Will Afghanistan’s Military Ever Be Fit to Fight?

When a fuel tanker overturned on Highway 1 outside Kandahar earlier this year, the villagers saw it as a gift from Allah. They flocked to the leaking tanker with pots, pans, even plastic bags, to steal the leaking gasoline. Several Afghan army jeeps screeched up, and the soldiers jumped out, pushing away the villagers. But not to protect the fuel: the Afghan soldiers simply wanted it for themselves.

At a nearby base, American and Afghan officers were watching the scene from a guard tower. Outraged by the looting, an Afghan captain named Nasser grabbed his M-16 and charged out to confront the soldiers. When the soldiers argued back, the captain fired a few warning shots. A stray bullet sparked the gasoline, and the tanker exploded into a colossal fireball. The smoke clouds, U.S. Lieutenant Rajiv Srinivasan later blogged, “blackened the sky like a tornado moving from the ground up.”

(See pictures of Afghanistan’s dangerous Korengal Valley.)

Exhausted after arranging the medevac by helicopter of eight dead soldiers and countless injured, Srinivasan then had the bad luck to be hit by an Afghan army truck speeding around the base. As Srinivasan wrote in his blog, all his pent-up frustrations spilled out. He yanked the Afghan out of the truck and slammed him to the ground, yelling, “We’re out here busting our asses for you, and you repay us by setting your own soldiers on fire and running me over with your trucks!”

This tale is typical of the myriad frustrations the U.S. and its NATO allies face in trying to cobble together an Afghan national army out of nothing. Yet the success of the Obama Administration’s full-throttle assault against the Taliban in its spiritual heartland of Kandahar hinges on getting the Afghan army on its feet and marching. And so does the likelihood of getting U.S. and NATO troops home anytime soon.

(See pictures of life in the Afghan national army.)

It is a nearly impossible mission. Nine out of 10 Afghan enlisted recruits can’t read a rifle-instruction manual or drive a car, according to NATO trainers. The officers’ corps is fractured by rivalries: Soviet-era veterans vs. the former mujahedin rebels who fought them in the 1980s, Tajiks vs. Uzbeks, Hazaras and Pashtuns. Commanders routinely steal their enlisted men’s salaries. Soldiers shake down civilians at road checkpoints and sell off their own American-supplied boots, blankets and guns at the bazaar — sometimes to the Taliban. Afghans, not surprisingly, run when they see the army coming.

Recruits tend to go AWOL after their first leave, while one-quarter of those who stay in service are blitzed on hashish or heroin, according to an internal survey carried out by the Afghan National Army (ANA). One NATO major from Latvia, stationed in the north, complained to a TIME video team that when a battalion’s combat tour was extended, three Afghan officers shot themselves in the foot to get medevacked out.

As of April, the army had 119,400 troops; the plan is to reach 171,600 by October 2011, by which time U.S. soldiers will be heading back home. In the rush to get fresh recruits out of the barracks, basic training has been slashed from 10 weeks to eight. (In the U.S. Army, basic training lasts at least 14 weeks.) In trying to meet NATO deadlines for an Afghan troop buildup, Antonio Giustozzi, an Afghanistan expert at the London School of Economics, writes in a recent report, there is “the risk of churning out grossly unqualified soldiers or, as some are beginning to argue, cannon fodder.” That’s not a lot to show for the estimated $26 billion that the Pentagon says it has pumped into creating the Afghan security forces. And the cost is rising by another $1 billion every month.

(Watch TIME’s video “The Trouble with Building an Afghan Army.”)

The man in charge of spending all this money is three-star general William Caldwell, a wiry Southerner with a lopsided grin and the energy of an entire army platoon. NATO officials, diplomats and military experts in Washington all say Caldwell has brought dynamism and focus to his enormous task since he took charge in late 2009. There is a new urgency: President Obama has pledged to start drawing down some U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the summer of 2011. Given a green light by the Pentagon, Caldwell has brought in hundreds more NATO trainers, many of them from the special forces. He is diversifying the Afghan army so that it is less reliant on NATO for logistical backup. His team is perfecting safeguards to make sure that Afghan commanders do not steal their men’s salary, by sending the money electronically to soldiers’ bank accounts. Recruitment is up, and the attrition rate — estimates of it range from 20% to 25% — is down from nearly 40% in 2002, according to the International Crisis Group. This is mainly because Caldwell raised the starting wage of a private to $165 a month, plus $45 for combat pay, which is enough for an Afghan to feed his family. It is also a notch higher than what the Taliban is paying its fighters.

See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.

See pictures of the U.S. Marines’ offensive in Afghanistan.

The general knows the risks of failure. He recently drove to a moonscape valley in the Kabul hills that serves as a graveyard for discarded Soviet-era weaponry. Gazing at row after row of broken, rusted-out tanks, Caldwell says he asked himself, “All those armored hulks — we don’t want that to happen to this Afghan army today. How can we ensure that what we build is self-sustaining?” It is a worry echoed by many of the NATO commanders TIME interviewed, who invariably used the expression “collapsing like a house of cards.”

It will require loads of money to stave off the ANA’s collapse. Not counting training costs, the price tag for just keeping the Afghan army fed, paid, clothed and ready for combat is estimated at more than $6 billion a year, far beyond the Kabul government’s yearly earnings of $1 billion in tax revenue, as calculated by the presidential office. This guarantees that the U.S. and its NATO allies will be footing the bill for many years to come. But Seth Jones, an Afghanistan expert at the Rand Corp. in Washington, argues that as a trade-off for pulling forces from Afghanistan, NATO countries would be willing to keep shelling out funds. It is far less than “the cost of international blood if foreign troops are kept on,” he says.

(See pictures of the 2009 presidential election in Afghanistan.)

Given the astronomical costs, some military experts say the Afghan army would be better off as a smaller force that is swifter, lighter and better trained. One U.S. trainer in Kabul, who asked not to be identified, says, “There’s a high-level debate over quality vs. quantity. Not much point raising a big new army if 45,000 of the soldiers are worthless.” Critics of the large army point to the success of the seven Afghan commando battalions mentored by U.S. special-forces trainers. According to senior NATO officers, the commandos fought hard during the Marjah offensive in February and acquitted themselves fairly well. NATO officials say the attrition rate for Afghan commandos is a negligible 2%, which may be the result of higher pay ($210 a month and an additional $90 in combat pay) and the Afghans’ self-image as daring warriors with no patience for the tedious slog of soldiering. But John Nagl, one of the architects of U.S. counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan, insists that even a force of 172,000 troops by late 2011 would still be too small. Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security in Washington, reckons that to crush a rebel force like the Taliban, which has an estimated 25,000 men at arms, it will take one soldier or policeman for every 50 civilians — a force of nearly 600,000. Most of the burden, he says, will fall on the military, which is far more respected than the police, whom Afghans regard as little better than bandits in uniform. “The national army is the pillar on which this country will be built,” says Nagl. “It’s the most respected institution in Afghanistan.”

Camp Violet, the ANA’s main training ground, lies off the main Kabul-Jalalabad highway, a favorite haunt of suicide bombers crossing the Khyber Pass from Pakistan. I’m riding in an armored SUV with a U.S. military escort, and there’s an audible sigh of relief among the passengers when we pull off the highway into the razor-wired safety of Camp Violet. A dirt road climbs into sandy hills cut by ravines where, even after the winter rains, hardly a single blade of grass grows. We halt on an exposed, bare hillside where a company of Afghan soldiers are scattered about with their rifles, learning how to lay an ambush. Flies swarm in their gunsights.

See pictures of the U.S. troops in Iraq.

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As the Afghans see U.S. officers arriving, they abandon their ambush positions and fall into line. NATO officers lament that recruitment among the ethnic Pashtuns of the south is poor — only 3% — because of sympathy for or fear of the Taliban. The inability to draw in Pashtuns, with their tribal links, language and cultural sensitivity, is seen as the army’s greatest weakness. Because of this, most Pashtun tribesmen look upon the ANA warily, as foreign invaders. I ask how many of the 125 men are southern Pashtuns. Only two raise their hands. A 19-year-old from Zabul province, who asks not to be identified for fear of retribution, says, “Even my parents don’t know. They think I have a job in Kabul. Otherwise, it would mean trouble for them with the Taliban.” He always slips out of his uniform into the traditional shalwar kameez before riding the bus down to Zabul. The Taliban have set up roadblocks and have been known to drag soldiers out of the vehicles and shoot them. “If the army sends me anywhere near my home, I’ll be very worried,” he says, nervously chewing his mustache. A commander steps into the conversation to talk about the soldiers’ bravery. “An army post was surrounded by the Taliban, and the soldiers held them off for four hours until they ran out of ammo,” he says. I asked what happened next. He shrugs and replies, “The Taliban beheaded them.”

(See TIME’s photo-essay “Afghanistan: Inside the Battle for Hearts and Minds.”)

A Force Divided
The Afghan army’s biggest threat may come not from the Taliban but from the ethnic and personal feuds raging within the ranks. The Defense Ministry is hardly the loyal prop to President Hamid Karzai that Washington strategists envision. The two top military leaders, Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and army chief Bismillah Khan, have a rivalry stretching back to the 1980s and the Soviet war. Wardak, a suave general’s son and a Pashtun, was a “Gucci mujahid,” as one CIA agent put it, who seldom crossed into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. In contrast, Khan was a Tajik village boy from the Pansheer Valley who rose up the rebel ranks through his fighting prowess and natural leadership. Such was the disdain that Khan and his fellow Tajik mujahedin had for Wardak that, according to a former Karzai aide, all the Defense Minister’s advisers were arrested when they flew back to Afghanistan from exile in the spring of 2002. Their enmity has turned the Defense Ministry into a chessboard, as each tries to block the promotions of the other’s allies while backing their own men.

Their rivalry also extends into other spheres. Wardak, a fluent English speaker, is reportedly close to the Pentagon and to Pakistan, while Khan and his Tajik clansmen are reaching out to Iran, India and Russia. Khan is also closely allied with Karzai’s main political opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, who is resistant to the beleaguered President’s recent attempts to reconcile with the Taliban.

(See pictures of President George W. Bush in the Middle East.)

Diplomats and some Afghan officials say Karzai’s peace overture to the Taliban could widen the ethnic cracks that already exist inside the army. The Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, who all suffered under the Taliban’s brutal rule of Pashtun supremacy, oppose reconciliation. Khan is said to have six key brigade commanders loyal to him, while one brigade and nine battalions are linked to Uzbek and Hazara warlords. Wardak has only one brigade behind him, according to analyst Giustozzi. Karzai, say some of his aides, is suspicious of Wardak, worrying that Washington may see the minister as his successor.

Putting rivals Wardak and Khan at the helm of the ANA, says a former Karzai adviser, was “a shotgun wedding forced by the Americans.” To depoliticize the army, the adviser adds, Karzai must sack both men. But the President is hamstrung because some of his NATO partners are backing Wardak while others prefer Khan.

If Karzai allows the dysfunction within the army to persist, from top to bottom, it would undermine everything Caldwell and other NATO commanders are doing to stand up the ANA. For their part, NATO generals shy away from discussing the divisions within the Defense Ministry, saying their job is only to get the ANA combat-ready. For the Afghan recruits at Camp Violet, the palace intrigues seemed far away as the men prepared for their first taste of battle: Sergeant Jerome Reilly from Tennessee had set up a simulated ambush on an Afghan army convoy, with a fake roadside bomb to see how his men would react. As the sound of the fake bomb echoed off the canyon walls, the men stood around in a daze — easy marks for a Taliban sniper. Turning these men — and tens of thousands like them — into a credible fighting force will take much more money, effort and Afghanistan’s scarcest commodity: time.

— With reporting by Shah Mahmood Barakzai / Kabul

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