Cannon Fodder

By Steve Hynd

The London Times reports today that the Afghan army is dropping its standards again in an attempt to keep up with growing Western demands for a local face on the occupation.

Lieutenant-Colonel Nick Ilic, the head of the British team that is training Afghan officers and non-commissioned officers, told The Times: �We are walking a tightrope and we could easily fall off.�

Another official, who declined to be named, said: �You could argue that the recruits are being made cannon fodder. Every time we lower the bar it�s the minimum we can get away with until someone says we need to lower it more to speed things up.�

The Afghan Army�s main training centre is a former Soviet base covering 70sq miles (240sq km) east of Kabul. Everywhere squads of recruits are marching, manoeuvring, storming mock villages, blasting away on firing ranges or learning to patrol in a graveyard of abandoned Soviet tanks and armoured vehicles. In five years, the centre has helped to create an army of 93,000 soldiers � a remarkable achievement, but not enough.

General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, has brought forward a deadline for reaching 134,000 soldiers from October 2011 to late next year, and there is now talk of reaching 240,000 by 2014.

To meet the new target, the centre must train nearly 5,000 recruits a month instead of 4,000. The course for enlisted men has been cut from ten weeks to eight, and for officers from 25 weeks to 20. Class sizes are rising from 1,200 men to almost 1,400.

Colonel Ilic said that the courses had been condensed by �cutting out the rubbish�, but every Afghan instructor questioned by The Times said that they were now too short. �If they gave us more time we would produce better soldiers,� said Lieutenant-Colonel Adbul Halahadi, who thought that the army was better in Soviet times.

The old Soviet-era Afghan army was barely adequate to keep the Taliban out of the cities. This may well be why Bush-era military spin merchant for Iraq and Petraeus ally Lt. Gen. William Caldwell is being put in charge of Afghan army training - to spin the awful as acceptable.

And if the Afghan Army is churning out cannon fodder, how much worse off are the Afghan police, which are being used as paramilitaries instead of as cops? All to keep a corrupt government "on the take" and save Obama or his generals the embarassment of withdrawal.