Building trust with the ANA

By Dave Anderson:

The Western plan for Afghanistan is to use heavy NATO forces, mainly American, to conduct large scale sweeps while Afghan government security forces hold already cleared areas and then a legitimate government in a box is unwrapped to build legitimacy and security in those areas.  Part of this process is building up the capacity and capability of the Afghan government security forces to at least better than Taliban standards even if not to NATO combat-ready standards.  The training process is a combination of learning by doing and significant embedded mentoring by Western troops with Afghan security units.  There is an obvious and exploitable weakness in the training process that can create a wedge between Afghan units and their ISAF/NATO trainers.

Reuters has more on a recent incident:

Two U.S. civilians and an Afghan soldier were killed Tuesday in a
shooting by another Afghan soldier at a weapons training area in the
north of the country, the U.S.
military said....

It also comes a week after a renegade soldier killed three members of a
British Gurkha regiment, including a major, before escaping....

As Steve noted last week, the number of "rogue" Afghani soldiers who "snap" is increasing:

In November last year, five British
soldiers were shot dead by an Afghan policeman. There were similiar
incidents which caused the deaths of two US soldiers in October
2009, twice in
2008 and another
in 2007. There have been at least eight such incidents in
Afghanistan in the last three years and the pace of these killings by
"rogues" is accelerating.
By contrast, in the entire seven year occupation of Iraq to
date there have been exactly three reported cases of Iraqi security
forces attacking their coalition mentors...

American doctrine is for US and allied units to very closely cooperate with their Afghan counterparts.  This means sharing intelligence, sharing the point on dangerous patrols, sharing fire-support, even if that fire support is US controlled and directed, sharing living quarters and sharing danger.  The process of sharing is supposed to build up the Afghan unit's capabilities by learning by doing training with US units as well as increase American and other ISAF local legitimacy as they are seen as partners with the theoretically legitimate government. 

If Western forces believe that there is a reasonable chance that the guys that they are training and going on patrol with are willing and able to ambush them when there is a chance, the level of training and trust all of a sudden decreases, and the strategy component of "they'll stand up as we stand down" fails.