The Redhunter

GEN. CONE: ...The ANA (Afghan National Army) are leading about 60 percent of the operations they participate in and have proven themselves as an effective fighting force. The ANA is also in the midst of expanding from their current strength of 68,000 to an end strength of about 134,000. Last year, we trained and added some 26,000 soldiers to the Afghan National Army. This year, we plan to expand the ANA by an additional 28,000.

This expansion is much more than raw numbers, though. The Afghan National Army is undergoing at the same time a significant force modernization effort. We are already well into the fielding the force with NATO weapons and also have begun fielding up-armored humvees.

From FM 3-24, the U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual the importance of an indigenous army.

6-1 Success in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations requires establishing a legitimate government supported by the people and able to address the fundamental causes that insurgents use to gain support. Achieving these goals requires the host nation to defeat insurgents or render them irrelevant, upholding the rule of law, and provide a basic level os essential and security for the populace. Key to all these tasks is developing an effective host-nation (HN) security force.

6-29 Training HN (host nation) security forces is a slow and painstaking process. It does not lend itself to a "quick fix".

Yes, but does it have to be this hard? I guess it's all part of that Clausewitzian friction:

Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that war is harder than it looks.

On to the Q & A

Some people say that we should shift resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. If we were to do so, how soon might additional resources make a difference? Could we accelerate the development of the ANA?

Q General, it's Tom Bowman with NPR. There's a lot of talk here in all the reviews going on of Afghanistan about accelerating the training of the Afghan security forces. And when I was over there, they said it will take five years to double the size of the Afghan army to 134,000. And I'm wondering, can you accelerate that number? Can you shave off some of that time? And to do that, how many more trainers would you need? Have you estimated that?

GEN. CONE: Yes, we have. I would say that we are working on a number of options that would accelerate the development of the army far faster. I think right now the current plan would complete the army by the third quarter of 2013. And again, we're working on a plan that essentially would shave seven quarters off of that and deliver the 134k army by 2011. The key point would be a lot of the light infantry capabilities needed in the current fight would be delivered a lot sooner.

In fact, our challenge in the near term would be really three things that I think when you deal with the rapid acceleration of a force like this -- the first is sort -- is the dearth of human capital.

And I just had a very excellent conversation with the minister of defense today, talking about the need to accelerate officer and non- commissioned officer training programs. And again, that's really where we have -- because of the generational loss that has occurred here through years of war, and we really have to focus our energies.

The second complicating factor we have here is certainly the long lead time in terms of the purchase of equipment and the buildout of facilities. Here in Afghanistan, because it is such an austere environment, just to expand training facilities, what we would need are -- certain -- you have to scratch something literally out of the desert to -- to build a training center for the Afghans that can support the kind of quality of life that's necessary to do training in the army.

And then the last point I would make is that all of this has to be done in an accountable manner. And one of the problems you have here with corruption across this country is that you have to closely watch all of the things that you do. So you can't go too quickly or you'll create an environment that might be conducive to a loss of control and accountability. So we have to watch all of that very quickly.

The request in regard to the number of additional trainers that we will need will be about 60 additional training teams. And there are about 12 to 16 trainers depending upon what their purpose is, whether it be -- for instance, logistics is a smaller team; infantry battalion mentors are a slightly larger team.

So yes, we can accelerate, but it's not so simple, and you can only speed things up so much. As Gen. Cone said, if you go too quickly you'll lose control and accountability will suffer.

A bit of history quoted in FM-3-24 is relevant:

"It is a persistently methodical approach and steady pressure which will gradually wear the insurgent down. The government must not allow itself to be diverted either by counter-moves on the part of the insurgent or by the critics on its own side who will be seeking a simpler and quicker solution. There are no short-cuts and no gimmicks - Sir Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam, 1966

Continuing with that line of questioning, Tom Bowman pursues the matter:

Q Have you put that request in, or is that something you're just considering?

GEN. CONE: The Afghans, I will tell you, are -- are moving out. I can tell you that we've already started in -- intake. We normally recruit about 2,000 Afghan recruits a month, and this month nearly 3,950 entered the training centers. And so we are -- the Afghans, within their capability and within their program, are going to aggressively move as fast as possible.

And when I say we can grow 28,000 in a year and bring eight battalions online sooner than was projected, I think if we, in fact, can meet those three constraints that I talked about, we could, in fact, go faster. And what we're looking at right now is getting the budgetary resources to have that -- that sort of flexibility.

Q Again, have you requested those 60 additional teams?

GEN. CONE: Yes. They are a part of the current requests for forces that are working both through NATO and through the U.S. channel.

So we'll see whether President Obama sends the additional resources to Afghanistan that he's been promising. If he does so, hopefully he'll do so without taking them prematurely from Iraq, or we're just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

This next exchange is also important in light of the financial crisis and our incoming administration:

Q This Daphne Benoit with Agence France-Presse. Good morning.

Given the resistance of NATO allies to contribute more, in Afghanistan, but also given the context of the financial crisis, are you concerned that you might experience a financial shortage, at some point, to fund your training programs? And can you remind us of the estimated cost of that program, please?

GEN. CONE: Actually I think everyone is aware of the financial crises and issues that are working currently both in the United States and around the world. But I think from our perspective, what we focus on, our request to the U.S. government, through the U.S. Congress, through the Department of Defense, and I'm relatively certain that they will make assessments, in regard to what is financially feasible. So our job is to really focus on the military dimensions of this and to allow others to make those kinds of assessments.

We have been told that a president Obama will be able to better work with our allies than was President Bush. Now that he's been elected, we shall see.

Lastly, the Sons of Iraq program (originally called Concerned Local Citizens) were very successful and contributed towards defeating the insurgency. It has been much discussed in the Iraq briefings I've covered. Would such a program work in Afghanistan?

Q General, Tom Bowman again with NPR.

As you know, there's a lot of talk about working more closely with the tribes over in Afghanistan. The word you keep hearing is empowering the tribes. Some say you should follow the model of Iraq, create maybe a Sons of Iraq-style program, sort of armed community watch kind of thing. Is that a good model, do you think, for Afghanistan?

GEN. CONE: I think there are a number of good ideas that come out of the experience in Iraq that we put to use here on a regular basis. I think that there is willingness today among senior Afghan government officials to engage in some form of -- actually the term they prefer to use is community engagement. And I think the point that I would make is there's some 425 tribes here in Afghanistan and oftentimes a single tribe might be on one side of a valley and another tribe on the other side. So you need to be careful about which tribe you engage because they may have traditional hostile rivalries, etcetera.

The notion the Afghan government is talking about today really focuses on community engagement that would take sort of an accumulation of the multitude of tribes that might be in an area and use a shura to provide additional members to assist in security. Typically the area they talk most about is in regard to highway security, the emerging requirement that we have there. So I think we're looking very carefully at the experience in Iraq, looking for lessons learned, but certainly doing it with a real sensitivity to the unique situation that we find on the ground here in Afghanistan, and trying to find the right mix. And I could tell you that the Afghan government, the ISAF leadership and CSTC-A are all involved in those discussions and I think we'll be fairly soon trying to work through some of those in meeting with some local tribal elders to further explore what is the right variant of that program for Afghanistan.

In response to a follow up question, Gen. Cone said that a decision on whether to proceed with such a program would come in a few months.

Surely there are lessons we can learn from Iraq. But each country is different, and must be approached as separate problem. FM-24 makes it clear that the nature of an insurgency can vary dramatically from one village to the next, and the counterinsurgents must vary their approach accordingly. Given this, the differences from one country to the next are even greater.

But all in all an interesting briefing and much can be learned from it.