The ANA – at least that part of it that most concerns Canadians – has come a long way since last fall. Then, a single, under-strength kandak (an Afghan infantry battalion) with perhaps 500 soldiers – although about one-third of them would be absent, usually visiting their homes halfway across the country – was the sum total of the Afghan National Army in Kandahar province.

Since then, teams of Canadian trainers embedded with and fighting alongside the Afghans, coupled with close pairing of small Afghan units and elements of the Canadian battle group, have transformed that kandak into what Brigadier-General Tim Grant calls the “best Afghan battalion in the entire Afghan army.” Trouble is, there's still only one fighting infantry kandak in Kandahar. Another, consisting of raw recruits who have just finished basic training, will deploy in a few weeks. The brigade's third infantry kandak doesn't yet exist. However, on the plus side, both the combat support and logistics kandaks needed to round out the brigade are functioning.
If Canada (and other NATO nations) have a viable exit strategy in Afghanistan, then marching home with honour will mean leaving behind an ANA capable of sustaining a peace and winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Afghans. “We're not going to win this war by sending out the battle group to kill five or 10 Taliban who can be replaced by five or 10 more,” said Lt.-Col. Eyre. Ultimately, winning the counterinsurgency requires the Afghan security forces to win the trust and support of the people and cut off the Taliban's lifeblood of support in the hinterlands.
So far, building that ANA is a campaign of much promise, modest success and a long way to go.
Much of the progress may seem mundane, but it's vital to developing a capable army. Afghan units fighting alongside the Canadians in Kandahar now organize and provide their own convoys, plan their own (small) operations and are slowly integrating the combat support and logistics elements. “The new leadership is good. … They understand the fundamentals of fighting a counterinsurgency, including the importance of keeping the population on side,” Lt.-Col. Eyre said. A tiny case in point. Last week, a young Afghan officer stopped his soldiers from stealing grapes from a farmer's vines in Panjwaii. Without that sort of discipline, the ANA would be just another armed band roaming the countryside. “They are now at the point where they are initiating, planning and executing their own operations, with Canadians only providing indirect support and things like casualty evacuation,” Lt.-Col. Eyre said. Meanwhile, the AWOL (absent without leave) rate has dropped from a stunning 30 per cent to a still-intolerable – by NATO standards – but much better 10 per cent. But the process will be gradual and it will be years before the Afghan army – even under the most optimistic of predictions – can project the kind of combat punch provided by 40,000-plus NATO troops backed by the world's most sophisticated warplanes.

Canada has ramped up its training effort. More than 130 officers and soldiers will be assigned to the OMLT during the current rotation based on the Van Doos battle group. That's up from 70 in the current OMLT. Still, that's only a fraction of the 1,000-soldier-plus Canadian battle group. However, deployed Canadian units will work alongside, and, it is hoped, in support of Afghan units. “2008 will be the transition year,” predicts Lt.-Col. Eyre. “I'd like to see them in the lead by the summer of 2008.”