recruits marched 22 miles Tuesday on an undulating path at the foot of
the towering Hindu Kush mountains, toting M-16 rifles and carrying
20-pound packs on their backs.
Army Sgt. 1st Class
native, marched every step of the way with them, but he carried only an
iPod. Cousan was more consultant than drill sergeant. He was there to
watch, and when necessary to give advice through an interpreter.
The effort to enlarge and train the Afghan army is
critical to the Obama administration’s plan to defeat the Taliban and
al-Qaida, pacify much of
and begin to withdraw at least some U.S. forces in 2011. Success,
however, is far from guaranteed: The Afghan military remains plagued by
corruption, ethnic rivalries and illiteracy, and by its almost complete
dependence on American logistical and intelligence support.
At the
The 22,000-acre training center was built by the
Soviets, taken over by the U.S.-backed mujahedeen who ousted them in
1989 and then by the Taliban who ousted the mujahedeen.
A junkyard with hundreds of destroyed Soviet tanks
sits in the middle of the camp, but the new Afghan army is being built
and trained to fight Islamist insurgents, not to stop an invasion by a
neighboring superpower.
“We have recognized that the military we’re building here … is different from a Cold War military,” said Col.
The few Afghan soldiers who learn to fire artillery
shoot only at targets they can see, as opposed to those 10 miles away,
and the Afghan army has few tanks.
“In this terrain, big heavy vehicles don’t do well,” said Brown, from
a lesson the U.S. is learning for itself as it replaces its heavy
Mine-Protected Ambush-Resistant armored vehicles with lighter, more
agile off-road versions.
Afghan soldiers are schooled in urban combat, in
storming the home of a suspected insurgent and in reacting to the
improvised explosive devices that are the insurgents’ deadliest weapons.
“Like an assembly line,” said Staff Sgt.
About a year ago, the Americans stopped issuing the
Afghans Soviet-designed AK-47 automatic rifles in favor of the NATO
M-16, a rifle that’s more accurate but less tolerant of dirt, dust and
water.
The change may seem to be a minor one, but the AK’s
reputation for functioning best when it’s set on full automatic and
spraying bullets isn’t well-suited to a counterinsurgency campaign
that’s trying to teach fire discipline and minimize civilian
causalities.
One thing the Afghan trainees don’t learn, however,
is how to read. About 20 percent of the recruits are literate, but
nobody seems concerned about that.
“Most of the training is practical, since most of our soldiers are illiterate,” said Afghan Maj. Mohammed Shapoon Sharipyar.
President
strategy includes an accelerated effort to expand the Afghan army to
134,000 by October of next year, but his timetable leaves little time
for new Afghan soldiers to learn more than essential skills.
“Since the pay raise has been implemented, the challenge has been finding enough space for them,” Brown said.
Recruiting in
harsh winter months is typically stronger than it is in the warmer
months. In the spring, when construction companies resume hiring,
recruiting ebbs.
Brown is anticipating a similar drop around April. “The strategy is to over-recruit during the good months,” he said.
But some observers wonder whether the quality of Afghan army recruits matters more than the number of Afghan army recruits.
When asked why they enlisted, three Afghan recruits,
standing at attention, insisted that they joined because they wanted to
protect their country, not their tribes or their villages.
“When I watched the army on TV, I was motivated to join,” said
Still, American commanders remain skeptical.
There are far more Tajiks in the Afghan army than
there are Pashtuns, even though Pashtuns are the largest and most
important ethnic group in the country, particularly in the eastern and
southern provinces where the insurgency is strongest.
Brown conceded that many soldiers identify with their families first, and their ethnicity, tribe or village second.
“And third would probably be the army and the central government,” he said. “It’s going to take time.”
Like cuisine, few militaries are 100 percent original.
The American military, in many ways, was constructed
from the British model, and the Afghan army maintains some of the
flavor of its former Soviet occupiers. The Afghans’ marching style,
with its high leg kicks, was clearly learned from the
Afghan non-commissioned officers and low-level
officers are given no freedom to act without precise instructions from
their commanders.
“You respond to your orders, you make no decisions, you just do what you are told,” Brown said of the Afghan army underlings.
That’s a “culture” that the U.S. mentors are trying
to break, Brown said, but that’s not an overnight process, and the
mentoring continues after the recruits graduate from the training
center.
Embedded Training Units — teams of about six U.S. soldiers who live with small Afghan units — are scattered all over
—
(c) 2009, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
