By Steve Hynd
So how's that progress in Afghanistan (all of which has supposedly happened since the date of the last Wikileaks War Log document, December 2009) working out?
Well the Afghan security forces, which are supposed to stand up so we can stand down except for paying for them, still looks riven by ethnic fractures.
Despite ethnic quotas and recruiting drives, the Afghan army is still dominated by northern minorities who were oppressed by the Taliban. Nearly all Taliban are ethnic Pashtuns. Although many Pashtuns, the country's biggest ethnic community, are not connected to the Taliban, the rift between northerners and the southern Pashtuns runs deep.
Now this ethnically skewed army is pouring into southern Afghanistan as part of an operation to squeeze the Taliban out of strongholds here and win the loyalty of the main prize -- the Afghan people.
When the international forces leave � whether it is next year or a decade from now � this mixed bag of soldiers will either rise to the challenge or allow the country to fall back into a collection of loosely affiliated territories ruled by tribally based militias.
...To give the military a national character, the Afghan army now has ethnic quotas for officers: 40-45 percent Pashtun, 30-35 percent Tajik, 10-12 percent Hazara and 8-10 percent Uzbek and other groups, according to Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry.
That's roughly in line with the population. But the army does not track the actual ethnic makeup of the officer corps, so it's difficult to know if the quotas are really filled. There are no quotas for enlisted soldiers.
The Afghan army tries to ensure a mix of ethnic groups in each brigade of enlisted soldiers, but it is hard to find a brigade that northerners do not dominate. Of the nearly 40 soldiers based with the Americans at Combat Outpost Ware in the Arghandab Valley, only two are Pashtun. One of them is the cook.
The inter-ethnic rivalries are amply illustrated by one Afghan officer:
"We can be here in the Pashtun area for 1,000 years, but they will never be our friends," said Lt. Gulagha Haksar, a 30-year-old Afghan soldier teamed up with U.S. troops here in the strategic Arghandab Valley. An ethnic Tajik, Gulagha remembers the killing sprees by the Taliban in his hometown in northeastern Takhar province.
...Gulagha said his unit initially had more Pashtuns, but they weren't trustworthy and deserted.
"We sent them to the Kandahar city bank to get their salaries. They took the money, left their weapons and drove off," he said.
Five soldiers deserted, but Gulagha focuses on the fact that two of them were Pashtun.
If a re-energized civil war isn't to start up again, then those Afghan security forces will need discipline in the ranks. How's that coming along?
Not well, as accounts of the latest "green on blue" incident illustrate. An argument between an Afghan soldier named Jafar and an American security contractor escalated somehow into a firefight in which four were killed and two wounded. There was a second such incident this month, when another Afghan soldier killed three British servicemen as they slept.
Those are, respectively, the seventh and eighth reported incidents of this kind in the last three years in Afghanistan. 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 - and all of those were in Mosul
And as the Wikileaks dump told us, there have been over 50 "green on green" incidents - Afghan security forces shooting at each other - too. Usually over who got the bribe, the loot or the drugs.
Indiscipline and ethnic imbalances, leavened with a good deal of historically motivated bigotry. That sounds to me like a recipe for "a collection of loosely affiliated territories ruled by tribally based militias". That's what we're going to spend the next five or six years spending blood and treasure to achieve, in a futile attempt at nation building that we don't even call nation building any more. Withdrawal has to be the better option.
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