The New York Times highlights on its front page some damning assessments of the Afghan National Security Forces. In the words of the Times reporters, “the internal reviews, written by officials directly involved in the training program or charged with keeping it on track, describe an overstretched enterprise struggling to nurse along the poorly led, largely illiterate and often corrupt Afghan forces.”

The indictment is accurate as far as it goes — but it doesn’t go very far. A lot of the problems plaguing the ANSF have to do with chronic underinvestment since 2001. The U.S. and its NATO allies have never made the kind of commitment needed to produce an ANSF that could truly secure its own territory. Successive foreign commanders have limited spending on the ANSF because they wanted a force small enough that Afghans could pay for it on their own. That has produced a force far too small to take on a powerful, entrenched insurgency. The entire ANSF numbers only 180,000, and only about 100,000 of those soldiers and police are actually in the field at any one time. The Iraqi Security Forces, by contrast, number 620,000 — and Iraq is smaller than Afghanistan. As one sign of the underinvestment, soldiers and police get paid considerably less (usually under $160 a month) than do the Taliban (around $300 a month). No wonder corruption and desertion are endemic, especially among the police, when those on the front lines have trouble supporting their families and are in constant mortal peril.

Nevertheless the Afghan National Army, in particular, has performed well. Its soldiers fight hard and have made their force the most trusted institution in Afghanistan. The police lag further behind, but elements of the Afghan National Police have also performed capably. Expanding their ranks won’t be easy, because of many of the problems listed in the Times article, in particular this problem: “The most significant challenge to rapidly expanding the Afghan National Security Forces is a lack of competent and professional leadership at all levels, and the inability to generate it rapidly.”

But does that mean that it’s impossible to grow the ANSF or that we should not even bother trying? That is not the right conclusion to draw. If we devote more resources to the problem — not only more money but also more American trainers — there is little doubt that we can grow both the size and effectiveness of the ANSF. While U.S. forces are not great at building civilian governmental capacity, they do have a proven track record of generating effective military forces — often from very unpromising materials. They have been doing it as long ago as the turn-of-the-century Philippines and as recently as Iraq. They can do it in Afghanistan, too, but the Times is right to raise questions about how quickly the process can be accomplished without compromising the quality of the forces. That is precisely why we need to send more American troops as a stopgap to fill the security vacuum that exists in much of the Afghan countryside until Afghan soldiers are ready to take over on their own –which won’t happen for a number of years.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 8:20 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.