Voices: Training Afghan soldiers is just not working

On an Afghan army base this spring, I got a glimpse of the security forces that are responsible for winning the war against the Taliban now that the U.S. has stepped back from an active combat role.

I expected to see local recruits being schooled in how to fight. Instead, soldiers hefting wooden replica rifles were being drilled — not in battlefield skills — but in how to build dining halls.

Perhaps they can challenge the Taliban to a bakeoff.

The scene would have been amusing if the stakes weren’t so high. Training others to fight battles the U.S. regards as important is at the heart of the Obama administration’s strategy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

It’s not working. Last week, the Taliban seized control of Kunduz, a provincial capital of 300,000 people, marking the first time the extremists had taken control of a city in 14 years of near-constant warfare. As Afghan forces tried to retake it, U.S. warplanes — still available for emergency support — bombed a local hospital, killing 22 people, including patients and staff.

The debacle in Afghanistan — which no doubt will be discussed Tuesday when Gen. John Campbell, the top U.S. officer there, testifies on Capitol Hill — only mirrors what’s occurred elsewhere. In Iraq, U.S.-trained units melted amid the Islamic State’s 2014 onslaught, and in Syria, the training program thus far has turned out a mere handful of fighters.

This is wishful thinking masquerading as foreign policy.

And it has a long history. Almost 50 years ago, President Richard Nixon sought to withdraw GIs from Vietnam by “Vietnamizing” the war — shifting responsibility for ground combat to our South Vietnamese ally. Ultimately, local forces were not up to the task.

More recently, the Pentagon identified training foreign fighters as a critical need in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review. Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote an oft-quoted Foreign Affairs article five years ago saying the military, which has historically promoted officers for just about any reason other than training acumen, needs to improve in that area.

Such efforts aren’t inexpensive. The U.S. has spent more than $65 billion training and equipping its Afghan surrogates. It will spend an additional $4 billion this year.

Yet problems persist. In Afghanistan, the U.S. training program often has been short of manpower and equipment. Many of the trainers have no experience before starting their work. Some of their pupils turn on them: At least 83 American or coalition personnel have been killed since the start of 2012 in so-called “green on blue” attacks.

That may explain the wooden rifles I saw on the base outside of Mazar-i-Sharif, where rusting Soviet-era tanks and armored personnel carriers bear witness to Afghanistan’s nearly unbroken four-decade history of conflict.

Yet the current training is aimed at bureaucrats more than warriors, revolving around administrative functions such as budgeting and planning rather than the best way to fire a rifle or mount an attack. The Afghan combat engineers I saw don’t even learn critical battlefield skills like erecting bridges under fire.

And while progress has been made, the finish line is nowhere in sight. The president plans to withdraw almost all of the 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of next year, counting on the Afghans to defend themselves.

A German colonel who was among the NATO trainers I spoke with in May told me the allies could stay in Afghanistan for 30 years and not finish the job.

Afghans are notoriously fierce warriors, but their will to fight is only as strong as the government they defend. Feeble public institutions along with sectarian divides undermine military cohesion.

When a few hundred Taliban are able to overrun several thousand government soldiers and police — as happened in Kunduz — it tells you one thing.

Wooden rifles and dining halls won’t win this war.

Lynch reported from more than 60 countries as a Paste BN foreign correspondent between 1997 and 2005.