thedrifter
03-27-09, 10:24 AM
March 27, 2009, 0:00 a.m.
Boot-Camp Social Engineering
This is what nation-building looks like.
By Rich Lowry
EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246).
Kabul — This is what nation-building looks like — a dozen young Afghan men standing in camouflage uniforms in a cold drizzle while they wait for the signal to drop to their bellies, peer down a rifle range, and fire their M-16s.
They are a few of the 7,000 Afghan army recruits at the sprawling Kabul Military Training Center, a facility built by the Soviets in the 1970s and bombed out by the United States in 2001. It is now back in commission, feeding men into Afghanistan’s premier national institution, the Afghan National Army.
The 80,000-strong army is ethnically balanced and well regarded both by the public and its coalition enablers. “There is a strategic purpose above and beyond security,” British Brigadier Neil Baverstock says of the army whose training he helps oversee. “It binds the people to the center in a way other institutions in Afghanistan don’t. It is a force for national unity, and is seen by the Afghans as such.”
This boot-camp “social engineering,” in Baverstock’s phrase, is key to the international coalition’s project in Afghanistan.
The army is headed to 138,000, and Pres. Barack Obama wants to double it again, although the sheer rate at which it is being built probably can’t be increased. There are few other facilities to use for training, and the country’s human capital is achingly limited. Seventy percent of the recruits are illiterate, and those who can read are immediately put on a fast track to become noncommissioned officers.
An earnest, slightly built 22-year-old recruit explains why he signed up: “I want to save my people, so they can get educated.” A stirring statement, but afterward a Western officer notes that’s what all the recruits say. The reason most of them sign up is sheer economic desperation.
If any reminder is needed of Afghanistan’s ability to frustrate ambitious outsiders, it’s in the rusted-out remains of Soviet armored vehicles lined up here for training purposes. Just over the hills echoing with rifle fire is the mountain pass through which a British contingent retreated in 1842, on the way to a slaughter from which only one surgeon escaped.
But the Americans aren’t a brutal occupying army or a hated colonial power. They are still the most popular country in the coalition among the Afghans, according to the deputy special representative of the United Nations secretary-general, Christopher Alexander. And why not? It’s hard to imagine a military force more committed to bettering the lives of a foreign people.
American officers have thoroughly absorbed the lessons of full-spectrum counterinsurgency and talk as much about economic development and effective governance as they do about “kinetic operations.” As they rail against government corruption and the like, it sometimes seems their true enemy is the progress-resistant culture of Afghanistan.
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” In Afghanistan, the military is a conservative institution in the service of that liberal truth.
“Lowering expectations,” a popular Beltway buzz-phrase, is anathema in Afghanistan. The Afghans hate it, sensing it’s a prelude to their abandonment. “It can only be justified,” thunders Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, a stout former mujahideen, “if your will is weakened and you want to come up with excuses.” It’s unpopular in the coalition because it’s thought a euphemism for giving up on the nonmilitary efforts necessary to make progress in the war stick.
Of course, a country that ranks near the bottom of all countries in the U.N. human-development index demands realistic expectations, lowered or no. Afghanistan is like a Haiti occupied by an often-confused international coalition, and flanked by Iran and Pakistan. It doesn’t get any harder. And yet, dozens of Afghan men sit on their haunches just off the training grounds here listening to instructions — 125 newly minted members of the Afghan National Army.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
Ellie
Boot-Camp Social Engineering
This is what nation-building looks like.
By Rich Lowry
EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246).
Kabul — This is what nation-building looks like — a dozen young Afghan men standing in camouflage uniforms in a cold drizzle while they wait for the signal to drop to their bellies, peer down a rifle range, and fire their M-16s.
They are a few of the 7,000 Afghan army recruits at the sprawling Kabul Military Training Center, a facility built by the Soviets in the 1970s and bombed out by the United States in 2001. It is now back in commission, feeding men into Afghanistan’s premier national institution, the Afghan National Army.
The 80,000-strong army is ethnically balanced and well regarded both by the public and its coalition enablers. “There is a strategic purpose above and beyond security,” British Brigadier Neil Baverstock says of the army whose training he helps oversee. “It binds the people to the center in a way other institutions in Afghanistan don’t. It is a force for national unity, and is seen by the Afghans as such.”
This boot-camp “social engineering,” in Baverstock’s phrase, is key to the international coalition’s project in Afghanistan.
The army is headed to 138,000, and Pres. Barack Obama wants to double it again, although the sheer rate at which it is being built probably can’t be increased. There are few other facilities to use for training, and the country’s human capital is achingly limited. Seventy percent of the recruits are illiterate, and those who can read are immediately put on a fast track to become noncommissioned officers.
An earnest, slightly built 22-year-old recruit explains why he signed up: “I want to save my people, so they can get educated.” A stirring statement, but afterward a Western officer notes that’s what all the recruits say. The reason most of them sign up is sheer economic desperation.
If any reminder is needed of Afghanistan’s ability to frustrate ambitious outsiders, it’s in the rusted-out remains of Soviet armored vehicles lined up here for training purposes. Just over the hills echoing with rifle fire is the mountain pass through which a British contingent retreated in 1842, on the way to a slaughter from which only one surgeon escaped.
But the Americans aren’t a brutal occupying army or a hated colonial power. They are still the most popular country in the coalition among the Afghans, according to the deputy special representative of the United Nations secretary-general, Christopher Alexander. And why not? It’s hard to imagine a military force more committed to bettering the lives of a foreign people.
American officers have thoroughly absorbed the lessons of full-spectrum counterinsurgency and talk as much about economic development and effective governance as they do about “kinetic operations.” As they rail against government corruption and the like, it sometimes seems their true enemy is the progress-resistant culture of Afghanistan.
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” In Afghanistan, the military is a conservative institution in the service of that liberal truth.
“Lowering expectations,” a popular Beltway buzz-phrase, is anathema in Afghanistan. The Afghans hate it, sensing it’s a prelude to their abandonment. “It can only be justified,” thunders Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, a stout former mujahideen, “if your will is weakened and you want to come up with excuses.” It’s unpopular in the coalition because it’s thought a euphemism for giving up on the nonmilitary efforts necessary to make progress in the war stick.
Of course, a country that ranks near the bottom of all countries in the U.N. human-development index demands realistic expectations, lowered or no. Afghanistan is like a Haiti occupied by an often-confused international coalition, and flanked by Iran and Pakistan. It doesn’t get any harder. And yet, dozens of Afghan men sit on their haunches just off the training grounds here listening to instructions — 125 newly minted members of the Afghan National Army.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
Ellie