NEW YORK
- Fear of being linked to US-backed regimes that lack
authority has inhibited potential recruits in
violence-prone Iraq and Afghanistan from heeding calls
to join nascent or rebuilding national armies, say
United States academics and political and military
analysts.
"The challenge of creating national
armies in both countries is fundamentally linked to the
challenge of legitimacy for the new [US-installed]
governments," says Margaret Karns, who lectures on
international organizations, foreign policy and
diplomacy at the University of Dayton in in the state of
Ohio.
"Low legitimacy" for the governments of
President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Prime Minister
Iyad Allawi of Iraq "translates into limited willingness
of individuals to sign up for the military, knowing that
they might become targets of groups opposed to either
government", Karns told IPS.
Since the US-led
invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Washington has been
struggling to create a 40,000-strong military force to
take over security in the war-torn country.
But
according to Brigadier General James Schwitters, who is
part of the US command responsible for training Iraq's
new army, only 3,000 of the soldiers could be regarded
as having been militarily trained, as of early August.
"Despite over a year and billions of dollars in
spending, [US] Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
those he appointed for the mission in Iraq have largely
failed to reconstitute meaningful security forces and
police," says Erik K Gustafson, a veteran of the 1991
Gulf War and director of the Washington-based Education
for Peace in Iraq Center.
Gustafson also argues
that the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA),
which administered Iraq until June, failed to treat the
Iraqi interim government as a full partner or to provide
Iraqi police and army forces with the equipment,
training, oversight and funding they need to operate
effectively.
"The legacy of that failure remains
and Iraqis are paying dearly in lost oil revenues,
crime, terrorism and other violence," Gustafson told
IPS. "Given the scale of failure and loss of lives and
property, Rumsfeld should be investigated for criminal
negligence," he added.
According to a report
released by the CPA on the eve of its hasty retreat from
Baghdad, Iraqi forces have 40% of the weapons, less than
one-third of the vehicles and about 25% of the body
armor they need to operate as an effective military
force.
"I have more hope that Iraq may succeed
in spite of the United States," Karns said, because it
is not only a more developed country than Afghanistan
but it also had a strong national army long before the
US-led invasion.
But the new Iraqi government,
she said, has to stop the slide toward "Lebanonization",
which has resulted in ethnic and religious feuds.
More than 500,000 people were killed in the
ethnic and religious battles that characterized the
1975-1991 civil war in Lebanon, most of them Christian
Maronites and Muslims.
On Monday, The New York
Times reported that US ambassador to Iraq John
Negroponte is urging the White House to reallocate
resources from infrastructure building in the occupied
country into improved security and job opportunities for
Iraqis.
The US Congress has appropriated about
US$18 billion dollars for the reconstruction of Iraq, of
which only about $600 million has been spent so far,
added The Times story.
Negroponte wants a
sizeable part of the remaining funds rechannelled to
help pay for 45,000 new Iraqi police officers, 16,000
border patrol officers, 99 new border outposts and an
additional 20 Iraqi National Guard battalions (totaling
about 20,000 troops). He is also seeking money for
training and new weapons for the army.
In
Afghanistan, the United States, with aid from France,
has succeeded in training a new national army of more
than 13,000 troops but that is far below the targeted
70,000 soldiers.
Manoel de Almeida e Silva, a
spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan, told reporters in August there is a
"significant expansion in the size and competence of the
Afghan national police force, as well as the Afghan
national army".
"This is very important," he
said, "but they are not yet there." The spokesman added,
"They are not close to reaching their total strength but
this is much better than what existed when this phase of
Afghan history began two and half years ago."
Pakistan's permanent representative to the UN,
ambassador Munir Akram, told the UN Security Council
last week that the Afghan national army is still unable
to cope with the security challenges in the country.
"The army suffers from what I would call an
ethnic deficit and imbalance," he said. "Until the
Afghan national army is in a position to provide
credible security, the responsibility of providing
security in Afghanistan rests with the international
forces, in particular, the International Assistance
Force [ISAF]."
The ISAF, a multinational force
consisting of about 7,300 troops from the European and
North American nations of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), is confined mostly to the Afghan
capital of Kabul. By the end of September, when Italian
and Spanish battalions join ISAF, total troop strength
is expected to rise to 8,300.
In both
Afghanistan and Iraq, attrition rates have also been
high, with trained soldiers deserting the military to
join insurgencies in the two countries.
"The
formation of the army [in Afghanistan] is incredibly
slow mainly because there is not much incentive to join
what is perceived to be the weakest armed faction in the
country [except when the United States decided to back
it up with fighter planes]," says James Ingalls,
founding director of the Afghan Women's Mission who is
also working on a book about US policy in Afghanistan.
Ingalls said Washington's tactic of "buying"
warlords to fight the Taliban, then awarding them seats
in the government, has entrenched their power. "The lack
of a countrywide ISAF deployment and the half-hearted
attempts at disarmament have only made this dismal
situation worse," he told IPS.
The Taliban, a
group of Islamic extremists who ruled Afghanistan during
1996-2001, was ousted from power by US forces when they
invaded the country in December 2001. Despite the
efforts of thousands of US soldiers since then, Taliban
forces have not been driven from the country and appear
resurgent, claiming responsibility for a car bomb in the
capital Kabul on Sunday that killed about a dozen
people.
Taliban forces have also warned Afghans
to boycott the October 9 presidential election.
Karns said the difficulties in creating a new
national army in Afghanistan are also linked to the
fundamental lack of security and the limited number of
US and NATO troops to deal with warlords and Taliban
outside Kabul.
"I am not optimistic, especially
about Afghanistan. We and the Europeans have yet to
commit enough military and economic resources to
Afghanistan to make a difference, and the situation is
clearly deteriorating," she added.
In July, NATO
Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer warned that both
Iraq and Afghanistan would surely end up as failed
states if the US and the international community did not
work together to salvage the two nations. The security
situation in both countries was dismal, he said.
"Can we afford two failed states in pivotal
regions?" he asked. "It's both undesirable and
unacceptable if either Afghanistan or Iraq were to be
lost. The international community can't afford to see
those countries going up in flames. There would be
enormous repercussions for stability, and not only in
those regions."
