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Afghan Army Post in Kunar Province Overrun by Taliban, 21 Killed

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[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiVw94CuwGg’]

 

In the worst attack in at least six months, Taliban fighters overran an Afghan army base in Kunar province near the Pakistan border, killing 21 Afghan soldiers who were said to have been sleeping at the time of the attack. It appears that a very large Taliban force carried out the attack. The New York Times carried a statement from the Afghan Defense Ministry that “hundreds” of fighters were in the attack and that the battle lasted four hours, while the Washington Post stated that “more than 100” Taliban fighters carried out the attack.

The Times article informs us that at least one version of events suggests that the Taliban had infiltrators on the base who helped the assault forces:

One of the Afghan soldiers taken prisoner, who later escaped and was interviewed in the eastern city of Asadabad, said he believed that the insurgents had entered the fortified base with the collusion of infiltrators who had been on guard duty in the base’s three watchtowers and outside its barracks. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

“I believe these four soldiers had links with the Taliban,” he said. “They shot our soldiers while they were sleeping. When others woke up, they were taken alive, along with me.” He said that he and three other soldiers had managed to escape from the insurgents as they fled the area.

The Times article also states that as the US draws down its forces, Afghan units no longer are accompanied by US forces and “do not have the close air support they often enjoyed”. It should be noted, though, that Afghan forces have already retaken the base. Also note that, as seen in the accompanying video of the funeral in Kabul for those killed, and as noted in this article in ToloNews, Afghan helicopters were at least available to ferry the dead, and so we are left to wonder if they were also involved in the re-taking of the base.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai canceled a planned trip in response to the attack and called for Pakistan to take action against the Afghan Taliban forces which find refuge in Pakistan. It is not clear if Karzai was aware that on Sunday, Pakistan killed at least 38 suspected militants in North Waziristan in air raids carried out by Pakistani jets. Yet another high ranking member of Pakistan’s Taliban also was gunned down today, as well.

Interestingly, at least one person the New York Times talked to about the attack seemed to think that there are still problems with screening of Afghan security forces since there are hints that sympathizers let the Taliban onto the base:

“My cousin was killed in the attack yesterday,” Hajji Alif Khan, from Khost Province, said at the ceremony at the military hospital. “I want to see the bloodshed ended in this country in my lifetime. It is enough, we lost thousands of people. Let’s stop this war,” he said.

But in the meantime, he said, “They should check every soldier’s background.”

Gosh, we were told about a year and a half ago that screening was now very good…

Civilian Casualties Rise Yet Again in Afghanistan, Confirming Surge Failure

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UNAMA 2013

Click on image for a larger view.

The United Nations is the best source of information on the impact of the war in Afghanistan on civilians. They released their latest data this weekend (pdf), and their results show that the vaunted “surge” of US troops into the country in early 2010 through late 2012 failed to protect civilians. In fact, the data show that civilian injuries have shown a steady rise from 2009 pre-surge levels through 2013’s post-surge period. Civilian deaths rose in 2010 and 2011. They went down slightly in 2012 before rising again in 2013.

Despite this clear indication that the surge was a waste of lives and money, recall that the Pentagon continued to spew its positive spin as troops were drawn down. From September, 2012 as the surge ended:

Very quietly, the surge of troops into Afghanistan that President Obama announced to such fanfare in late 2009 is now over.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said today that 33,000 troops have been withdrawn, calling the Afghan surge “a very important milestone” in a war the Obama administration is winding down; there are sill 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The “surge did accomplish its objectives of reversing the Taliban momentum on the battlefield and dramatically increase the size and capability of the Afghan national security forces,” Panetta said.

As seen in the UN data, the surge did nothing to reverse attacks on civilians, with civilian casualties continuing a steady increase. How about Panetta’s other claim, the one about dramatically increasing the size and capability of Afghan national security forces? To answer that, we depend on data supplied by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Their latest report can be found here (pdf). Once again, the target for ANSF size was not achieved, even after moving the goalposts (footnotes removed):

This quarter, ANSF’s assigned force strength was 334,852, according to data provided by CSTC-A. This is short of the goal to have an end strength of 352,000 ANSF personnel by October 2012. That goal had been in the Department of Defense’s (DOD) April 2012 Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan. When that end strength was not met, DOD revised the goal to 352,000 ANSF by 2014 (187,000 ANA by December 2012, 157,000 ANP by February 2013, and 8,000 Air Force by December 2014). Neither the ANA nor the ANP met their end-strength goal by the revised deadline, as shown in Table 3.6.

But the reality could be far worse than those numbers indicate. While the force size falls just barely short of the target, the functionality of those troops is suspect. Further, it appears that Afghanistan may be playing games with the meaning of “available” (sorry, this bit of text won’t copy, so I have to use images instead): Read more →

Latest Night Raid Afghan Civilian Deaths Put BSA into Further Doubt

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Back in October, I noted that one of Hamid Karzai’s primary barriers to signing the Bilateral Security Agreement is his objection to night raids carried out by US-trained death squads because of the high rate of civilian casualties involved. Yesterday, yet another night raid went bad, but this time, instead of the death squad killing civilians, an air raid called in when the raiding party came under heavy fire was responsible for civilian deaths. In an attempt to deflect blame, ISAF tried to emphasize that this mission was Afghan-led:

International Security Assistance Force regrets that civilians were killed Jan. 15 during a deliberately-planned, Afghan-led clearing operation to disrupt insurgent activity in Ghorband district, Parwan province.

The mission, led by commandos of the 6th Special Operations Kandak and supported by ISAF special operations advisers, was conducted to disrupt insurgent activities in the district, including attacks on Bagram Airfield, and in support of Afghan National Security Forces’ tactical priorities. Local district and provincial officials were informed in advance of the operation and were provided updates during and after the actions.

It would not surprise me if ISAF eventually blames the “local district and provincial officials” who were warned for tipping off the insurgents so that an ambush could be carried out. But note that “ISAF special operations advisers” were present, and as I have noted previously, this is the hallmark of the US-trained death squads that have previously operated with impunity but have infuriated Karzai. Even though ISAF is claiming that the intelligence for the operation was generated by the Afghans, you can bet that our “advisers” would not have ventured off their base if our own intelligence hadn’t also been involved in planning the attack.

Strangely, the NYTimes article linked above puts the operation taking place at 6:30 am, but the Washington Post puts it at 1 am, which fits night raid timing much better. The details in the two stories differ substantially. From the Times:

Aziz Ahmad Zaki, a spokesman for the governor of Parwan, said that the coalition Special Operations advisers had come to assist the Afghan forces in the area, setting up alongside them in a district check post that quickly came under fire from Taliban attackers on Tuesday.

Around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, Afghan and coalition forces began a clearance operation in the Wazghar Valley, but ran into a Taliban ambush, taking fire from several compounds in the area at once, officials said.

“Afghan and coalition forces returned fire and required defensive air support to suppress the enemy fire,” according to the coalition statement.

But according to the Post, the raiding party attempted to enter a home at 1 am, rather than conducting a “clearing operation” at 6:30:

According to Karzai and the governor of Parwan province, the incident occurred about 1 a.m. when U.S. Special Forces attempted to enter a home. A gun battle ensued, resulting in a coalition airstrike that killed the children and a female relative in the house, they said.

This version says nothing about being attacked at a checkpost but instead follows a usual night raid routine.

Karzai is furious. From AFP:

President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday accused the United States of killing seven children and a woman in an airstrike in central Afghanistan — an incident set to further damage frayed ties between the two allies.

Relations between Washington and Kabul have been rocky for years, and negotiations over an agreement that would allow some US troops to remain in the country after this year have broken down into a long-running public dispute.

“As a result of bombardment by American forces last night… in Siahgird district of Parwan province, one woman and seven children were martyred and one civilian injured,” a statement from Karzai’s office said.

“The Afghan government has been asking for a complete end to operations in Afghan villages for years, but American forces acting against all mutual agreements… have once again bombarded a residential area and killed civilians.

The zero option in Afghanistan is looking more and more likely.

Wait. Where Are These “Gains” NIE Says We Might Lose in Afghanistan?

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The latest effort by War, Inc. to prolong the war in Afghanistan consists of a “leak” of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan. The Washington Post dutifully stepped up to transcribe the official line, bleating breathlessly in its headline “Afghanistan gains will be lost quickly after drawdown, U.S. intelligence estimate warns”. Since drawing down our troops closes the spigot feeding war profiteers, we just can’t consider leaving:

A new American intelligence assessment on the Afghan war predicts that the gains the United States and its allies have made during the past three years are likely to have been significantly eroded by 2017, even if Washington leaves behind a few thousand troops and continues bankrolling the impoverished nation, according to officials familiar with the report.

And if we leave faster, Afghanistan will go to hell faster, according to our Intelligence Oracles:

The report predicts that Afghanistan would likely descend into chaos quickly if Washington and Kabul don’t sign a security pact that would keep an international military contingent there beyond 2014 — a precondition for the delivery of billions of dollars in aid that the United States and its allies have pledged to spend in Afghanistan over the coming years.

As I have long maintained, however, virtually all claims of “progress” in Afghanistan come more from a process of gaming the numbers than any real calming of the country. Consider this post from June of 2012. Note from the figure in that post that violence in Afghanistan varies greatly with the season, but that the peak level of violence increased steadily from 2006 through 2011. I intended to go back to this same source to see how the subsequent years look on the graph, but it appears that these particular reports are no longer published for the general public.

The UN does still release reports on its collection of data regarding protection of civilians in Afghanistan. Noting that the current claim regarding the “success” of the surge in Afghanistan is that it managed to “reverse the Taliban’s momentum and give the government more of an edge”, consider the latest data on civilian deaths that the UN ascribes to anti-government elements in Afghanistan:

Afghanistan civilian AGE deaths

 

Perhaps, if we consider only deaths, an argument can be made that the rate of increase of deaths has been slowed, but there certainly is no basis for claiming that there is a trend to fewer deaths.

Lurking beneath this dire warning in the NIE is a tacit admission that the $50 billion that the US has spent to train and arm Afghan security forces has been a total waste, since the ANSF will not be able to maintain security once we are gone.

The bottom line is that the entire US war machinery has failed in every single facet of the effort in Afghanistan. Our presence has accomplished nothing but death, destruction and the wasting of nearly a trillion dollars. Our leaving will see further death and destruction. Staying longer would make no difference other than continuing to enrich War, Inc. There are no good options left, but getting our troops out at least stops the hemorrhaging of money.

 

Pitiful “Moral Victory” for ANSF: “Mostly Survived” and “Didn’t Give Back All Gains”

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Maybe ISAF can borrow this tag for vehicles in Afghanistan. (Photo courtesy of myoldpostcards via Creative Commons License on flickr)

Maybe ISAF can borrow this tag for vehicles in Afghanistan. (Photo courtesy of myoldpostcards via Creative Commons License on flickr)

I’ve noted before how the “fighting season” in Afghanistan is viewed by the Pentagon in terms that are eerily parallel to baseball season, but the end of season reviews this year have sunk to a pitifully low level as military leaders cast about for anything that can be viewed as a positive sign to take away from the season that is winding down. In today’s New York Times, the season review has sunk lower than any diehard Cubs fan’s version of “wait until next year”:

Some American and Afghan commanders characterized a kind of moral victory for the Afghan forces: they mostly survived, and they did not completely give back gains from past Western offensives.

True to form, the article opened by presenting the “fighting season” framing:

When the Taliban announced the beginning of their spring offensive, they saw few limits to their ambitions: to kill top Afghan officials across every major ministry, to plot even more infiltration attacks against Americans and to bloody, break and drive off the Afghan security forces who were newly in charge across the country.

Now, Afghan and American officials are cautiously celebrating a deflation of the Taliban’s propaganda bubble, the militants’ goals largely unmet.

With this year’s fighting season nearly over, the officials say the good news is that the Afghan forces mostly held their own, responding to attacks well and cutting down on assassinations. But at the same time, the Afghans were unable to make significant gains and, worse, suffered such heavy casualties that some officials called the rate unsustainable.

So, in other words, the Taliban team was really cocky coming out of spring training and felt like they could win it all. Their arch-rivals ANSF instead played them to a standstill, with neither team making the playoffs yet again. And the ANSF team is in dire danger of being seriously depleted next spring.

The review coming from manager Joseph Dunford at the ISAF team website is no better:

While the ANSF are making real progress in security, the challenges faced by Afghans and the international community are primarily psychological and political. There is still widespread uncertainty amongst the Afghan people and in the region concerning the post-2014 environment. This uncertainty causes unhelpful hedging behavior. The overall perception of security is affected by the Taliban’s high profile attacks (HPAs), which is nothing more than a campaign of fear, murder and intimidation. ISAF’s current focus is to enable the ANSF to emerge from this fighting season confident and credible in the eyes of the Afghan people; this will create the perception of security that will support the political process and lead to successful elections in 2014.

If only that damned commissioner’s office would quit screwing around with league alignment, we’d win it all! Honest!

But all jokes aside, when military sources providing quotes to the Times can only speak of “moral victories” and when the commander of US forces has as his goal “the perception of security”, the battle is already lost.

Mission Creep Hits Syria Targeting, Training Before First Tomahawks Fly

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Even while Barack Obama and John Kerry are busily lobbying for a positive vote in Congress for their Not-War in Syria, it appears the Defense Department isn’t waiting for a pesky thing like Congressional approval or even the official start (as opposed to already ongoing but covert) of US actions to begin their usual process of mission creep that is undoubtedly to be followed by cries of “Just six more months and victory will be ours!”. The mission creep on targeting threatens the propaganda push that so far has been centered on selling the action as limited. We have New York Times articles this morning stating that Israel goes along with the idea of limited strikes but definitely doesn’t want to go all the way to regime change where radical Sunni groups might seize power, while at the same time we have the Pentagon claiming they’ve been tasked with expanding the number of targets for the strike. From the latter:

President Obama has directed the Pentagon to develop an expanded list of potential targets in Syria in response to intelligence suggesting that the government of President Bashar al-Assad has been moving troops and equipment used to employ chemical weapons while Congress debates whether to authorize military action.

Mr. Obama, officials said, is now determined to put more emphasis on the “degrade” part of what the administration has said is the goal of a military strike against Syria — to “deter and degrade” Mr. Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons. That means expanding beyond the 50 or so major sites that were part of the original target list developed with French forces before Mr. Obama delayed action on Saturday to seek Congressional approval of his plan.

For the first time, the administration is talking about using American and French aircraft to conduct strikes on specific targets, in addition to ship-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles. There is a renewed push to get other NATO forces involved.

See? It’s the fault of all those dirty hippies insisting on following an old piece of paper and forcing the President to get a permission slip from Congress before taking action. That delay is why we have to expand the number of targets.

We are left to ponder just how it will be possible to magically target and kill Syrian forces tasked with moving chemical weapons around without actually hitting those weapons–which the forces are in the process of hiding. What could possibly go wrong here?

But I want to focus more fully on this AP article. Marcy had just read it when she sent out this tweet:

That, along with the title: “US officials: US considers training Syria rebels”, suggests that the article is an expansion of the effort I outlined earlier in the week, where Barack Obama is trying to change both the date and the size of the first CIA-trained death squads to enter Syria, most likely because they are somehow tied up either as targets of the chemical weapons attack or as perpetrators of a false flag operation.

Diving into the article, though, we see that this is about adding to the death squad training by expanding into a much larger operation where US troops are directly involved in training a large force (for the Afghanistan analogy, this proposal is to move beyond the CIA training Afghan Local Police–the militias who become death squads–for our military to train the actual Afghan National Army, which is about ten times larger): Read more →

“Progress” Report: ANSF Abandoning Over One Third of ISAF Facilities

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As I have noted previously, Congress requires the Defense Department to provide status reports on the situation in Afghanistan twice a year. The scheduling of these reports appears to be entirely random. The first report in 2012 was in April, but since there was an election in the US in November, it appears that the Defense Department and the Obama administration managed to delay the next report for several months, so that it was published in December instead of October. The next report in this series has now been released (pdf), about seven and a half months after the December 2012 report was released. So much for that “semi-annual” requirement from Congress. The next interval will have to be significantly shorter than six months if there are to be two reports in 2013.

I am still taken aback each time I open one of these reports, since the title is always “Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan”. Aside from the fact that even with Afghans self-reporting their own troop strength, the Defense Department can only report an overall ANSF force size of 333,368 as of January, 2013, well short of the fabled 352,000 overall ANSF force size that the Obama administration and media spout regularly. But the abject failure displayed in how these Afghan troops have been deployed as they take over primary responsibility for security in the country is staggering.

We have heard anecdotal reports in the media for some time now about how individual bases and small outposts in Afghanistan have been abandoned during the process of handing over security responsibility. One figure in the Defense Department report, however, drives home just how widespread the process of abandoning facilities has become:

Many bases are being abandoned in Afghanistan as Afghans take over primary security responsibility.

Many bases are being abandoned in Afghanistan as Afghans take over primary security responsibility.

Note that ISAF starts off with more or less 800 facilities at the beginning of 2011. At the end of the graph, ISAF appears to be in charge of only about 175 facilities and yet the ANSF has only taken over 400 facilities. That leaves between 200 and 225 facilities abandoned, presumably because the ANSF cannot defend them. In other words, of the over 600 facilities ISAF has withdrawn from, less than two thirds of them can be defended or maintained by Afghan forces.

And keep in mind that this is not a problem of number of personnel. In fact, ANSF force size, at least as reported by Afghanistan and ISAF, is more than twice the troop size ISAF has ever had in-country:

Afghanistan has more than twice as many troops as ISAF, and yet it can maintain only about two thirds of facilities ISAF is exiting.

Afghanistan has more than twice as many troops as ISAF, and yet it can maintain only about two thirds of the facilities that ISAF is exiting.

How can the Defense Department continue to claim “progress” in Afghanistan when the large force it has trained is not capable of maintaining ISAF-established facilities with more than twice as many troops? And with the number of bases going down by at least a third, how can Afghanistan be expected to provide anything near the level of security that ISAF provided?

Here is the text that was provided with the figure where it is clear that many bases are disappearing:

Figure 4 illustrates the number of ISAF bases transferred to the ANSF. Many—but not all—ISAF bases that have been closed have been transferred to the ANSF. This demonstrates the drawdown of ISAF forces and their shrinking footprint and evolving mission as well as the growth of the ANSF.

Yup, abandoning over 200 bases would indeed qualify as “not all” of those ISAF has exited being transferred to ANSF control.

Postscript: I chose a really bad time to take a few days off. While I was gone, this Defense Department report, the latest SIGAR quarterly report on Afghanistan and the latest UNAMA report on civilian casualties all came out. I will try to dig through this report more thoroughly as well as the other reports over the next few days.

Post-2014 NATO Mission in Afghanistan Has a Name, But No Enabling Agreement

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[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSlwYESlvqs’]

 

In a complete repeat of the process the Obama administration used to get NATO to be the entity to propose extending the mythical 352,000 Afghan National Security Force size through 2018 instead of letting it drop by a third in 2015, yesterday saw NATO “announcing” that the training of ANSF would extend post-2014 and that Germany and Italy would participate in this training. This mission is clearly guaranteed to succeed because it has the nifty new name of “Resolute Support” and is even the subject of the slick video above that NATO released for the roll-out of the surrounding propaganda campaign:

The United States has agreed to lead a training mission in Afghanistan after 2014 that will include troops from Germany and Italy and will operate under a new NATO mandate, officials announced Wednesday.

U.S. troops would be based in hubs in the east and south, Taliban strongholds where the Afghan army is likely to face a deadly insurgency for years to come. Germany has pledged to keep troops in the north and Italy in the west, an arrangement that would mark a continuation of the current force structure, albeit with far fewer troops.

However, there still is no underlying agreement that will authorize US trainers to be in Afghanistan after 2014 with full criminal immunity:

Officials did not specify how many troops the mission, called Resolute Support, would include. They declined to say whether it would include a counterterrorism mission, one of the capabilities that the Obama administration has expressed interest in keeping after the mandate of NATO’s current troop contingent, the International Security Assistance Force, expires.

“The new mission will not be ISAF by another name,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. “It will be significantly smaller.”

/snip/

The White House has been reluctant to specify how many troops it would be willing to keep in the country because it has yet to sign a security cooperation agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. That has made U.S. allies reluctant to make their own commitments to continue pouring money and troops into a deeply unpopular conflict.

It’s nice to know that we have the toughest detail of naming the mission out the way so that we can now get down to the minor details of criminal immunity, force size and full combat activity for US troops under the rubric of “counterterrorism”. What could possibly go wrong with this terrific new effort?

It might also be noted in parting that Rasmussen claimed Afghan Special Forces as the “bedrock” of the post-2014 effort. From what I have been able to find, those “special forces” have a whopping twelve weeks of extra training, compared to 14-18 months of extra training for US Special Forces.

Dunford Once Again Shows Complete Lack of Budget Awareness

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When we last heard from General Joseph (We Are Winning in Afghanistan, We Really Are!) Dunford, he was showing total incompetence in terms of budget awareness in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had announced on March 28 that DoD was $7 billion over budget in Afghanistan. By the time Dunford was asked about the over-budget situation during the hearing on April 16, Mike Lee stated that the overage had grown to $10 billion. Despite being in charge of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, Dunford professed complete ignorance of the over-budget situation. That is a stunning lack of situational awareness for someone who is supposed to be in charge. After bumbling on a bit, Dunford did promise to eventually get back to Lee on the budget issue.

It would appear that even if he has gone back and looked over his own money management failures, Dunford has looked no further than the DoD budget. The New York Times posted a story yesterday based on an interview with him, and Dunford made another statement that is mind-boggling in terms of its lack of awareness of budget realities for the region. Recall that back in February, NATO defense ministers proposed that instead of allowing Afghan National Security Forces to drop by about a third after the end of 2014, the full force size of “352,000” (that’s in quotes because I think the SIGAR audit is going to finally destroy the 352,000 force size myth) should be maintained through at least 2018. My response to this suggestion was that it appeared to be a $22 billion bribe being offered to Afghan authorities in return for their agreeing to a Status of Forces Agreement that would grant criminal immunity to US forces remaining after the end of the official NATO mission at the end of 2014.

In the interview with the Times, Dunford continued his previous agreement with the concept of extending the time frame for the larger ANSF force size, but then made a suggestion that is stunningly stupid regarding how the extended force size should be funded:

He has concluded as well that plans to reduce the number of Afghan security forces — the army and police combined — to 228,000 after 2015 from the current target level of 352,000 are not realistic, given the threats in the country. “The consensus now both from the Afghans and certainly from us is that we ought to sustain that for some period time to come,” said General Dunford, referring to the 352,000 head count.

What is less clear is how such a force could be paid for. The international community, led by the United States, has agreed to pay roughly $4.1 billion in aid per year for the Afghan security forces after 2014, based on estimates of what a smaller Afghan security contingent would cost. If the Afghans want to keep a larger force, they will either have to field a cheaper army and police force or come up with more money themselves to pay for it. General Dunford suggested that the Afghans could economize, although he did not give examples of where they might find the savings.

That’s right. A totally dysfunctional, stunningly corrupt government should just somehow “economize” and find an additional $22 billion to fund a mythically large defense force.

Oh, and just like his own war effort in Afghanistan that has been mis-managed into a huge budget deficit, if Dunford only read the New York Times, he would be aware that the IMF has found Afghanistan’s government to be facing a serious budget shortfall:

The Afghan government is supposed to cover less than half its own bills this year, yet achieving even that modest goal is proving an unexpected challenge, Afghan and Western officials said.

A confidential assessment of Afghan finances by the International Monetary Fund said the potentially severe cash crunch was caused by widespread tax evasion abetted by government officials, the increasing theft of customs revenues by provincial governors and softening economic growth.

The I.M.F. assessment, which has not been publicly released but was described by American and European diplomats who were recently briefed on its findings, estimated that Afghan revenue in the first quarter of the year was roughly 20 percent to 30 percent short of an informal target the fund had set for the government.

Yeah, sure. With revenues already 20 to 30 percent short of projections, that’s a government that can just poke around a bit and find another $22 billion in the SOFA.

Even With Non-Validated Afghan Self-Reporting, SIGAR Finds ANSF Falls Short of 352,000 Goal

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A central tenet of DoD dogma regarding withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan rests on Afghan National Security Forces reaching a force size of 352,000 and taking over full responsibility for security in the country as US forces leave at the end of 2014. There are multiple problems surrounding the myth of ANSF force size of 352,000. As reported last quarter by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the “official” force size reported by DoD relies on self-reporting by Afghanistan and can not be validated. Further, NATO ministers proposed back in February that financial support for the 352,000 size should be extended through 2018, rather than allowing the force size to drop by about a third at the end of 2014. I equated this offer to dangling an extra $22 billion in front of Afghan government officials for embezzling in return for a grant of criminal immunity for US forces remaining behind after the official withdrawal.

SIGAR released its latest quarterly report yesterday (pdf), covering the first quarter of 2013, and we see that the problems surrounding the myth of 352,000 ANSF force size persist and show no prospect of improving.

From the report, we see that even with Afghanistan self-reporting in an unvalidated way, and with US goals clearly known, force size falls short of the goal:

ANSF force size

Although the reported force size is only about 5.5% below the goal, it seems remarkable that Afghan officials developing their own numbers in a non-validated way were not able to reach the goals that are clearly known to them.

This process of developing the ANSF has drawn the largest portion of US funds that have been allocated to Afghanistan. Here is how funds have been allocated since the beginning of the Afghan war:

As of March 31, 2013, the United States had appropriated approximately $92.73 billion for relief and reconstruction in Afghanistan since FY 2002. This total has been allocated as follows:

• $54.27 billion for security
• $22.97 billion for governance and development
• $6.39 billion for counter-narcotics efforts
• $2.43 billion for humanitarian aid
• $6.66 billion for operations and oversight

Of all the funds allocated to Afghanistan by the US, over half have gone to developing ANSF. Here is how security money breaks down from 2005 to the present time:

ASFF breakdown

Note that since the beginning of the 2005 fiscal year, we have provided nearly $14 billion in salaries for troop sizes that are self-reported in a non-validated system and therefore ripe for embezzlement. Further, another $13.8 billion was provided for “equipment and transportation” of ANSF, which would also seem a good source for corruption. That is a huge amount of money and it appears to be very poorly spent, given the lack of preparedness for ANSF.

SIGAR calls DoD into question on its claims that the 352,000 ANSF force size has been met: Read more →