Executive Summary
Afghanistan and Iraq have both shown that the United States must look far beyond the normal definition of counterinsurgency to determine how it can conduct armed nation building as a critical element of hybrid warfare. This requires an integrated civil-military effort in which providing lasting security for the population, and economic and political stability, will often be far more important than success in tactical engagements with enemy forces. It also requires the US to understand that important as its traditional allies are, the key ally will be the host country and not simply its government but its population.
How to Use Host Country Forces toWin aWar – And Lose One
Shaping the full range of host country security forces – from armed forces to regular police – has already proven to be a critical element in building such an alliance. No amount of experience, area expertise, or language skills can make US forces a substitute for local forces and the legitimacy they can bring. The US cannot structure its forces to provide a lasting substitute for the scale of forces needed to defeat an insurgency, deal with internal tensions and strife, fight what will often be enduring conflicts, while also fulfilling other US national security requirements.
No amount of US efforts in strategic communications or aid can substitute for a host government's ability to both communicate with its own people and win legitimacy in ideological, religious, and secular terms. Key aspects of operations – winning popular support, obtaining human intelligence, minimizing civilian casualties and collateral damage, and transitioning from military operations to a civil rule of law – all depend on both the quality and quantity of host country forces, as well as a level of partnership that assure the populace of a host country that the US will put its government and forces in the lead as soon as possible – and will leave once a host country is stable and secure.
The US has taken more than a half a decade to learn these lessons in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It has made major progress in recent years, but its efforts remain deeply flawed and the US military as well as outside military analysts still have not learned many of the painful lessons of Vietnam, Lebanon, and previous advisory efforts. At the same time, a US "whole of government" integrated civil-military effort, and true civil-military joint campaign plan represent at best a work in progress and are often little more than a triumph of rhetoric over reality.
Some of the gravest problems lie on the civil side, and the failure of the State Department and the civil departments of government to develop the necessary operational capabilities even after more than eight years of war. The US military, however, has yet to demonstrate that it can effectively and objectively manage its efforts to develop host country forces in ways that honestly assess their progress, the trade-offs needed between quality and quantity, and the need to create partners, rather than adjunct or surrogate forces.
This is partly a failure at the formal training level – sometimes dictated by unrealistic efforts to accelerate force quantity without considering the real world pace at which progress can occur. The pace of host nation force development can be slowed by a number of factors, including: national traditions and social values, the impact of a lack of political accommodation and capacity in the host country government, and the impact of ethnic, sectarian, and tribal divisions within the armed forces.
There also, however, have been two chronic failures in US efforts.
- One is the inability to properly structure efforts to create true partners once new units complete the formal training process and provide the proper quality and number of mentors, partner units, enablers, and efforts to integrate higher level command structures. Far too often the US has also sought to rush new battalionsized combat elements into service to meet its own short term needs without considering the resulting problems in quality, force retention, and host country perceptions of the result. Expediency has led to fundamentally misleading ratings of unit warfighting capability like the CM rating system, using up halfprepared forces in combat, and major leadership and retention problems. The US and NATO/ISAF are turning out the minimum possible standard to meet the timeline given. The result is poorly trained soldiers and a low retention rate.
- The other is a series of far more drastic failures to create effective police and security forces. These include the failure to properly assess the need for paramilitary police that can operate in a hostile counterinsurgency environment; the need to structure other police and security elements in ways that suit the constraints imposed by a lack of government capacity, corruption, differing cultural values; and the need to create a "rule of law" or civil order based on host country standards rather than US or Western values.
The US will lose the war in Afghanistan unless it makes far more effective efforts to correct these problems in what now seems likely to be an effort to accelerate training to reaching current force goals while doubling the overall size of the force. Military action is only a part of the strategy needed to win in Afghanistan, but no other effort towards victory will matter if the Afghan people cannot be given enough security and stability to allow successful governance, the opportunity for development, and an established civil society and rule of law that meets Afghan needs and expectations.
The creation of more effective host country forces is critical to achieving these ends. NATO/ISAF and US forces cannot hope to win a military victory on their own. Their success will be determined in large part by how well and how quickly they build up a much larger and more effective Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) first to support NATO/ISAF efforts, then take the lead, and eventually replace NATO/ISAF and US forces. The challenge is find a workable trade off between how well is 'good enough' the how quickly is as fast as possible. No meaningful form of success can occur, however, without giving the development of ANSF forces a much higher priority. The US and other NATO/ISAF nations need to act immediately to begin to support and resource NTM-A/ CSTC-A plans to accelerate current ANSF force expansion plans. They also need to act immediately to establish the groundwork for further major expansions of the ANA and ANP by 2014-2016. Recent planning efforts indicate that such an effort must nearly double the size of the ANA and ANP, although early success could make full implementation of such plans unnecessary. Making a fully resourced start will ensure that adequate ANSF forces will be available over time, and will greatly ease the strain of maintaining and increasing NATO/ISAF forces. Funding such expansion to the ANSF will also be far cheaper than maintaining or increasing NATO/ISAF forces. At a key moment of the ANSF's expansion, mentor strength is decreasing because the priority of effort is based on operations rather than training.
But, such efforts must not race beyond either Afghan or US/NATO/ISAF capabilities. Quality will often be far more important than quantity, and enduring ANSF capability is far more important than generating large initial force strengths. US/NATO/ISAF expediency cannot be allowed to put half-ready and unstable units in the field. It cannot be allowed to push force expansion efforts faster than ANSF elements can absorb them or than US/NATO/ISAF can provide fully qualified trainers, mentors, and partner units and the proper mix of equipment, facilities, enablers, and sustainability. At the moment, the US and NATO/ISAF are producing quantity not quality, and that is the inevitable result of speed of production.
US/NATO/ISAF expediency cannot afford to ignore the impact of Afghan cultural needs, regional and ethnic differences, family and tribal structures, and the real world "friction" that affects force development. Slogans and rhetoric about ideological goals, leadership, and morale cannot be allowed to lead the force development effort to ignore Afghan material realities: problems in pay, corruption, problems in promotion, inadequate facilities and equipment, poor medical care, overstretching or over committing force elements, problems in supporting families, vulnerability to insurgent infiltration and threats, and a lack of meaningful compensation for death and disability. The US military and NATO/ISAF have systematically ignored such problems in the past, and understated or lied about their impact. As one expert puts it, "In my view the biggest single issue is the J1 piece where at the moment we can not be sure that promotion is on merit or that people are posted on a regular systematic plot."
It may be conceptually attractive to compare the price of creating Afghan forces to those of deploying US and NATO/ISAF forces. It is certainly clear that the US and NATO/ISAF cannot or will not deploy and sustain the forces necessary to compensate for any failure to expand Afghan forces. It will be a disaster, however, if the real world problems in creating truly effective ANSF partners are not fully addressed and equal attention is not given to correcting these problems. Each problem is a way to lose, and force expansion that fails to solve them cannot be a way to win.
They also need to realize that improvements in the training base are needed to emphasize the training at the Kandak level, and that these units must be integrated and trained as whole unit before going out into the field. These improvements proved to be very beneficial in Iraq, and while they could make the training effort longer – not shorter – they pay off the moment units become active in the field. At the same time, no element of the ANSF can simply be trained and thrust into operations. Moreover, the key to success is not the quality of the training in training centers, but the quality of the partnering, mentoring, support, and enablers once a unit enters service. This requires an ongoing, expert effort per unit for 6 to 12 months at a minimum, and the CM definition of a "in the lead" is little more than a joke.
Realistic efforts to shake out new units, give them continuity of effective leadership, deal with internal tensions and retention problems, and help them overcome the pressures of corruption and power brokers requires both time and careful attention to continuity from the embedded training/mentoring effort. Partnering and the creation of effective units in the field is an exercise in sustained human relationships, and the short tours and rapid changes in US and NATO/ISAF trainers can be as crippling as the assumption that training is more critical than mentoring and partnering.
Further shifts will be needed in the structure of training and partnering as ANSF forces move into populated areas and take on the full range of "shape, clear, hold, and build" tasks. Every aspect of clear, hold, and build requires help in preparing ANSF elements to go from a combat ethos to one of effective civil-military relations. At this point in time, it is unclear that even the most dedicated advocates of a population centric strategy within the US military and NATO/ISAF can really define how to implement clear, hold, and build in terms of tangible ways to execute and manage the tasks involved and chose truly valid measures of effectiveness.
The moment such efforts become operational on a large-scale basis, however, they must be ready to partner ANSF forces and help them find the best way to deal with such problems. The COIN academy helps in this regard and the recent Afghan decision to open an Afghan COIN academy is a step in the right direction The US and NATO/ISAF military need to address these issues at every level of command and operations. They need to take the warning from junior and mid-level officers, and in far too much media reporting, fully seriously. They must not downplay the number of times that "optimism" and exaggerated declarations of success have hurt US efforts in the past, or the continuing impact of problems documented by the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, the General Accountability Office, and sensitive field reporting on the performance and retention problems in Afghan units in the field.
This study examines some of the issues affecting the expansion of Afghan forces, including the need for major changes in the way NATO/ISAF trains, mentors, and partners Afghan forces. It raises serious issues about the impact of excessive corruption and Afghan power brokers in the ANSF, particularly the Afghan National Police, and its highlights acute resource problems and issues in force quality. Its key recommendations, however, focus on the expansion of two key elements of the ANSF: The Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police.
© The Center for Strategic & International Studies
