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.

Even a somewhat smaller central army of roughly 60,000 troops, as force planners in the United States have proposed, is unrealistic and does not address the spoiler problem. Simply recreating a national army strictly controlled from Kabul will do little to convince individual tribal or ethnic groups that the central government is not seeking to dominate them. In fact, if the interim government's composition offers any guide to Afghanistan's eventual leadership, a national army responsible solely to the central government would almost certainly be dominated by the Tajik-controlled Northern Alliance -- and thus would pose a direct challenge to local power bases. This situation could provoke both Pashtuns and some warlords to revolt against the central government in the near future, as they would seek to strike while the government was still weak.

A third suggestion is that the new armed force should not be a military at all. Instead, it should fall somewhere between an army and a police force, akin to Costa Rica's small, paramilitary-style national guard. It would focus exclusively on domestic security and have no heavy weapons, so as not to threaten the authority and clout of regional power brokers. This solution, however, underestimates the strength and determination of the new government's potential opponents. Carrying only small arms, the paramilitary force would be outgunned by the full range of potential spoilers -- holdout Taliban or al Qaeda bands, warlord armies, and even individual criminal bands -- and unable to integrate the warlords' standing forces.

A BALANCED SOLUTION

There is a different solution, however. A force that incorporates the best elements of the proposed models while mitigating their failures could resolve the problems presented by all the potential spoilers. Such a force would have two components: first, a small, ethnically integrated professional army answerable to national political authorities; and second, a "national guard" that incorporates tribal and warlord militias (and in the south, the U.S.-trained anti-al Qaeda troops) into formal units responsible to provincial governments. This solution avoids the pitfalls of the other options on the table by balancing Kabul's various needs: a professional army capable of guaranteeing the state's sovereignty and suppressing any total spoilers; integrating the various armed, greedy spoilers; and assuaging the concerns of potential limited spoilers.

In terms of size, the new army should be large enough to fulfill its duties but small enough to facilitate the army's rapid professionalization and help assure individual ethnic and tribal groups that the army will not be used as a means of conquest or control. A force structure of roughly 30,000 troops would fit these requirements: six maneuver brigades, four light and two mechanized, supported by artillery, engineering, and logistics assets. This force mix, essentially a smaller version of Afghanistan's pre-civil war military, would be mobile, able to operate across Afghanistan's varied terrain, and equipped with enough firepower to deal effectively with likely foes. It would not, however, be heavy enough to be used as an occupying force if hijacked by any one ethnic group.

Recruitment should occur through the mechanism that Karzai's interim administration established for the ISAF programs, drawing from each of Afghanistan's 33 provinces. All new recruits should then train together in ethnically integrated units. The officer corps should be built in a similar manner, with each governor delegating a small number of officers to train at a central academy that incorporates all the ethnic groups.

The ethnically integrated brigades should be based near the major urban areas (Charikar, Gardez, Herat, Jalalabad, Kabul, Kandahar, Kunduz, and Mazar-i-Sharif), to help the government establish national authority without directly encroaching on the fiefdoms of rural leaders. The basing of units or individual commanders should be rotated on a regular basis to prevent the development of overly close ties between particular military units and local political authorities -- a strategy used successfully in a number of African states.

For this army to be accepted and trusted by all Afghans, its command structure must be broad-based and unified. A senior leadership drawn from or structured along purely ethnic or partisan lines would make excluded groups suspicious of the army and the regime behind it -- at the potential expense of future peace. If a political dispute arises while the new force is being put together, disgruntled groups will then be able to walk out of the entire process with their armed units behind them. The example of Angola, where a failed military integration led to another decade of warfare, stands as a clear warning.

The initial wave of generals appointed to lead a new Afghan army does not bode well in this regard. Of the 100 or so generals named by Defense Minister Fahim during the interim administration, about 90 are Tajiks hailing from the relatively small Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul. Yet this unfortunate beginning does not have to doom the whole project. Like all appointments made by the interim government, these selections should be reassessed under the 18-month transitional authority appointed by the Loya Jirga (the traditional Afghan assembly). A little finesse should be used in shifting slots and considering future appointments, aiming to restructure the senior military leadership so that it better reflects Afghan demographics. One possibility is to move a portion of these officers into other, potentially more lucrative government bureaucracies.

As is the practice in Western militaries, national political authorities should appoint the senior military staff, while the military bureaucracy should nominate individual unit commanders. The new army may initially have to be relatively top-heavy. This may not be the most militarily efficient structure, but the creation and disbursement of a greater number of senior slots will provide Kabul with valuable political chips to bring all parties, including the warlords, to the table. After the critical postwar period has passed -- most likely at least three to five years down the road -- the government can slim down the command structure to better reflect professional competence.