Afghan army being built from the ground up
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The Government and international donors have agreed to nearly double the strength of the army (AFP: Shah Marai)
Afghan army recruit Mohammad Sediq is sitting out his class at a military academy on the outskirts of Kabul, because his feet became swollen after he wore ill-fitting military boots without socks.
Another former school drop-out slumps on a chair at the back of an open-air class on map reading staring blankly, either unable to comprehend the language or the subject.
From such disparate and unlikely troops, the Afghan National Army (ANA), the key to the nation's long-term stability, is being built from the ground up.
It lacks guns, tanks, and planes, its troops speak different languages and its wages lag behind the salaries paid by a resurgent Taliban to their foot soldiers.
But it has fighting spirit. It can move fast in the rugged Afghan terrain and most of all, it is beginning to win respect in a nation with few institutions or contemporary heroes.
"This is our pride. This is our hope for the future," said Major-General Zaher Azimi, a former mujahideen commander and now an adviser and spokesman at the Afghan Defence Ministry.
"The only solution for Afghanistan in the long term is building Afghan institutions, and a strong military is the first of them."
Earlier this month, the Government and the international donors that Afghanistan relies on agreed to nearly double the strength of the ANA to 134,000.
The expansion of the Afghan army, together with a "mini-surge" of 4,000 US troops, is a step towards fighting back a resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda in a year when violence has hit its worst level yet since the 2001 US-led invasion.
A sharp rise in civilian deaths in air strikes by the US-led coalition forces in a violent summer has fuelled Afghan anger and prompted even more calls for a greater role of the Afghan army in the operations against the insurgents.
"An American soldier meets fire, he calls an air strike and there are always casualties in such a situation," an Afghan Defence Ministry official said.
"An Afghan soldier on the other hand is going to engage where the fire is coming from. He is not going to be calling air strikes."
'Ragged no more'
Five years after a motley group of soldiers graduated from the military school, the ANA is no longer a ragged force.
In the beginning it was mostly the ex-mujahideen or resistance fighters who enlisted for the basic 16-week basic combat training, showing up in class with their own weapons.
Now it is more likely that civilians like Sediq, 23, join up, chucking up his job as a guard at a private firm in Kabul for a career in the army. He worked as a labourer during the Taliban years after dropping out of primary school to support his family.
Now he hopes his $US100 monthly salary as a soldier, topped up with another $US60 if he is deployed to the provinces, would help take better care of ageing parents and younger siblings.
Such steely determination is perhaps common to armies worldwide, but in Afghanistan, racked by decades of the civil war, it stirs hope.
The army was initially plagued by desertions, beginning from the school down to the units where they were deployed. Sometimes the men would simply disappear from school for weeks and then show up back again and there wasn't even a proper count kept, Sergeant Lamouret recalls.
But the basic training course has now been cut back to 10 weeks, there is less down time, and desertions have dropped to below 10 per cent from 25 to 30 per cent earlier.
'Way to go'
Major-General Azimi says what the military now needs is guns, armour, tanks and planes for the fledgling air force.
The Afghan army is intended to be armed with NATO weapons including M-16 rifles but very few units have received them yet, with most still relying on old Soviet weapons.
The air force has five transport planes, again from the Soviet period, a few helicopters acquired recently, but no combat aircraft, no surveillance capabilities, and no sophisticated radars.
"We can't really carry out independent operations without an air force. In a mountainous country like this you need air power even to transport troops quickly to a location," he said.
Afghan government and US military officials say it will be some time before the ANA can lead primary operations on its own and few are willing to put a time frame to it.
The US Government and Accounting Office (GAO) in a report to Congress in June said both the Afghan army and police are far from ready to undertake security operations without substantial help from US and NATO forces.
Only two of 105 Afghan army units are considered fully capable, GAO said. About 36 per cent can conduct their own operations but only with routine international support, while all of the rest are much less capable.
The GAO said that that the United States could be training and sustaining Afghan security forces for more than a decade at a cost of $US2 billion a year.
The Pentagon, however, rejected the GAO's conclusions and US commanders on the ground are more optimistic.
-Reuters
