Does Afghanistan Need a Big Army? Posted by Michael Cohen

A couple of days ago I highlighted a recent Pentagon report about the weakness of the Afghan Army; and a few DA readers e-mailed me off-line to suggest that things were a bit more nuanced than that otherwise desultory report suggested. As one person put it to me, "Are they a competent, First World force? Hell, no. But they don't have to be. There's a small--very small--ray of hope there, but the ANSF isn't quite as disastrous as many reports make them seem." Point taken. 

But it raised for me another issue that perhaps doesn't get enough attention.  Everyone (this blogger included) seems to take for granted the notion that we need to build up the Afghan Army and police force. General McChrystal has talked about a force of 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police; in congressional testimony last month General Mullen slightly trimmed those sails with a call for a force of 170,000 ANSF by July 2011. 

The issue here is that, as I pointed out the other day, these numbers are completely insane. Even my offline interlocutors agree that these numbers are utterly unrealistic - and what's worse police training lags even further behind army training (even though from the perspective of fighting a counter-insurgency, police training is probably more important). 

Afghanistan is a country with staggeringly high levels of illiteracy; it's the second most corrupt country in the world; it has little tradition of a professionalized military and most important the Afghan government doesn't have close to the revenue to pay for a military of the size being considered. The current ANSF is approximately 90,000 - and there lots of problems with them like they've been unable to in any significant way support US operations in Southern Afghanistan. What makes anyone think that we can easily double the size of the force . . . or more important that we even should?

Does Afghanistan really need a 170,000 man army or a 240,000 man army or a 400,000 army - or do they perhaps need a better trained 90,000 man army that can protect the country from an enemy that seems to be no bigger than 20,000 fighters? If the US and ISAF are going to rely more on local militias than what is the strategic rationale for a big, centralized Afghan Army? Granted those big numbers look rather sexy, but one can't help but fear that we are building a paper tiger military with potentially unreliable units that will be unable to protect the country once we leave.

And let me ask another question to which I don't really know the answer - how does Pakistan feel about the idea of a 170,000 man army on their Western border possibly commanded by a government that many in Islamabad seem to think is an Indian stooge? I haven't really seen any serious commentary on this issue, but I can't imagine this makes the Pakistanis very happy or terribly inclined to crack down on the Afghan Taliban safe havens in their country.

 

In the end this gets back to the issue of what we are trying to accomplish in Afghanistan; is our goal to stabilize all of Afghanistan? Is it to defeat the Taliban insurgency? Or is it to leave a central government in Kabul that can maintain a semblance of authority and hold off a Taliban take-over of the country?

It seems to me that if the latter is your goal, a smaller, more competent army is what Afghanistan needs. But if you have ambitious goals, then you want a big army with gaudy six figure numbers. But then how would you square those ambitious goals with a political leadership (the White House) that wants to send no more troops and wants to start handing over responsibilities to the Afghan military in 18 months? You can't . . . and that is the problem.

Once again it seems that we have a crucial disconnect between ends and means with well-worn military tactics driving strategy. The White House seems focused on a more restrained mission and the military - as is its wont - wants to go big with ambitious goals for Afghanistan's future. And so the strategic incoherence continues.  

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