The United States has begun training a new multi-ethnic Afghan army, but its Defense Department has yet to explain how it proposes to make this army stable. American coercion could persuade Defense Minister Mohammed Qasim Fahim to fold his largely Tajik troops into a multi-ethnic force, while American funding could help maintain peace in the countryside during the four years it will take to build the army. But local observers say the United States first needs to reconcile its support for a new army with its practice of funding regional warlords who want to undermine it.
Those warlords, and assassins trying to break the transitional government, threaten Afghanistan's immediate stability. An army is "the cornerstone for any democratic institution to defend itself against threats internally," Lt. Col. Kevin McDonnell, the American commander, told reporters in July. McDonnell's soldiers are finishing a 10-week course for 600 Afghan soldiers. As these Afghan soldiers go through their paces, they are preparing for a daunting task. US President George W. Bush has rejected repeated calls by the United Nations and President Hamid Karzai to deploy foreign peacekeeping troops around the country. Instead, the Bush administration has said a new Afghan army will do a better job patrolling the provinces even though starting such an army will take at least 18 months, and it will not reach full strength until 2006 at the earliest. European diplomats in Kabul say that American officers rushed in to begin a training program in March without fully understanding the larger political issues. It remains unclear how warlords' militias can join the new army or cede to it. "It is indispensable that plans are in place for the phasing out of those who currently call themselves soldiers and police," Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN's special Afghan representative, told the UN Security Council on July 19.
Other nations are issuing similar warnings, and Americans are apparently listening. Since March, British military officers who organized Kabul's International Security Assistance Force, German officers who are training the Afghan police and UN officials have been holding intensive discussions with their American counterparts to convince them of the need for a political strategy to build the new army. "In the beginning the Americans just didn't get it, thinking training was the only issue," says a senior British official. "But now they realize that the real issue is creating a super-structure." The official also notes that American military planners seem to recognize another principle: that reconstruction and job creation depend on the government's ability to lure men away from warlord militias and into civilian life.
A plan to smooth this transition does exist on paper. Key Western nations and the UN have helped the Afghan government devise a working paper for the new army, which Western donors discussed in early July in Paris. "Establishing an affordable, effective and efficient modern armed forces will require down-sizing of current force levels over time," says the paper, which contemplates a 60,000-strong army, a border guard of 12,000 and an Air Force of 8,000, at a price of $289 million. A Quick Reaction Corps based in Kabul, with 6,000 soldiers on alert to threats, would be the first division to operate, backed by a combat support division and a service support division of 6,000 men each.
The concept also addresses the need for nationwide security by providing for seven 6,000-soldier corps around the country, each with a rapid-response brigade and two light-infantry brigades. Acknowledging the ethnic tension roiling Afghanistan and the refugee crises troubling its neighbors, the paper defines the army's strategic goals in terms of "international security co-operation in the region
Editor's note:
Ahmed Rashid is a journalist and author of the books "Taliban: Militant Islam and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" and "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia."
