Drug-addicted non-existent army is Afghanistan escape plan

Sending more troops to Afghanistan is Obama and Brown's exit strategy. The troops will slow the Taliban’s advances, they say, providing time to train Afghan forces to take over the fight, allowing the Americans and British to leave. Just one problem: it isn't going to happen.

Currently, some 94,000 Afghan National Army (ANA) troops have been trained by the US, and General McChrystal wants to bring that number up to 134,000 by next October, and eventually to 240,000.

Leaving aside the fact that McChrystal is envisaging an army on a scale that the Afghan state could never afford to maintain, there’s plenty of evidence that the "Afghanization" strategy which will form the centerpiece of Obama’s rationale for escalation is just as fictitious as the "Vietnamization" strategy of four decades ago.

In a blunt assessment of official statistics, Gareth Porter points out that one in four combat soldiers of the ANA have left the force in the past year.

Of the 94,000 already trained, only 39,000 are deemed combat ready, and of those, a lot fewer are ready to stand and fight against the Taliban.

Ann Jones offers some lively insights into men joining up for the pay and weapon they get from ten weeks training, then going home to their villages — although sometimes they return for another bout of salaried training, under a different name:

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 ANA, 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 ANA 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.

In a country where 40% of men are unemployed, joining the ANA 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.

The idea that there are 240,000 Afghans out there with the hearts and souls of Prussian military cadets, who simply need US training in order to turn into the politically neutral professional military who will put their lives on the line for the Karzai state and its infidel patrons is, to put it mildly, somewhat fanciful.

We’re going to be fed a pile of myths about the Afghans taking responsibility yada yada yada. Nothing like this is going to happen. What’s Obama going to be saying a year from now?