Yesterday the New York Times published an article titled U.S. Military Seeks Slower Pace to Wrap Up Afghan Role. The opening paragraph stated: “American military officials are building a case to minimize the planned withdrawal of some troops from Afghanistan starting next summer, in an effort to counter growing pressure on President Obama from inside his own party to begin winding the war down quickly”. The article goes on to state that General Petraeus is going to go on a media campaign in the next few days pointing to some signs of progress as evidence that “a rapid withdrawal” is not a good idea. The article also quotes an unknown senior official remarking: “…while we’ve been in Afghanistan for nine years, only in the past 12 months or so have we started doing this right, and we need to give it some time and think about what our long term presence in Afghanistan should look like”.
With that as a backdrop, I’d like to continue sharing the results of several recent Department of Defense (DoD) Bloggers roundtables I participated in featuring interviews with some of the key people involved in training the Afghans. As mentioned in earlier blogs, training of Afghans is a major part of the second stage of the COIN strategy. A brief review might help for clarification purposes. There are three stages to a COIN campaign. The initial stage is to stop the bleeding; the middle is characterized as inpatient recovery, and the third outpatient care – movement to self-sufficiency.
The characteristics of the second stage are taken directly from the COIN manual and are as follows:
MIDDLE STAGE: “INPATIENT CARE—RECOVERY”
• Characterized by efforts aimed at assisting the patient through long-term recovery or restoration of health—which in this case means achieving stability and civil security.
• The desire in this stage is to develop and build resident capability and capacity in the Host Nation (HN) government and security forces.
• Focus expands to include governance, provision of essential services, and stimulation of economic development.
• Relationships with HN counterparts in the government and security forces and with the local populace are developed and strengthened.
• The host nation increases its legitimacy through providing security, expanding effective governance, providing essential services, and achieving incremental success in meeting public expectations.
There has been a lot of effort and progress in this area. Yesterday I got a chance to speak with Air Force Brigadier General Michael Boera who is in charge of training the Afghan Air Force. According to the General, the Afghan Air force has grown 52% since November 2009 with current total of about 3,900 airmen. They have 49 aircraft with plans to expand and modernize the aircraft. For instance, currently the Afghans have 6 of the C-27 cargo aircraft. There are plans to expand to 20.
General Boera states the mission is “to set the conditions for a professional, fully independent and operationally capable Afghan Air Force, ready to meet the security needs of Afghanistan today as well as tomorrow”. The General said the Afghan Air Force has progressed and done some great things just in the past month and went on to reveal they have four helicopters involved in the humanitarian mission in Pakistan. The efforts to help flood victims were coordinated between Afghanistan and Pakistan with no U.S. advisors involved in the process.
The week before the start of these operations, the eastern part of Afghanistan also suffered major floods. Using two helicopters, the Afghans rescued over 2,100 people that were stranded by flood waters. The helos did have U.S. crew members aboard, not because they were needed but because joint crew flights had been scheduled for the day. The Afghan Air Force has also been involved in other humanitarian and disaster relief. When Kyrgyzstan had their recent uprisings, Afghan helos went to that nation, conducting a noncombatant evacuation (NEO) of Afghan students that were stranded during the conflict. Boera also indicated currently the Air force is preparing for election support. “…this will be the third time the Afghan air force assets are used to support pushing the ballot boxes out to those remote areas of Afghanistan so that it can maximize how many Afghans can vote”.
Training continues. Last November 17 courses were offered, currently there are 36 courses and that number will rise to 70 by November. Eventually there will be 104 courses offered.
Future of Afghan National Police
On July 22, I participated in a DoD Bloggers roundtable on the Afghan Police with Dr. Jack Kem, Deputy to the Commander, NATO Training Mission Afghanistan. Dr. Kem addressed corruption charges early in the interview stating, “…at times you’ve no doubt heard criticisms of the Afghan National Police. Some of those criticisms are founded and others are not. But one of the tings the Afghan Ministry of Interior is doing to combat criticisms of the force is to professionalize the national police, and build a force that will serve the people of Afghanistan well into the future”.
Dr. Kem said this sounds simple but is not and indicated there are 4 traits “that turn a job into a profession, and into a lifetime of service”. These are:
Education and training
Skills Development
Long term professional development
Ethics
Addressing the corruption issue, Dr. Kem remarked: “We are helping the Afghans develop the code of ethics, and that code…has three components…service to the nation, a respect for the citizens, and the integrity of public service”. They’ve also changed the pay structure so police are being paid wages they can live off of and therefore hopefully take away the incentive to take bribes. When asked about reports of police not being paid, Dr. Kem responded that there have been some problems. Over 90% are paid via electronic transfer of funds. Some of the police are stationed in areas that lack ATMs or banking systems. They are working to solve that issue.
The police force currently stands at 106,000 with a goal of 109,000 by the end of October. Attrition continues to be an issue but those numbers have dropped from a high of 20% to 10 – 12%. Dr. Kem indicated there is one exception, a higher attrition for members of the Afghan National Civil Order Police, but they’re working on solving that problem with things like incentive pay because those forces deploy throughout the country away from home.
When asked to talk about gratifying “a-ha moments” of Afghan police changing their mind sets as a result of the ethics training, Kem stated: “I think is when you start to see more and more women that are coming in the Afghan National Police. There is a goal now to have about 5,000 police officers recruited in the next two years who are women…the ‘a-ha moment’ is for many of the Afghan: when they realize that it does make sense, culturally right to having a woman doing the inspection of another woman. And if you’re going to have somebody do that kind of inspection or that kind of check on somebody at the border, then that woman should be trained, that woman should be literate, just like you would expect the other border police and other police officers”.
Think I’ll stop here and cover the rest within the next day or so. My intent with this series of blogs is to highlight some parts of the COIN strategy that are not getting much play elsewhere. I believe if we’re to make intelligent informed decisions about the course our national strategy should take, we need to gather as much information as we can. This is an issue too important to rely on media sound bites interspersed with stories of Hollywood celebrities gone wild.
As always, my views are my own. Think I’ll go for a bike ride.
