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With Troop Pledge, New Demands on Afghans
President Obama’s commitment Tuesday night to redouble America’s campaign in Afghanistan left unanswered what is perhaps the most decisive question of all: will the Afghans step up too?
In ordering the accelerated deployment of 30,000 fresh American troops to the country, Mr. Obama made clear that he would demand a far greater effort from President Hamid Karzai to stanch corruption in his government and from Afghan soldiers and police officers to fight Taliban insurgents.
The extra American soldiers, the president said, would be on the ground only for a limited time to ensure the Afghans followed through.
But that is the heart of the problem: (…) Mr. Obama is setting criteria for success that he and his field commanders may be able to influence, but that ultimately they will not be able to control.
The most immediate challenge is President Karzai himself, the onetime Western favorite who presides over what is widely regarded as one of the most corrupt governments in the world. The graft permeating the Afghan government is so vast that for ordinary Afghans, it has begun to call into question the very legitimacy of Mr. Karzai’s government — and for Americans, the wisdom of fighting and dying to support it.
Only last month, Mr. Karzai was declared the winner in nationwide elections that were tainted by extraordinary levels of fraud — nearly all of which independent election observers found was orchestrated on his behalf. Mr. Karzai’s own brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is suspected of bring a central player in the country’s opium trade, a primary source of money for Taliban insurgents.
“We have to have a better government because all these soldiers will be sent to benefit this corrupt government,” said Noorulhaq Uloomi, an Afghan member of Parliament. (…)
Mr. Obama appears to be hoping that a precise timetable for the beginning of an American withdrawal — 18 months from now — will goad Mr. Karzai to act.(…)
One clue to President Obama’s approach is that he intends to curtail the amount of American money going directly to Mr. Karzai and the central government in Kabul. Instead, the president intends to channel more American money directly to local officials in the provinces. (…)
Mr. Karzai, now in his eighth year as president, has consistently resisted previous American demands that he clean up his government. Only last month, he reportedly refused the latest American demand, made by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, that he remove Ahmed Wali Karzai from his base in Kandahar.
(…) Afghan police officers say that high-ranking jobs in the force, for instance, are often auctioned off for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars; the Afghans who secure those jobs then often use their positions to reap even more money by facilitating the movement of narcotics.
Yet for all the worries about corruption, President Obama’s far larger gamble is the plan to train the Afghan police and army to take over for the Americans — and eventually allow them to go home. Even by their numbers alone, the Afghan forces are woefully inadequate: there are currently about 90,000 Afghan soldiers and about 93,000 Afghan police officers. In a country of about 30 million, that is nowhere near the number that will ultimately be needed to bring order to that fractious land.(…)
President Obama and his field commanders intend to rapidly expand the rank of Afghans under arms to about 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police officers.
They also intend to augment those forces by supporting local defense forces — Afghan militias — in villages and towns. Turning groups of former insurgents into neighborhood defense forces was a decisive factor in reducing the violence in Iraq.
But the far more worrying prospect is the quality of the Afghan troops and officers. (…)
One example often cited by American trainers: the bureaucratic skills and literacy levels necessary to administer a large force have not materialized, even after years of mentoring. When it comes to paying their soldiers, keeping them fed, providing them with ammunition and equipment, tracking who is on leave and who is injured, most Afghan units perform very poorly. These tasks — essential to the readiness of any army — are almost invariably performed by American or NATO soldiers. (…)
“The focus of the training program has always been ‘more soldiers’ at the expense of quality training,” said an American involved in training Afghan forces, who demanded that his name be withheld because he was still working with Afghan soldiers. “There are no ‘tests.’ A soldier does not have to master any task prior to graduating. Attendance equals graduation.”
When it comes to such grim assessments, the struggle in Afghanistan is colored by that other American war, the one in Iraq. In that country, for nearly four years, the war went horribly wrong — and then, suddenly, conditions markedly improved. Many factors contributed to the turnaround, not least the rapid and temporary influx of American forces known as the “surge.”(…)
In Iraq, both the population and insurgency are concentrated in cities. Afghanistan, by contrast, is a largely rural country, with the population spread across a mountainous and remote terrain. The Afghan insurgency is, too, making it far more difficult to pin down.
In the end, training Afghan soldiers and pressuring Afghan officials will succeed only if the American-led war has the support of ordinary Afghans themselves(…)
“We’re in a battle to win over what the average Afghan wants for their country,” an American military official said, “and whether they have more faith in their own government.”
