A New Model Afghan Army

Anja Manuel and P. W. Singer

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002

Summary:  Afghanistan's peace remains tenuous. Rival warlords still control separate militias, and distrust of government abounds. Only a national army can secure the peace. Yet the Afghans have been slow to create one, and the international community has not helped much. The United States must jump-start the process before war breaks out again.

Anja Manuel is an Attorney with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. P. W. Singer is Olin Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and Coordinator of the Brookings Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World.

A novel option worth exploring is to contract the job out. Such a move would solve any concern over detracting from the peacekeeping or antiterrorism effort. Instead, it would bring all the international programs under the management of a private military consulting firm. A number of such consulting companies, staffed by retired military personnel, have experience in advising nascent militaries and useful expertise in running officer academies and training centers. The U.S.-based firm Military Professional Resources, Inc., for example, presently runs such an operation in Bosnia aimed at binding Bosnian Croat and Muslim units together into a capable national force. Local acceptance of the program has also been critical in weeding out the negative influence of military assistance from radical states such as Iran. If the privatized option is chosen for Afghanistan, however, it must be carefully monitored. The contract should include provisions for a gradual turnover of authority to local officers -- otherwise, the firm could seek to profit from long-term local dependence on its services.

MISSION CONTROL

If a disciplined standing armed force is not built, Kabul will have to continue relying on the Northern Alliance's loose amalgamation of warlord-controlled forces. This outcome is hardly optimal. The Northern Alliance, a short-term coalition at best, does not represent the country as a whole. Rather, it reflects the agendas of its individual warlord components, which do not always intersect with that of the broad-based national government.

The government needs a new national army, instead, to come to terms with the spoiler problem -- or otherwise risks scuttling the peace. The army must be able to reassure and incorporate limited and greedy spoilers, giving them incentives to cooperate and thus creating some breathing room for the nascent central government. At the same time, the force must also be strong enough to deal effectively with total spoilers, such as al Qaeda and the Taliban remnants, who may challenge the government in the future.

Given the warlords' deep-rooted hold over local power structures, the government probably could not crush them -- indeed, it would be injudicious even to try. They must instead be convinced to play along. The government needs to show the warlords that they will have a role in the new government and military if they cooperate. Yet the country's leaders must also stand tough and enforce the current tacit cease-fire, calling on outside assistance as necessary, to forestall any jockeying for position among the warlords that could disrupt the peace. Running all political and military aid through Kabul will give it important leverage in this process.

In light of this situation, the mission of an integrated Afghan military should be limited. In the short term, it should focus on certain core sovereign tasks: defending Afghanistan's borders against foreign fighters and preventing terrorists from using the country as a base; heading off renewed fighting between political or tribal factions; and protecting the major lines of communication and commerce.

The new army should avoid the numerous other missions that some have proposed for it, from weeding out criminals and smugglers at border crossings to enforcing bans on poppy production. Not only is it unrealistic to expect a new force to take on so many tasks, but these additional duties would blur the traditional distinctions between military and police functions and could even harm the reintegration process. Targeting the major income sources of local power brokers may also create a showdown that the central government is not yet politically strong enough to win. Instead of compromising the national armed force's legitimacy with these explosive domestic issues, Kabul and the international community should focus on establishing effective local law enforcement to take care of such matters.

A better alternative might be to focus the new military's energies on other, more positive operations as a means to help solidify public support, while at the same time building force cohesion and experience. These auxiliary duties would include weapons disposal, demining, and support for disaster relief operations. Similar exercises were used successfully in El Salvador and South Africa.

DANGEROUS IDEAS

Ideas for the size and form of the new Afghan armed forces vary significantly. Some, such as Interim Defense Minister Muhammad Fahim Khan, have proposed creating a national military that combines all the warlords' militias and other standing armed forces. This type of centralized force failed during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and remains unrealistic today. Undeterred, Fahim has publicly stated that he envisions an army of 200,000 troops, almost twice the size of the Soviet-era force. This proposal ignores the incredible financial burden that a large national army places on a nascent state, at the very time it is least able to afford it. In Mozambique, for example, officials decided to integrate all armed units into a large national force, and to demilitarize later. Political leaders overestimated the resources available to fund this force, however, and troops did not receive their promised pay. The resulting dissension within the force led some parts of the new military to revolt, provoking a renewed crisis that the new government barely withstood. Maintaining a centralized force of the magnitude Fahim has proposed, moreover, would eventually require some form of national conscription. In the past, this proved highly unpopular and undercut public support for both the communists and the Taliban, a mistake the new government would do well to avoid.