How to win in Afghanistan: get more Afghans doing pushups

Gordon Brown's exit strategy for Afghanistan is to speed up the training of the Afghan National Army. He predicts adding 50,000 more troops in the next year, so that "Afghans can take responsibility for their own affairs". US Army General McChrystal also says this is the game plan for "winning", but adds that the Afghan army will not be ready to do that for three years and it will take much longer for the police. This isn't going to happen. Not now. Not ever.

In the heat of this summer, I went out to the training fields near Kabul where Afghan army recruits are put through their paces, and it was quickly evident just what's getting lost in translation. Our trainers were big, strong, camouflaged, combat-booted, supersized American men, their bodies swollen by flak jackets and lashed with knives, handguns, and god only knows what else.

The Afghans were puny by comparison. Afghan recruits come from a world of desperate poverty. They are almost uniformly malnourished and underweight. Many are no bigger than I am (5'4" and thin) -- and some probably not much stronger. Like me, many sag under the weight of a standard-issue flack jacket. Their American trainers spoke of "upper body strength deficiency" and prescribed pushups because their trainees buckle under the backpacks filled with 50 pounds of equipment and ammo they are expected to carry.

All this material must seem absurd to men whose fathers and brothers, wearing only the old cotton shirts and baggy pants of everyday life and carrying battered Russian Kalashnikov rifles, defeated the Red Army two decades ago. American trainers marvel that, freed from heavy equipment and uniforms, Afghan soldiers can run through the mountains all day -- as the Taliban guerrillas in fact do with great effect -- but the US military is determined to train them for another style of war.

American military planners and policymakers proceed as if, with sufficient training, Afghans can be transformed into scale-model American Marines. That is not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. No matter how many of our leaders concur that it must happen -- and ever faster.

Security

So who are these security forces? The Kabul Military Training Center report that the army now numbers between 88,000 and 92,000 soldiers, and the basic training course financed and led by Americans, called "Basic Warrior Training," is turning out 28,800 new soldiers every year. The number 400,000 is often mentioned as the supposed end-strength quota for the combined security forces -- an army of 240,000 soldiers and a police force with 160,000 men.

Training security forces is not cheap. So far, the estimated cost since 2001 is at least $10 billion. What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training?

Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 US Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police.

Why, you might ask, didn't the Afghan National Army, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to "operate independently," but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist.

It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of "Basic Warrior Training" 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through Afghan National Army training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

Game

In a country where 40% of men are unemployed, joining the Afghan National Army for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it's a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid.

Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin -- the Islamist fundamentalists the US once paid to fight the Soviets -- and many are undoubtedly Taliban. American trainers have taken careful note of the fact that, when Afghan National Army soldiers were given leave after basic training to return home with their pay, they generally didn't come back.

To foil paycheck scams and decrease soaring rates of desertion, they recently devised a money-transfer system that allows the soldiers to send pay home without ever leaving their base. That sounds like a good idea, but like many expensive American solutions to Afghan problems, it misses the point. It's not just the money the soldier wants to transfer home, it's himself as well.

As for the police, US-funded training offers a similar revolving door. In Afghanistan, however, it is far more dangerous to be a policeman than a soldier. As representatives of the now thoroughly discredited government of President Hamid Karzai, the hapless police make handy symbolic targets. They are sitting ducks for Taliban fighters. British commanders in Helmand province estimated that 60% of Afghan police are on drugs -- and little wonder why.

In the Pashtun provinces of southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is strong, recruiting men for the Afghan National Police is a problem. Consequently, non-Pashtun police trainees of Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek, or other ethnic backgrounds are dispatched to maintain order in Pashtun territory. They might as well paint targets on their foreheads.

The police who accompanied the US Marines into Helmand Province reportedly refused to leave their heavily armed mentors to take up suicidal posts in provincial villages. Some police and army soldiers, when asked by reporters, claimed to be "visiting" Helmand province only for "vacation."

In many districts, the police recently supplemented their low pay and demonstrated allegiance to local warlords by stuffing ballot boxes for President Karzai in the presidential election. No amount of American training, mentoring, or cash will determine who or what Afghans will fight for, if indeed they fight at all.

Racist

When I visited bases and training grounds in July, I heard some American trainers describe their Afghan trainees in the same racist terms once applied to African slaves in the US: lazy, irresponsible, stupid, childish, and so on.

That's how Afghan resistance, avoidance, and sabotage look to American eyes. The Taliban fight for something they believe -- that their country should be freed from foreign occupation. "Our" Afghans try to get by.

Yet one amazing thing happens to Afghan National Army trainees who stick it out for the whole 10 weeks of basic training. Their slight bodies begin to fill out a little. They gain more energy and better spirits -- all because for the first time in their lives they have enough nutritious food to eat.

Better nutrition notwithstanding "our" Afghans are never going to fight for an American cause, with or without American troops, the way we imagine they should.

They're never going to fight with the energy of the Taliban for a national government that we installed against Afghan wishes, then more recently set up to steal another election, and now seem about to ratify in office, despite incontrovertible evidence of flagrant fraud. Why should they? Even if the US could win their minds, their hearts are not in it.

Think instead about what you might have won -- and could still win -- had you spent all those military billions on food. Or maybe agriculture. Or health care. Or a civilian job corps. Is it too late for that now?

Read the full version of this article here. Ann Jones is the author of Kabul in Winter and writes often about Afghanistan for TomDispatch and the Nation. War Is Not Over When It's Over, her new book about the impact of war on women, will be published next year.