There once was a time when President Obama implied that the Afghanistan war would at least start to end in July 2011. Then that date got pushed back to 2014. Now, the general in charge of training Afghan forces to take over for departing Americans pegs that date closer to 2016 or 2017 — that is, if the U.S. doesn’t want the entire Afghan security apparatus to implode.
What will ensure Afghan soldiers don’t collapse? “Strategic patience and an enduring commitment,” Lt. Gen. William Caldwell told a crowd at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Translated from the mil-speak: many more years and billions of dollars. Asked by Danger Room how much longer the training mission needs to last, Caldwell replied, “We won’t complete doing what we need to do until about 2016, 2017.”
It’s one thing to train Afghans to fight. Lt. Gen. William Caldwell has done that in spades, producing an “industrial kind of method” to build a force of 296,000 soldiers and cops — more than 100,000 more than when he arrived in Kabul in fall 2009. But the real test for the training mission is “that it endures and it will last,” Caldwell said. “It has to last. It’s not enough to just transition.”
Caldwell might have just delivered some real talk about what it takes to build an army and a police force from scratch. But even so, he essentially moved the goalposts at least two years beyond NATO’s December 2014 target date for putting the Afghans in charge of their own security. Not that 2014 should be mistaken for a date at which the war ends: senior administration officials are quietly negotiating long-term basing accords with Afghanistan. But Caldwell said that the Afghan air force won’t be ready patrol the skies until 2016 at the earliest.
And keeping planes and helicopters in the air isn’t even the hardest aspect of building a viable Afghan security structure. The Afghans still don’t have a mature logistics chain and support battalions — the sustainment forces that keep militaries functioning. Before 2011, Caldwell said, the Afghan police didn’t even have engineers to keep its facilities running. Now, he’s got to put them through three months of education to cultivate their “basic technical skills.”
That’s itself a huge challenge. Caldwell has made basic literary and numeric education a cornerstone of his training regimen after discovering that very few Afghan recruits can read on a first-grade level. How to make an engineer corps out of illiterates? If that wasn’t enough, about 18 percent of Afghan policemen and nearly a third of Afghan soldiers walk off the job early every year, Caldwell said. And lest we forget, Caldwell’s command estimates that it costs $6 billion every year to yield a capable Afghan security force.
But the general was hardly all gloom and doom at Brookings — where, full disclosure, Danger Room editor Noah Shachtman is a non-resident fellow. (Maybe because Caldwell didn’t face any questions about inappropriate media strategies.) He’s ahead of schedule to meet NATO’s goal of 305,000 soldiers and cops by October. And those troops — infantrymen and cops, mostly; not support elements — are better fighters than they’ve ever been, he assured.
Which might be faint praise. Caldwell broke a big taboo in the Afghanistan debate by invoking the ghosts of the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. “I’ve been constantly reminded of a previous effort by a major power to build an Afghan government and security force. Wherever you go in Afghanistan, there are echoes of the previous effort — that succeeded,” he said, “in building a government and a very robust security force, but the effort failed to make it last.”
Still, making it last requires patience that very few in Washington have for a war nearing its tenth anniversary, especially after the man responsible for it recently took two bullets to the dome from a Navy SEAL. And if Caldwell has any opinion about how many troops need to stay in Afghanistan to ensure the Afghans don’t collapse, he kept that to himself during his Brookings talk.
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