Afghan National Army Sustainability

By Dave Anderson:

The premise behind the US/ISAF strategy in Nato is that a surge of foreign fighters will be sufficient to impose sufficient costs on the Taliban and other anti-government groups that they will not effectively contest the expansion of both ISAF and Afghan government control of the Pashtun urban areas in the short run.  In that short run, the Afghan army and national police grow greatly in size, competence and honesty so that residents of the Pashtun urban areas grant the government legitimacy and turn their backs on the Pashtun Taliban and other anti-government groups.  After that the foreign forces draw down by a significant fraction of total forces and the greatly expanded and non-corrupt Afghan military and police forces are sufficient to maintain order and beat down on anti-government groups with only Western support instead of Western infantry looking for contact every day. 

That is the theory.  It has numerous problems in it that have been examined here and everywhere else in the COINtra blogosphere. 

It also has a problem that Afghanistan is dirt poor and it can not afford to sustain a national security apparatus that is anywhere near big enough, well trained enough and well-equipped enough to work under US counterinsurgency doctrine.  Spencer Ackerman at Wired points out (yet again) that the Taliban is paying competetive to slightly above market wages  for its light infantry soldiers compared to the Afghan government.  More importantly, his commenter Feral Jundi caught a great tidbit from a December 2009 Washington Post article on sustainability:

An Afghan soldier costs about $25,000 a year to train, equip and
maintain,

Even at the recently upped pay scales, direct pay only accounts for 15% of the cost to keep a single Afghan soldier in the field for a year.  It is the support infrastructure that is expensive, and that infrastructure is supposed to expand faster than direct personnel numbers are supposed to expand to support Obama's strategy.

The problem is the nominal GDP per capita in Afghanistan is between $500 and $1,000 US dollars in 2009.  So each soldier requires the entire output of twenty five to fifty average Afghans to support.  By comparison, the baseline cost of a US soldier requires the entire output of slightly more than 2 Americans to sit in garrison in Texas, or twenty Americans to be deployed to Khandahar.  And given the basic fact that the US tax system is both far more efficient and pervasive than the Afghan tax system, the number of tax payers required to support a much more expensive US soldier is far less than the number of Afghan taxpayers required to support an Afghan soldier.

The way that this problem has been worked around is for the rich ISAF nations, especially the US, to fund the vast majority of the costs of the Afghan National Army.  And that is where we hit the legitimacy problem (again) as the army is only fielded by the largess of foreign interests and everyone knows that the Kabul government can't fund or support such an army out of its own resources, or even a sufficiently powerful and loyal force to hold its own against other armed and competing factions that are able to self-fund effective forces in Afghanistan.