SHAPING AFGHAN NATIONAL SECURITY FORCES: WHAT IT WILL TAKE TO IMPLEMENT PRESIDENT OBAMA’S NEW STRATEGY Anthony H. Cordesman Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy [email protected] With the Assistance of Adam Mausner and Jeffrey Carson Review Draft: April 20, 2010 Cordesman: Afghan Security Forces 4/20/10 Page ii Executive Summary President Obama’s new strategy for Afghanistan is critically dependent upon the transfer of responsibility for Afghan security to the Afghani National Security Forces (ANSF). His speech announcing this strategy called for the transfer to begin in mid-2011. Creating the necessary Afghan forces, however, poses major challenges that will endure long after 2011. Creating the forces needed to bring security and stability is a far more difficult challenge than many realize, and trying to expand Afghan forces too quickly, and creating forces with inadequate force quality, will lose the war. America’s politicians, policymakers, and military leaders must accept this reality or the mission cannot succeed. Everyone now involved in developing the ANSF – Afghan, American, and ISAF – must resist the past tendency to claim false progress, exaggerate combat capability, downplay the seriousness of key problems, and rush towards impractical deadlines. It will be far better to under promise and over perform than to repeat the mistakes made during 2002-2008, or in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Iraq. General Petraeus has warned that security force training is similar to “building the world’s largest aircraft while in flight and while being shot at.”i This is a warning that strategic patience is not a luxury, it is the only way to win. The new US strategy must also build on an awkward legacy of insufficient resources and past failures. The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) have made significant advances during the last few years, but their development had low to moderate priority for nearly half a decade. It was not until 2006-2007 that the ANSF began to have meaningful force goals, and to have adequate ISAF and US aid in developing its “force quantity.” Despite the additional resources that are now being devoted to ANSF development, increasing ANSF size and capabilities will take years even under optimal conditions. Moreover, increases in ANSF numbers will be meaningless without ANSF increasing its quality, and building quality takes time, mentoring, and experience. The statement that “numbers create a quality of their own” is true, but this is scarcely a recipe for success. Counter-insurgency history has shown again and again that low quality large forces are defeated by much smaller high quality forces, and that one of the best ways to lose a counterinsurgency campaign is to alienate the people with corrupt forces and/or forces that cannot protect them. The kind of “quality” that sheer numbers create is proven way of losing wars, with thousands of years of historical examples to warn that such an approach is a recipe for failure. At the same time, major increases must take place in the ANSF if they are to become able to provide a total mix of ISAF and ANSF large enough to implement a population-oriented strategy, and “shape, clear, hold, build, and transfer.” Forces must become both large enough and capable enough to do the job or the strategy will fail. It is all too clear that the Allied forces in ISAF will not make significant further increases and some will leave in 2011. It is equally clear that any further effort to make major increases in US troops will be politically difficult – if not impossible. Larger and more effective Afghan forces are critical to providing security and stability in a country where civil Afghan capacity will lag behind the military and cannot operate without ANSF protection. In short, the war will be won or lost by the ability to improve both ANSF quality and quantity. It will be determined by whether the US and its allies will provide the necessary resources and time, and whether progress is assessed with ruthless honestly and without false claims and exaggeration. The present ANSF force goals for 2011 are so high that they may not meet expectations. The heritage of eight years of inadequate resources, massive shortfalls in trainers Cordesman: Afghan Security Forces 4/20/10 Page iii and mentors, failing to set the right force development goals, and false progress reports cannot be overcome by 2011. The following key shortcomings still cripple the ANSF, and must now be corrected: • ISAF efforts that lacked unity of command, and the ability to flexibly apportion both ANSF and ISAF forces across the battle space; • Failure to make the ANSF a full partner with the ISAF and to lay the ground work for transfer of lead security responsibility; • Lack of effective coordination among the elements of the ANSF. • A lack of capability and willingness on the part of the government of Afghanistan to honestly and efficiently develop and deploy the security forces. • Unwillingness among various elements of ISAF and member countries to directly confront problems with corruption, powerbrokers, criminal elements, and insurgent influence within the Afghan government, and within the leadership of various elements of the ANSF. • Setting inadequate force goals and force expansion plans that led to lack of sufficient capacity and capability of all types of ANSF, across the theater; • Lack of clear near-term priorities and timelines for developing the capacity and capabilities of the ANSF required for the current fight extend beyond the ‘near-term’ of 12-24 months; • Lack of longer term plans to expand and fund/sustain the ANSF for the length of the entire campaign, and help Afghanistan achieve lasting security and stability. • Sustained mismatch between the force goals that were set and the resources necessary to implement them, including both funding and the provision of adequate trainers, mentors, and partners. Ongoing problems growing out of past failures to set the proper goals for ANSF expansion, provide adequate numbers of mentors and partners, and to fund the level of effort required • Failure to understand, and properly audit and survey, the motivation of ANSF forces by force element to understand recruiting, performance, motivation, and retention problems; and to properly assess the levels of pay, privileges, leave, medical benefits, death and disability benefits, facilities and equipment. This is necessary to create effective forces on a sustained basis and compete with the Taliban and other insurgents and the pressure from power brokers, narco traffickers, and other sources of corruption. • A series of major shifts in the training effort for the ANP involving repeated changes of mission and policing concepts coupled to a failure to prepare police for the reality of counterinsurgency and the Taliban threat, and to tie police development to the creation of a practical approach to the rule of law that could provide a functioning mix of formal, informal, and prompt justice. • A focus on creating large numbers of battalion sized Kandaks in the ANA with emphasis on quantity over quality, and formal training without effective mentoring and partnering of newly created units; failure to understand that newly formed units require extended training at the whole unit level, and that extended mentoring and partnering of deployed units is critical, or formal training fails to achieve its goals. Resource Failures Through CY2009 The US bears a large share of the responsibility for many of these failures. The US took more than half a decade to fund ANSF development seriously and then funded it erratically and failed to provide the proper numbers of trainers, mentors, and partners. Critics of today’s ANSF should look carefully at the data in Figure One. The US failed to make funding effective Afghan forces a serious goal until FY2007, and much of this took 6- Cordesman: Afghan Security Forces 4/20/10 Page iv 12 months to have an impact in the field. This meant that such US funding only began to have a full impact in mid to late CY2008. The US then failed to provide the follow-up funding necessary to sustain a major force expansion. According to the Department of Defense, (FY) 2008 funding levels totaled $2.75 billion, including $1.7 billion for the ANA, $964 million for the ANP, and $9.6 million for detainee operations. The total then dropped to $2 billion in FY2009, although the ANA force goal was being raised to 134,000.ii The US must make massive expenditures it might well have avoided if it had taken ANSF development seriously in the first place. As has been noted by the Special Inspector General iii for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), As of December 31, 2009, almost $17.55 billion had been disbursed. Of this amount, more than $11.47 billion (65.4%) was disbursed for the ANA and more than $6.00 billion (34.2%) for the ANP; the remaining $0.07 billion (0.42%) was directed toward other related activities. most of the funds for the ANA were disbursed for Equipment and Transportation (more than $4.95 billion), followed by Sustainment activities (more than $2.99 billion). Most of the funds for the ANP were disbursed for Sustainment activities (almost $1.68 billion), followed by Infrastructure initiatives (more than $1.59 billion) . The good news is that ANSF funding levels have since risen to levels much more appropriate to the mission. DoD requested a FY2010 supplemental of 2.6 billion and an FY 2011 budget of 11.6 billion.iv The supplemental 2.6 billion brought the FY 2010 total up to 9.2 billion. This high funding level will have a better impact if it is maintained for several years, as opposed to the usual feast-or-famine funding seen in the past.