Nation Building in Afghanistan

Do you think much has changed in one year?

Lessons Learned in U.S. Nation-Building Efforts

• Many factors -- such as prior democratic experience, level of economic development, and social homogeneity -- can influence the ease or difficulty of nation-building, but the single most important controllable determinant seems to be the level of effort, as measured in troops, money, and time.

• Multilateral nation-building is more complex and time-consuming than a unilateral approach. But the multilateral approach is considerably less expensive for individual participants.

• Multilateral nation-building can produce more thorough transformations and greater regional reconciliation than can unilateral efforts.

• Unity of command is as essential in peace operations as it is in war. This unity of command can be achieved even in operations with broad multilateral participation when the major participants share a common vision and tailor the response of international institutions accordingly.

• There appears to be an inverse correlation between the size of the military stabilization force and the level of casualties. The higher the proportion of troops relative to the resident population, the lower the number of casualties suffered and inflicted. Indeed, most of the post-conflict operations that were generously manned suffered no casualties at all.

• Neighboring states can exert significant influence, for good or bad. It is nearly impossible to put together a fragmented nation if its neighbors try to tear it apart. Every effort should be made to secure their support.

• Accountability for past injustices can be a powerful component of democratization. Such accountability can be among the most difficult and controversial aspects of any nation-building endeavor, however, and therefore should be attempted only if there is a deep and long-term commitment to the overall operation.

• There is no quick fix for nation-building. None of our cases was successfully completed in less than seven years.

Source: America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, by James Dobbins, et al., RAND, 2003.

Further reading
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Reliability of Afghan army called into question by Pentagon

By Ben Farmer in Kabul and James Kirkup Published: 7:00AM BST 14 Jul 2010 Telegraph

Raising the competence of the force is central to the entire Nato strategy for Afghanistan. Western nations have said they will withdraw their forces only when the Afghans can secure the country themselves.

With the Afghan National Police widely regarded as corrupt and unreliable, even greater importance rests on the Afghan National Army (ANA).

Nato leaders have repeatedly claimed that the ANA is making excellent progress, but those claims have been questioned by a US government audit.

Arnold Fields, the US Defense Department’s inspector general for Afghanistan, concluded that the capabilities of many “top-rated” ANA units have been “overstated” by Nato commanders.

Several ANA units officially passed as able to operate without international support or guidance have not proved they are capable of independent operations, the auditor found in a report last month.

Nato admits that Afghan forces remain totally reliant on Nato for air support and artillery, for medical evacuation from the battlefield and often for supplies.

The audit’s findings are echoed by Nato commanders in the field.

Many Nato troops have hair-raising stories of careless young Afghan soldiers accidentally firing their weapons, including rocket launchers.

Commanders in the field have also occasionally questioned the Afghans’ commitment.

On a recent visit to the Babaji area of Helmand, where yesterday’s shooting took place, The Daily Telegraph saw Afghan troops refuse to carry their own food or water on patrol and demand that Gurkhas supply them instead.
Some Afghan soldiers also refuse to patrol at night or in the heat of midday. One British officer said: “The Afghan soldiers and police like to have fresh food. They are fixed to their meal times. Sometimes they have been out on patrol and said 'It’s lunchtime, it’s over’ .”

There are currently about 119,000 members of the ANA. To allow the transfer of security duties, Nato has set a target of 171,000, due to be reached by 2014. That means an accelerated process that sees new recruits given two months’ basic training before being assigned to units, often formed from scratch.

Prof Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute said a few units are of good quality but, because of the short training period for rank-and-file soldiers, “the quality is always going to be patchy”.

There are questions about the commitment of the ANA and Prof Clarke estimated that one in ten newly trained ANA soldiers go absent without leave.

British officers training the ANA say that there is a particular shortage of non-commissioned officers, the sergeants and sergeants-major who are the backbone of any modern army.

Paul Flynn, a Labour backbencher and critic of the Afghan war, described the ANA as “a group of drug-addicted mercenaries” that could not be trusted.

He said: “Its members have little or no loyalty to their election-rigging president, their own government or international governments. Why on earth do we expect to build a stable Afghanistan on that crumbling foundation?

Afghan National Army: 1 in 4 quit, 9% AWOL, 19% absentee rate.

POLITICS: Afghan Army Turnover Rate Threatens U.S. War Plans
By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Nov 24 (IPS) - One in every four combat soldiers quit the Afghan National Army (ANA) during the year ending in September, published data by the U.S. Defence Department and the Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan reveals.

That high rate of turnover in the ANA, driven by extremely high rates of desertion, spells trouble for the strategy that President Barack Obama has reportedly decided on, which is said to include the dispatch of thousands of additional U.S. military trainers in order to rapidly increase the size of the ANA.

The ANA has been touted by U.S. officials for years as a success story. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal called in his August 2009 strategy paper for increasing the ANA to 134,000 troops by October 2010 and eventually to 240,000.

But an administration source, who insisted on speaking without attribution because of the sensitivity of the subject, confirmed to IPS that 25 percent has been used as the turnover rate for the ANA in internal discussions, and that it is regarded by some officials as a serious problem.


The 35,000 troops recruited in the year ending Sep. 1 is the highest by the ANA in any year thus far, but the net increase of 19,000 troops for the year is 33 percent less than the 26,000 net increases during both of the previous two years.

Those figures indicate that the rate of turnover in the ANA is accelerating rather than slowing down. That acceleration could increase further, as the number of troops whose three-year enlistment contracts end rises rapidly in the next couple of years.

Meanwhile, the Defence Department sought to obscure the problem of the high ANA turnover rate in its reports to Congress on Afghanistan in January and June 2009, which avoided the issues of attrition and desertion entirely.

Instead they referred to what DOD calls the "AWOL" (Absent without Leave) rate in the ANA, which measures those unavailable for duty but still in the army. It claimed in June that the AWOL rate was nine percent through May 2009, compared with seven percent in 2008.

The reports also confused the question of turnover in the ANA by using questionable accounting methods in DOD's reporting on monthly changes in personnel. It provided figures for total ANA personnel in 2009 showing an increase from 66,000 in September 2008 to 94,000 in September 2009.

Those figures have made it appear that ANA manpower increased by 28,000 during the year. But nearly half the increase turns out to be accounted for by a decision on the part of the U.S. command responsible for tracking ANA manpower to change what was being measured.

Previously the total had included only those who had been trained and assigned to a military unit. But in late September 2008, CSTC-A started counting 12,000 men who had not previously been considered as part of the ANA.

In response to a query from IPS, Sgt. Grady L. Epperly, chief of media relations for CSTC-A, acknowledged that the U.S. command had abruptly changed what it included in its overall strength figures for the Afghan Army in late September 2008.

"The way numbers were reported was switched from reporting only Operational Forces to including all Soldiers, Officers and civilians, regardless of training status and command," Epperly wrote in an e-mail.

The graphs in the DOD reports of January and June 2009 are still identified as "Afghan National Army Trained and Assigned". But the text of the report reveals that the personnel totals shown on the graph were no longer for the Afghan National Army but for the Ministry of Defence.

That meant that the totals included for the first time those still in training, including even high school cadets, and others not assigned to any unit.

That deceptive accounting change obscured the fact that the total number of personnel assigned to ANA units in September 2009 was actually 82,000 rather than the 94,000 shown, and that the increase in ANA personnel over the year was only 16,000 rather than 28,000.

Using the corrected totals for changes in personnel during the year, the 25 percent turnover rate for ANA combat troops can be calculated from the available data on recruitment and the breakdown between combat and non-combat troops
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Calculating the ANA Combat Troop Turnover Rate
The turnover rate in any organisation in a given time period is the total number of personnel who quit the organisation divided by the total number who belonged to the organisation during that period.

The ANA recruited 35,000 men from September 2008 through August 2009, according to quarterly reports issued by the Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan and semi-annual DOD reports. With 66,000 as the personnel base for the year beginning September 2008, the total number of personnel in the organisation for the year was 101,000.

The difference of 19,000 between the 35,000 recruited and the 16,000 net increase in personnel during the period represents total turnover from a combination of attrition – soldiers who do not reenlist after their three-year contracts have expired – and desertion.

The 19,000 turnover is 19 percent of the total of 101,000 men who belonged to the ANA during the year ending September 2009.

However, the more meaningful measure of turnover is the percentage of combat troops who left the ANA.

The total number of combat troops increased only from 46,000 to 58,000 during the year ending in September for an increase of 12,000, according to the official published data.

Four thousand of the new 35,000 new recruits either went into non-combat units or were not assigned, leaving 31,000 recruits who were assigned to combat units.

The difference between the 31,000 recruits assigned to combat units and the 12,000 increase in combat troops, representing the turnover of ANA combat troops, is 19,000. That 19,000-man total turnover was 25 percent of the 77,000 total ANA troops assigned to combat units during the year (46,000 plus 31,000).
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ANA turnover as a proportion of ANA combat troops is a more significant indicator of instability than turnover as a proportion of all personnel, because there is little or no desertion and far higher reenlistment rates in non-combat jobs. ANA non-combat personnel totals also include thousands of civilians.

The impact of the 25-percent combat troop turnover rate on the ANA is actually more acute than it would appear, because of the high absenteeism rate in the ANA. The GAO report revealed that, as of February 2008, out of 32,000 combat troops on the rolls, only 26,000 were available for duty – a 19 percent absenteeism rate.

Assuming that same rate of absenteeism remained during the past year, the number of ANA combat troops actually available for duty increased only by about 9,000 from 37,000 to 46,000.

As serious as the turnover rate was in 2009-2009, turnover in the first two or three years of the ANA was much worse. ANA recruitment and reenlistment figures show that 18,000 of the first 25,000 troops recruited from 2003 to 2005 deserted.

That desertion rate prompted analysts at the U.S. Army Center for Lessons Learned at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas to conclude that the ANA would not be able to grow beyond 100,000, according to an article in the current issue of "Military Review", published at the same Army base.

The authors, Chris Mason and Thomas Johnson, both of whom have had extensive experience in Afghanistan, write that that the analysts at the Army Center concluded that by the time the ANA got to 100,000 troops, its annual losses from desertions and attrition would roughly equal its gains from recruitment.

The Center for Lessons Learned refused to confirm or deny those assertions. When asked about the assertion in the Military Review article, an official of the Center for Lessons Learned, operations officer Randy Cole, refused to comment except to refer IPS to the authors of the article.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.