By Steve Hynd
The BBC reports on allegations by a former UN official that the Afghan security forces are hopelessly compromised:
Dr Antonio Maria Costa, former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said Taliban sleeper cells had been set up inside the security forces.
They had already carried out a number of attacks and were planning further attacks on Nato-led troops, he said.
A spokesman for the coalition forces said infiltration was a rare problem and most Afghan troops were loyal.
It may be "rare", but it's a lot less rare than in Iraq.
As we've written here before, there have been only four cases of Iraqi security forces turning their guns of their Western mentors in all the time the US and its allies have been there - three of those were in Mosul, the still-living heart of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, but AQ wasn't even blamed in all of those cases.
By contrast, there have been at least eight such "green on blue" incidents in Afghanistan in just the last three years and in almost every case Taliban infilrators have been blamed- suggesting that the problem of insurgent sleepers is six times more prevalent in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
But even more worrying for prospects of "standing them up so we can stand down" is this nugget:
Meeting the handover target in four years requires 141,000 new recruits to be found within a year - more than the current size of the Afghan army.
There are fears that the Taliban are taking the opportunity to enlist insurgents into the ranks.
Not that the Afghan forces have to grow by 141 thousand, mind you. That's the number LTG William Caldwell, the Pentagon's former spinmeister in Iraq who is now training Afghan forces, admits he needs to find in order to get just 56,000 who will stay in uniform until the end of their short training! Over the next 15 months, even if all goes to plan, 85 thousand newly recruited Afghan soldiers and cops will just walk away.
If that sounds like a perfect excuse to drop entrance standards and make it far easier for potential Taliban sleepers to infiltrate, well it is. It's also a perfect excuse to recruit those who have worked for security companies, now being banned - and who will likely retain their loyalties to the strongmen and warlords who have always had them rather than to the Afghan state as a whole. Or to recruit drug addicts (in March 2010 the Pentagon reported that 14 percent of active officers have tested positive for hash, opium, or methamphetamines), criminals and those who would wish to enrich themselves by corruption while in uniform.
But even then, say Caldwell manages to reach his target by recruiting the shabbiest military in recent history. What then?
As soon as NATO stops providing training for new recruits, the Afghan security forces themselves will have to do so. That will drop standards even further.
Then there's the desertion rate of those who have passed training - currently running at 12-17% or more. At those rates, it would only take three or four years for Afghan security forces to be back down to half their targeted strength. Still, the Afghan government couldn't even afford that many. It currently costs about $6 billion a year to train, equip and pay the Afghan security forces but the Afghan government cannot even manage to contribute a twelfth of that amount.
There's a massively hollow and compromised concept at the heart of US plans for Afghanistan and it's about time LTG Caldwell and his staff - and of course the Obama White House who rubber-stamped the military's plans - admitted as much.
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