Let's Train'em, Declare Victory and Leave

Great progress being made in Afghanistan. Six years down the road and we're almost at the halfway point in the goal of building a 70,000-soldier strong Afghan army. Once we hit that magic number, so we're told anyway, it's all "Mission Accomplished" and we can move on. Just a few more years now - or maybe ten or twenty or...

The Afghanistan National Army is a bit of a novelty. The country has never really fielded a national army in recent history. Force has been structured by militias controlled by ethnic warlords - Pashtun, Baloch, Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara. The national army essentially takes that military control out of the hands of the warlords and there's the rub.

Where are those warlords today? Why, many of them are in key positions of power in the Karzai government. Some of those are also in the narcotics industry. Some have ties to the Taliban.

What then is holding the Afghan national army together as its rate of enlistment slowly comes to outpace its rate of desertions? Well the glue would be the US and NATO forces in that country. They provide the structure and, after this many years, they're actually getting fairly good at herding the cats.

The question is whether the western troops have become the indispensible spine of the Afghan National Army. What is there to replace them if we leave that country? What would be left save for a thoroughly corrupt and dysfunctional central government?

If the national government is too weak and corrupt to sustain the national army, what then? That may depend as much on the army's officer corps as the number and quality of soldiers we train for them. It is not inconceivable that it may take a military coup to prevent a post-NATO Afghanistan from sliding back into the abyss of warring fuedalism fueled by the spoils of a failed, narco-state.

Maybe the best we can do for Afghanistan is to help train an effective army with heavy emphasis on its officer corps so that we can leave the country in safe hands. Perhaps this is our only legitimate exit strategy. The quest to bring Western democracy to Afghanistan may be more than the US, NATO and Afghanistan can bear.