Stalemate at Camp Victory Camp Victory directed by Carol Dysinger
Reviewed by Hannah Gurman
"All I need is 100 loyal Afghan men, and we could defeat the Taliban." This is
the first we hear from Afghan General Fazalulin Sayar in Carol Dysinger's
documentary Camp Victory, which opened in New York this past weekend as
part of the Human Rights Watch film festival.
The film traces the relationship between Sayar - an earnest commander whose
commitment and fatigue show in the two deep grooves that run from his eyes to
his mouth - and his gaggle of American advisers from the National Guard who
have come to Camp Victory in western Afghanistan. The Americans are there to
help Sayar turn a ragged bunch of young Afghan men into an effective fighting
force.
The documentary chronicles the development of Camp Victory from 2004 to 2009,
during which Sayar's claim to need only 100 men to defeat the Taliban becomes
increasingly problematic. The problem isn't that the general overstates the
capability of the Afghan soldier. Instead, he reveals the difficulty of
recruiting and maintaining even a modest number of quality soldiers in his
ranks. The challenges that Camp Victory has faced illustrate the difficulty of
the US coalition strategy overall in Afghanistan.
The rise of the ANA
Afghan President Hamid Karzai launched the Afghan National Army (ANA) in 2002
to supplant the domination of the country by local warlords. Putting Afghan
security forces in charge of the war against anti-government Taliban extremists
has been and remains a key pillar in the US and North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) counter-insurgency strategy in the region. Indeed, the
success of America's war in Afghanistan hangs on the Afghan army. "The Afghan
National Army can solve the problems of the Americans," said Afghan Colonel
Akhbar in 2003, but "until the Afghan National army is built, there will be no
security in Afghanistan."
Building a national military in a hurry is a heavy task, and the battle record
of the Afghan troops trained at Camp Victory offers few encouraging signs. In
2006, the company faced heavy firefighting in Lashkagar. As Dysinger's film
reports, a few Afghan soldiers fled and many more took a back seat to the
all-night shootout that left an American medic dead. Unfortunately, Sayar's men
are no exception. Despite the emphasis the US and coalition forces have placed
on the ANA in the overall counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, the
Afghan soldiers have performed poorly on the battlefield.
In the Taliban stronghold of Marjah, where fighting was heavy this past spring,
ANA forces were nominally in charge. But, as C J Chivers reported in The New
York Times, American officers and troops were clearly leading the battle in a
"city" with a population of only 50,000.
On June 7, Afghan security forces were unable to prevent an attack on a police
training center in the southern city of Kandahar that killed two American
security contractors. The incidents don't bode well for the much-anticipated
and now-delayed Kandahar offensive.
Understanding the shortcomings
Why is the Afghan army proving to be such a disappointing fighting force? Most
of the news and official government reports have tended to frame the problem in
technical terms. Chivers, who reported on the shortcomings of the ANA in
Marjah, did a series of video stories this past spring that focused on the poor
marksmanship of Afghan soldiers who point their Kalashnikov assault rifles from
their shoulder rather than holding the sights to their eyes so they can
actually aim at the targets.
For its part, the Pentagon has underscored the low salaries of infantrymen, the
lack of trained officers and mid-level leaders in the ANA, and a dearth of
available trainers from the coalition forces.
Focusing on these gaps in the capacity and technical abilities of the ANA,
which do exist, can be misleading. Take the issue of salary, for instance.
According to Dysinger's film, at US$66 a day, the salary for new recruits at
Camp Victory was already more than double what these young men, most of whom
grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan, could expect to earn elsewhere. And while
these soldiers may be poor marksmen when they enter the army, it isn't clear
why they remain so after months of training.
"It is not difficult to turn a religious student into a religious fighter,
capable of using light weapons," says former Afghan defense official Haroun
Mir. Surely, the Afghans, who have been at war for the past 28 years, and who
have fought foreign occupation for hundreds of years before that, are not
inherently lacking in military skills. One doesn't have to romanticize the
Afghan warrior to concede that the technical ability should come fairly easily,
so long as there is a will behind it.
Perhaps the more important question is not whether the Afghans can fight, but
whether they actually want to fight. One of the more illuminating scenes in Camp
Victory shows a line of new recruits looking apathetic and somewhat
bewildered as their American advisers direct them through physical training
exercises. The shout, "Come on, one more push-up!" from the American trainers
is met with a good-humored laugh followed by "no thank you". If this were a US
feature film, Jack Black, not Richard Gere, would play the part of the new
recruit.
The National Guardsmen in Camp Victory respond to the lethargy in their
trainees with a considerable amount of patience and understanding. Elsewhere in
Afghanistan, some American advisers have been less successful at keeping their
frustration and anger at bay.
A March 2009 video of US Marines serving as embedded tactical trainers in
Afghanistan shows US soldiers chastising their Afghan counterparts, who prefer
to smoke hashish rather than prepare for inspections and ready themselves for
the day's mission tasks. At one point, an American trainer, speaking to his
Afghan counterpart over walkie-talkie, says, "I don't give a f**k about your chai,
I care about the mission," an exchange that obviously upsets the Afghan
interpreter in the middle.
Echoes of Iraq
This scene is far tamer, but reminiscent of amateur footage from Iraq (the
place and date are not reported) in which a US soldier curses out a group of
Iraqi police trainees. "I come down here to try to train you, and you're
f**kin' trying to kill Americans. You're trying to kill your fellow f**kin'
Iraqis."
Differences in tone notwithstanding, one common thread that runs through the
frustration of American trainers in Afghanistan and Iraq is their emphasis on
loyalty to nation. The American soldier in Iraq is so angry because he suspects
that a good portion of the men standing before him have been working for the
Mahdi militia and not the Iraqi nation.
"You guys better figure out where your loyalties lie. Are you loyal to Iraq?
The Shi'ites? The Sunnis?" With much less ire but a similar message, an
American officer tells his demoralized Afghan counterpart, "You need to figure
out what motivates your soldiers. You need to get that sense of nationalism."
In fact, in several recent conflicts, it's not just the fighting ability of
Afghan soldiers but also their loyalty that has come into question. Last
November, an Afghan police officer opened fire on his British colleagues in
Helmand province, killing five. In January, a suicide bomber wearing an Afghan
army uniform carried out an attack on a NATO base in Khost province.
And in the latest attack, a rogue Afghan soldier killed three British troops on
a base in Helmand province on July 12. The soldier, identified by the UK
Military of Defense as Talib Hussein, shot one as he slept and killed two
others by firing a rocket-propelled grenade into the base's command center.
These incidents suggest that Afghan insurgents have infiltrated the ANA, and
perhaps more troubling, that some soldiers are playing on both sides of the
war.
Perhaps the question isn't why the average soldier isn't loyal to the ANA, but
rather why should he be? The attitude of the average Afghan toward the central
government is decidedly ambivalent. There isn't much evidence that the US's
counter-insurgency strategy has been effective in decisively turning people
against the insurgency.
Rising Insurgency?
Buried in a sea of updates on US and NATO organizational streamlining in the US
Defense Department's recent progress report on Afghanistan is the stark
admission that 2009 was a good year for the insurgency, which has been gaining
support among the Afghan populace. Of the 121 areas deemed strategically
critical to the US strategy in Afghanistan, only 29 have populations that
support the Afghan government.
Since that's a declassified Pentagon statistic, the reality may be even worse.
In line with its entire report, the Pentagon frames its response to the problem
in terms of capacity-building and technical improvements, in this case using
the language of governance. "ISAF [International Security Assistance Forces] is
working closely with the Government of Afghanistan and the international
community to coordinate and synchronize governance and development in the 48
focus districts prioritized for 2010."
Meanwhile, as the same report notes, the insurgency is increasing its own
capacity to act as a shadow government, in some areas already doing many of the
same things that the central government now only plans to do.
Just as the United States can't build Afghan nationalism solely through closing
capacity and technical gaps, neither can it foment nationalism in the military
solely through army training. Consider the US experience by contrast. Although
the US military has surely played an important role in fostering and
perpetuating nationalism, it was not by any means the initial source of
national feeling, which bubbled up from a complex web of economic, political,
and cultural forces.
Occupied as much by internal strife as by foreign invaders, Afghanistan has
little basis on which to build a national feeling. At Camp Victory, the
infantry soldiers march to the words, "Oh country, I'll sacrifice my life to
defend you!" It is as though they are singing a song in a foreign language.
Meanwhile, after target practice, local villagers scramble to pick up artillery
shells to sell them to the highest bidder. Like the Afghan infantry soldier,
these villagers still do not have a lasting reason for being anything but
fence-sitters. And it is still not clear how the US counter-insurgency strategy
will change a government or a people whose attitudes and behaviors toward each
other have complex historical and social roots that cannot be fully addressed
through capacity-building and technical improvements.
For want of 100 men
If there ever were a true Afghan patriot, General Sayar would qualify. Ever
since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, he looked to the United States to
help his country. In the 1980s, while serving in the Soviet-run Afghan army, he
had close contacts with the US-supported mujahideen and its leader Ahmad Shah
Massoud.
On January 14, 2009, Sayar's helicopter crashed in the Adraskan district of
Herat province in western Afghanistan. Colonel Shute, Sayar's American adviser,
was devastated when he heard the news and wondered how the United States had
let such a high-ranking general get on an outdated clunker of an aircraft that
no American would board. Sayar saw America as his country's hope, and America
let him down.
It's not clear whether the film wants us to see this tragedy as the story of a
lost victory or that of a lost cause. The ambiguity stems in part from
Dysinger's choice to explore the larger problems facing the ANA through the
lens of Sayar's relationship with Shute.
This gives Camp Victory a human quality and makes for a compelling
personal story. Both Sayar and Shute are honorable and intriguing individuals
who were able to forge an unlikely, intimate, and loyal friendship. At the same
time, this story of camaraderie between two officers, one of whom is American,
takes the focus off of the Afghan infantry soldier whose bond to the country of
Afghanistan is ultimately the most important and tenuous of all.
Camp Victory ends with Sayar's death, which occurred before the Barack
Obama administration escalated its commitment to the war in Afghanistan. Over
the past year and a half, the effort to build up the ANA has become even more
of an urgent priority, in line with the Obama administration's plan to begin
withdrawing American troops in mid-2011.
In January 2010, the Pentagon announced the "acceleration" of the ANA training
program. Under this plan, the Afghan army would increase from 102,400 personnel
to 134,000 by October 2010 and 171, 600 by October 2011. The goal is to grow
the Afghan army to 400,000 by 2013. With the United States as primary
bankroller of the ANA, the US Congress has appropriated $6.6 billion dollars
for the task.
According to the Defense Department's most recent report card on Afghanistan,
recruitment levels are up and on schedule to meet these targets. So many
soldiers and so much money, but still the question remains: Can they get 100
loyal men?
Camp Victory; verite documentary shot between 2005 and 2008, directed by
Carol Dysinger.
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