|
I served as a military adviser to HQ Training Command, which trains everyone from new recruit privates to officer candidates to staff officers -- vaguely modeled on US Army TRADOC for those who get that reference. In my experience in that year, the actual available-for-duty rate of the overall army was about 50%, and I heard through colleagues that the police were even worse off. For a brand-new recruit battalion entering basic training, we ASSUMED a 25% desertion rate (not attrition rate, just desertion rate). Some battalions reached 50% before the end of training.
In my experience, here are some of the main issues: 1. The ANA is a volunteer force and the Afghan societal view is that if you voluntarily joined then there is no social stigma on voluntarily leaving either.
2. Because of (1), the ANA get a lot of 'seasonal recruits' -- guys that join in the winter when the agricultural work dries up, but then split in the spring when the planting season kicks off again.
3. Soldiers are treated like shit, or "worse than animals" as one told me (considering how I saw animals being treated, that's a chilling thought). We had a riot at the main MEPS station in Kabul one night because some recruits finally fought back against some staff who would rape them in the middle of the night. Don't even get me started on the barracks and the food. Corruption rules the ANA, and money is siphoned into every pocket along the way, leaving soldiers with little or nothing. One company down south was wiped out in an ambush while on patrol because their commander had SOLD ALL THEIR AMMO to line his own pockets, but still sent them out on missions. With no cultural stigma against desertion and virtually no chance you'd ever be caught, would you stay?
4. The Taliban use the ANA for THEIR basic training as well. Why bother training new fighters when the Americans, French, Brits, Canadians, Romanians, et al will do a way better job, plus feed and pay your recruits so you don't have to? And when they leave they bring a couple of uniforms, helmet, and a rifle to boot! Score!
5. The ANA's requirement to ethnically mix all units to a fixed proportion means that on average about 2/3s of soldiers will be serving in a province far-removed from their own, where they probably don't speak the local language and have little in common with the local people. And IF they get paid (assuming their commander hasn't embezzled all their money) they have the anguish of trying to figure out how to get the money home to their family in a country which is in-essence a cash-only society, at least outside Kabul.
6. Their officers are mostly incompetent, corrupt, uncaring and incapable -- hardly inspirational stuff. The new generation of lieutenants trained by the British and the US/Turkish teams are much better, but they're also too junior to change much and disillusionment was becoming a problem with them. Of the senior guys, the Soviet-trained ones were by far the best, but they're dwindling in numbers and they're still oftentimes corrupt as well.
7. And IF by some miracle you survive your two-year enlistment, since there is very little chance for progression in the ranks of any sort, why on earth would you re-enlist? This is more about retention than desertion, but retention is probably an even worse problem that is even less-reported (retention rate was about 10% as of 2007).
|