Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The opposites game
By Tom Engelhardt
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country's version of normal
truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post
news story that's been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of
reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the
true weirdness buried in it.
The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19 and was headlined, "US military
criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps." Maybe that's
strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? We all know, at least
vaguely, that by
year's end, US spending on its protracted Afghan war and nation-building
project will be heading for US$350 billion. And those dollars do have to go
somewhere.
Admittedly, these days in parts of the US, state and city governments are
having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The
Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn't hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to
"train" and "mentor" the Afghan military and police - and after each round of
training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money,
and train them again.
That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of
the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of
that air force - little used in the Taliban era - was destroyed in the US air
assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the "Afghan air force" (with about
50 helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it
is, in fact, the US Air Force.
Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago
on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it's on a refurbished version of
these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648
million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan's difficult flying
environment back when various Islamic jihadis, some of whom we're now fighting
under the rubric of "the Taliban", were allied with us against the Russians.
Here's the first paragraph of Whitlock's article: "The US government is
snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's
fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress
who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead."
So, various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a
buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That's the story
Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase
dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what's
worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren't
getting the contracts.
But let's consider three aspects of Whitlock's article that no one is likely to
spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of
the American way of war in distant lands - and in Washington.
1. The little training program that couldn't: There are at
present an impressive 450 US personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air
force. Unfortunately, there's a problem. There may be no "buy American" program
for that air force, but there is a "speak American" one. To be an Afghan air
force pilot, you must know English - "the official language of the cockpit",
Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters). As he points out,
however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to
learn the language. (Imagine a US Air Force in which, just to take off, every
pilot needed to know Dari!)
Thanks to this language barrier, the US can train endlessly and next to nothing
is guaranteed to happen. "So far," reports Whitlock, "only one Afghan pilot has
graduated from flight school in the United States, although dozens are in the
pipeline. That has forced the air corps to rely on pilots who learned to fly
Mi-17s during the days of Soviet and Taliban rule." In other words, despite the
impressive Soviet performance in the 1980s, the training of the Afghan air
force has been re-imagined by Americans as a Sisyphean undertaking.
And this offers but a hint of how bizarre US training programs for the Afghan
military and police have proven to be. In fact, sometimes it seems as if
exactly the same scathing report, detailing the same training problems and
setbacks, has been recycled yearly without anyone who mattered finding it
particularly odd - or being surprised that the response to each successive
piece of bad news is to decide to pour yet more money and trainers into the
project.
For example, in 2005, at a time when Washington had already spent $3.3 billion
training and mentoring the Afghan army and police, the US Government Accounting
Office (GAO) issued a report indicating that "efforts to fully equip the
increasing number of [Afghan] combat troops have fallen behind, and efforts to
establish sustaining institutions, such as a logistics command, needed to
support these troops have not kept pace". Worse yet, the report fretted, it
might take "up to $7.2 billion to complete [the training project] and about
$600 million annually to sustain [it]".
In 2006, according to the New York Times, "a joint report by the Pentagon and
the State Department ... found that the American-trained police force in
Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work,
and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many
officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment
issued to police units have gone." At best, stated the report, fewer than half
of the officially announced number of police were "trained and equipped to
carry out their police functions".
In 2008, by which time $16.5 billion had been spent on army and police training
programs, the GAO chimed in again, indicating that only two of 105 army units
were "assessed as being fully capable of conducting their primary mission",
while "no police unit is fully capable".
In 2009, the US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction reported
that "only 24 of 559 Afghan police units are considered ready to operate
without international help". Such reports, as well as repeated (and repetitive)
news investigations and stories on the subject, invariably are accompanied by a
litany of complaints about corruption, indiscipline, illiteracy, drug taking,
staggering desertion rates, Taliban infiltration, ghost soldiers, and a host of
other problems. In 2009, however, the solution remained as expectable as the
problems: "The report called for more US trainers and more money."
This June, a US government audit, again from the Special Inspector General,
contradicted the latest upbeat American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) training assessments, reporting that "the standards used to appraise the
Afghan forces since 2005 were woefully inadequate, inflating their abilities".
The usual litany of training woes followed. Yet, according to Reuters,
President Barack Obama wants another $14.2 billion for the training project
"for this year and next". And just last week, the Wall Street Journal's Julian
Barnes reported that new Afghan war commander General David Petraeus is
planning to "retool" US strategy to include "a greater focus on how
Afghanistan's security forces are being trained".
When it comes to US training programs then, you might conclude that Afghanistan
has proved to be Catch-22-ville, the land where time stood still - and so,
evidently, has the Washington national security establishment's collective
brain. For Washington, there seems to be no learning curve in Afghanistan, not
when it comes to "training" Afghans anyway.
And here is the oddest thing of all, though no one even bothers to mention it
in this context: the Taliban haven't had tens of billions of dollars in foreign
training funds; they haven't had years of advice from the best US and NATO
advisors that money can buy; they haven't had private contractors like DynCorp
teaching them how to fight and police, and strangely enough, they seem to have
no problem fighting.
They are not undermanned, infiltrated by followers of President Hamid Karzai,
or particularly corrupt. They may be illiterate and may not be fluent in
English, but they are ready, in up to platoon-sized units, to attack heavily
fortified US military bases, Afghan prisons, a police headquarters and the like
with hardly a foreign mentor in sight.
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