In combat, the performance of Afghan National Army units had shown promise, but the dominance of former Northern Alliance leaders, corruption, and uneven leadership continued to hobble their development. Initiatives like the Afghan Military Academy—Afghanistan’s West Point—helped. But leaders needed time and political will to create a self-sustaining institution.
The police were far behind, almost depressingly so. They had received little international attention since 9/11, and despite Minister Hanif Atmar’s energetic efforts, they lacked training and leadership and suffered from chronic corruption and drug use. By nature, police are far harder to build than armies. Their decentralized employment disperses them in small elements that are vulnerable to improper pressure and corruption. It also makes small-unit leadership critical, something that in Afghanistan was weak. Further, in the press to field police around the country, the Ministry of the Interior adopted a recruit-deploy-train model, instead of the more logical recruit-train-deploy one, guaranteeing that most police in service lacked even a basic level of training.
As a result, the police struggled for legitimacy with the people. In a number of locations, predatory police were the single greatest factor undermining support for the Afghan government. Still, against the cacophony of withering criticism they regularly received, I’d point out that the Afghan National Police were dying in far greater numbers fighting the insurgency than any other force.
Finding fault with both the army and police was easy, but that wouldn’t get the job done. So we pushed to expand the existing organization responsible for their training and development into a vastly more capable international effort called NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan (NTM-A). At the same time, we sought increased force levels for both the army and the police.
There were a number of reasons to doubt this goal. We knew that rapid expansion of Afghan security forces risked producing units that lacked the training, discipline, and needed professionalism. And we projected that for a decade or more, Afghanistan could not afford forces of this size without donor funding. But we knew that fielding Afghan forces cost a fraction of what it did to deploy Coalition forces, and that the final stages of the war would be fought not by Americans, but by Afghans.
Leadership would be critical. But development of leaders was a long-term prospect. So Rod and I intended to leverage partnership with ISAF forces to help mitigate the risks of fielding Afghan units that lacked a seasoned leadership cadre. The only way to build not just more security forces but better policemen and soldiers was to put into motion the “radically improved partnership at every level” I had called for in the assessment. Afghans and NATO soldiers would train, eat, bunk, plan, patrol, fight, celebrate, and mourn together. We knew this course of action, however, carried its own risks. It’d be impossible to keep out all attempts by the insurgents to infiltrate the forces, or prevent soldiers turning sides. And we anticipated there would be cultural friction. Most difficult to stomach were tragic cases when uniformed Afghans killed NATO service members. Still we judged true partnering was the only viable option in the time frame we believed we had for the mission.
* * *
Piercing stares, animated conversation, and pointing followed my every move. Even separated by chain-link fencing and carefully placed sheets of Plexiglas, the prisoners were menacing. I was visiting the detention facility at Bagram air base, still housed in the same old buildings I’d visited in 2002. As I walked among the series of small chain-link group “cells” occupied by eight to ten detainees each, I was struck by the seething rag coming from what looked like cages. The Plexiglas was there to prevent food and other things from being flung at the guards, who, for the conditions, remained impressively professional. Construction was already under way for a new facility. But it couldn’t come quickly enough.
Sensitive to both the importance and risks of detention operations, I was anxious to create a detention operation like I’d seen developed in Iraq in 2007–2008. I remembered sitting in a meeting in Baghdad in early 2007 when a Marine Reserve major general named Doug Stone had arrived to take command of detention operations. I’d known Doug from his tour in Islamabad back in 2003–2004 and frankly doubted he would be up to the task.