There has been a lot of media coverage addressing fighting in Kandahar, possible peace talks with the Taliban but very little on the stabilty operation parts of the COIN strategy. As mentioned in my last Blog, I recently participated in several Afghanistan themed Department of Defense Bloggers roundtables. Topics covered during the roundtables were training updates for the Afghan Air Force, Afghan Police Force, leadership development, and ministerial development plans. Problems continue with literacy, corruption, and attrition in the police forces; but signs of progress are popping up. Since recruiting and training of Afghan security forces is a major part of the COIN stability operations, I thought it would be useful to provide some updates on the NATO training programs.
Afghan Air Force
The Air Force currently numbers 4000 men and 46 aircraft and is expected to grow to 150 aircraft and 8,000 airmen. Most recent operations include participating in the humanitarian flood relief in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. All told they evacuated over 1900 civilians and flew in 188 tons of supplies. They also contributed to support for the September elections, servicing 200 polling centers with over 150,000 pounds of election material. They also flew 530 election personnel to various locations.
Brigadier General David Allvin, the commander of the NATO Air Training Commands says thus far the training has focused on basic aviation skills. The General says his top three priorities are: expanding operational capability, professionalization, and command and control. Elaborating Allvin stated: “Once you expand the operational cability to meet the needs of the Afghan Air Force, you’re really on your way to meeting the mission needs and transitions…when we talk about a professional organization, we talk about education and training. And we’ve certainly done a lot in that regard with respect to setting up our curricula and facilities to really train and educate the Afghan airmen”. The General said the Afghan Air Force support of the elections showed work still needed to be done in the area of command and control and was “absolutely key to be able to maximize the use of these extremely limited assets within the Afghan Air Force”. The Afghan Air Force with with support from NATO is develooping a command and control process.
Literacy has been a problem but one they’re working hard to resolve. In addition to basic literacy courses, they have a three month literacy course at their air training facility. According to Allvin: “They go through that before they go through some of the basic technical courses…”
Afghan Police Leadership Development
Canadian Major General Stuart Beare, the Deputy Commander of NATO’s training mission for the Afghan police force, while recognizing that there were still obstacles, was upbeat about the strides being made. Training is one example, according to the General, “Last year we produced about 10,000 police of all types. This year we’re tracking about 25,000. And next year we’re going to shoot up to about 50,000 police officers trained. In another encouraging sign, in July, the Afghans appointed a new Minister of the Interior, General Mohammadi a veteran of the Muhajeddin, Soviet resistance, and the Northern alliance. In his most recent job, he was Vice Chief of the General Staff for the Afghan Army. General Mohammadi has already gotten rid of 19 senior ministry officials who were either suspected of corruption or professionally incompetent.
General Mohammadi has six priorities:
Training and education
Leadership
Anti-corruption
Take care of his people
Restructuring the Ministry
Reward and Discipline
Beare says Mohammadi is putting anti-corruption “right on the table. And everything he does when he’s out and about visiting his police force is to go and check stuff, not with a view to holding local leaders accountable for the conditions they’re living in, but to hold – to check what conditions local leaders are living with to find the corruption that’s between the ministry and them that’s preventing them from being able to do their job.”
The police force was given a raise last year but according to Major General Beare, General Mohammadi is “looking at things as simple as food and lodging and the care of his police forces” so hopefully they would not be as inclined to resort to corruption.
When asked about the role of the police force and whether it was similar to those forces in western countries. General Beare replied: “There’s too much of an insurgency at this stage of the game to train police forces for a community policing model, when in the first instance they’ve got to be able to survive in the face of a violent and ruthless enemy, who through IED, indirect fire and a whole lot of other ways has got no reluctance to kill people..”
Beare says there are five police forces. “The uniformed police live in the communities. They get basic literacy…basic police training so that in the first instance they can survive, and the second is they can protect the population and third when they do engage with bad actors who are criminal, they can …arrest them and…take them to jail.” Other police units are the border police, civil order police similar to French Gendarmeries “able to work as company and battalion sized units to do security operation. There are also the special police units who work issues like counter narcotics, counterterrorism, and special investigations. The fifth force is the public protection police who work in their local community.
As for attrition, General Beare says overall its similar to that of western police forces. Currently its at about 16% for the whole force though the civil order police had a spike in numbers of about 38% for the first six months of the year. That number is coming down. Last month’s figure was 1.9%. General Beare said the police were leaving for three reasons: “The first one was, they were being used much harder and more often than any of the force, but they were paid the same. So their pay was increased…They weren’t uniformly partnered with our forces because there weren’t enough of us to partner them…and now they’re partnered in operations with ISAF forces…And the other thing that was an aggravating factor for them was the fact they didn’t know when they were going home…They’d be sent to the lion’s den in the south, and they’d stay, and they’d stay, and they wouldn’t know when they were comiong home. And when they were finally sent home, they –a lot of them ran before they got sent back.” They’ve now been put on a 12 week on and 12 weeks off of operations.
I asked the General about the effect of July 2011 deadline on their training. He replied they were developing a whole system. “We need to stay overlaid on that system from the ministry to the institutions to the training bases and to the fielded force for some time…2011 is just another…calendar month on a journey of professionalization…we’re planning our way through that every month from here till when transition may occur…we’re transitioning from doing stuff for them to doing stuff with them with our support in the background.”
I’ve talked recently with many of the people involved in these training efforts and none seem to believe their programs will be standing down July 2011. I suspect that the drawdown, whenever it is will be gradual. Who knows how gradual? We still have large number of troops in Germany and Japan and World War II ended in 1945 and the Cold War ended 20 years ago or so. Think I’ll end here. Have one more bloggers roundtable to talk about. Will do it in the next day or so. As always my opinions are my own.
