Taking a cue from the CIA, this week the Department of Defense outsourced its press release on Afghan commandos to the Daily Beast. The result was a closer look at Obama’s great camouflaged hope in Afghanistan, something I’ve written about before for RFE/RL. For the record, back in 2012 I felt that Afghanistan’s US-mentored special operations forces (SOF) were one of the less-dim bulbs in the transition chandelier. Still do. But from the Beast article, here’s five things we can learn about the current (and future) state of Afghan commandos.
1. They’re winning. Just ask them.
On Election Day, U.S. special operations forces left security entirely to the Afghans, as a sort of a test. Commander of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, or CJSOTF-A, Col. Chris Riga said one of his Afghan Commando counterparts boasted of his troops conducting 40 operations that day.
“I don’t believe you,” Riga told him. He said the commander pulled out his records to prove it. “It was pretty impressive,” the Green Beret officer said.
Afghan security forces are notorious for producing reports on a level of honesty that would make Bernie Madoff blush. It’s one of the reasons the Americans no longer produce monthly incident reports, something they quit doing in January of last year. The fact that Riga points to records kept by a military that’s still incapable of keeping track of its equipment on a regular basis as evidence of success is an indication of how badly the US wants to show progress in the face of the drawdown.
2. Like all Afghan forces, they still need the Americans.
The Afghans were originally recruited and trained by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command to join the elite U.S. operators on missions, as indicated by the patch the Afghans still wear emblazoned with the words “Afghan Partnering Forces.”
“Now we are trying to do all our operations independently,” said Colonel Jalaluddin Yaftaly, commander of the elite unit. “We have two problems,” Yaftaly said. “We don’t have enough helicopters, and we need more information,” like satellite images and signals intercepts to track the targets, he said in an interview at his headquarters, tucked at the furthest side of a large Afghan army base outside Kabul.
So outside of knowing where the bad guys are, and a ride to get them to said bad guys, Afghan special ops dudes are doing just dandy. The problem here is that the US trained the Afghans to fight using technology that the Afghan government is no position to pay for going forward. This kind of material support during the next several months (and beyond) is going to be critical if the Afghan SOF mission is going to be anything like a success.
3. They’re using drones for CAS.
That’s why most of the strikes against al-Qaeda in the mountainous and remote eastern provinces of Kunar and Nuristan are now carried out by U.S. drone strikes, two of the officials said. The Afghan forces can’t get them any other way.
Expect a much longer piece from me on this in the next several days, but see the previous point on the ability of the Afghans to provide themselves with everything they need to take the fight to the enemy. Given that the condition of Afghan’s roads is somewhere on the facelift scale between Joan Rivers and Mickey Rourke (read: “still needs a lot of work, and even then, problems), they still need airpower. If they can’t get it from the Americans (which they will for the foreseeable future), the Afghans’ ability to push the insurgency back is hampered to the point of inaction.
4. The ALP are a problem.
“In many areas, the ALP are providing security and the community wants them there,” said Georgette Gagnon, director of human rights at the U.N.’s mission in Afghanistan, which has closely chronicled the ALP’s development. “In other areas, they carry out human-rights violations with impunity.”
If you remember no other paragraph about the Afghan Local Police (ALP), make it this one. Gagnon’s summed up the deal with the devil that is the ALP on several levels. While the Beast’s editorial slant here was playing up how much good the ALP have done, their future success (and human rights nightmare scenarios) is still up for debate. Even with long-term US security support, they are now and always will be a paramilitary organization only loosely affiliated with official government entities. That alone is cause for concern, and as the drawdown continues, keeping track of them and maintaining accountability is going to get even more difficult.
5. They’d rather fight Taliban.
They say Afghan forces sometimes focus their firepower on targets they see as a more immediate threat to them and their government like a local Taliban ringleader that is planting roadside bombs, rather than an al Qaeda or Haqqani suspect with aspirations of attacking U.S. targets.
I’ve asked this before on the blog: Whose counterinsurgency is this, anyway? While we’re after AQ, the Afghans would rather whack the guy who’s planting the IEDs. Which, given that they’re trying to secure the nation of Afghanistan for the good of their fellow Afghans, is a reasonable enough approach. Unfortunately, that’s not the US goal here. We’re all about making sure that AQ Airways isn’t making plans to resume service to New York or any other points west.
So Obama’s pinned his hopes on a self-reporting portion of the Afghan military in desperate need of outside inputs that’s affiliated with a group of human rights nightmares. I can see a few flaws with that plan, and keep this in mind: the commandos are the best of the bunch when it comes to Afghan security forces. Should be a fun couple of years.