Desertions undermine Afghan army

[IndianaGreen]

Source: Al Jazeera

Desertions undermine Afghan army (VIDEO at link)

An exclusive Al Jazeera investigation has found that the number of existing security forces in Afghanistan has been greatly exaggerated with widespread desertions by members of the army and police.

Senior officials in the Obama administration say US troops will start to return home from July of 2011.

That is when Afghan forces are supposed to be ready to take over.

But an investigation by Al Jazeera's James Bays shows that may not be feasible.



Read more: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/12/200912123265842619.html

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Desertions were also a problem in the ARVN (South Vietnam's army for you young ones).

[Yupster]

1. The ARVN

fought awfully hard and took tremendous casualties for years though.

The Afghan army has a long way to go to equal the ARVN.

In fact, the ARVN is not given a fair break in history. To read about them you'd think they were a shadow army that operated to make a buck and ran away at the first sign of fighting. There was certainly plenty of corruption and also plenty of desertion (as there also was from the Viet Cong and NVA), but the ARVN also carried the burden of the war for many years.

Just as one example, in 1972 the NVA launched a general offensive which could have well ended the war. The US was out of the war on the ground, but still involved in air support. The NVA crossed the DMZ and overran a good chunk of northern South Vietnam. The ARVN buckled. Then two of the best ARVN divisions were brought north from the southern part of the country, they counterattacked and retook the occupied land and gave the NVA a good bloodying (with US airpower). Somewhere I have an old Time Magazine from 1972 with a picture of ARVN cleaning up NVA dead with the title of something like "ARVN Passes The Test".

We pretty much left for good in 1973, and all through 1974 ARVN fought by itself, but then in 1975, it collapsed in panic.

The collapse was pretty interesting strategically. In early 1975 the communists were harrassing the ARVN by attacking and ambushing the small towns and cities of the sparsely populated Central Highlands. The ARVN would rush their quick reaction troops by helicopter from one town to another, but the fighting was too expensive, especially in fuel which ARVN no longer had in good supply once the US left.

The South Vietnamese government then made a disastrous decision. They decided to give up the Central Highlands and instead protect the cities of the coast, and the food producing area of the south. They didn't explain what they were doing though. The jungle bases were evacuated and the populations of those areas joined the troops on long columns toward the coast. As the NVA started sniping at them, the columns got all intermingled between soldiers, equipment and civilians, and by the time they reached the coast, it was in a rout. When the convoys reached the coastal cities, they panicked also, and within days the soldiers of the larger cities were evacuating themselves to Saigon and the cities of the north fell without a fight one after another.

Not all the ARVN units collapsed though. Maybe the ARVN's greatest battle of the long war was the Battle of Xuan Loc fought in April 1975 after the whole north and central parts of South Vietnam had collapsed and been overrun.

The Eighteenth ARVN Division was a veteran unit which had fought well throughout the war. They were stationed to defend Xuan Loc, a moderate sized city right on the highway to Saigon. When the NVA found the Eighteenth Division dug in and fighting, they brought in four divisions, the NVA 5th, 6th, 7th and 318th to push them out of the way. The battle was unusual because the NVA used T34 tanks in large numbers and for the first time also had heavy air support using mostlty overrun ARVN airplanes.

For twelve days the NVA attacked, and the Eighteenth Division parried the attacks and counterattacked and inflicted a significant defeat on the communists. The NVA eventually switched their attack to bypass Xuan Loc and the Eighteenth Division was pulled back into Bien Hoa almost in the suburbs of Saigon which is where they were when the Saigon government surrendered.

Anyway, I didn't want to hijack your thread, but the story of ARVN is never told. They are usually treated like a joke which is not fair to an army which took more casualties just in the year 1972 than the US did in the entire war.

[pam4water]

2. Well since it's Hijack a bit. Was that before the US cut funding to the Sothern Veitnam Government?

I end up one of many screaming matches with a Freeper type over how Vietnam was lost. They are all sure it was because the "pussy" Democrats in Congress cur war funding. Screaming matches on multiple subject not all on Vietnam. That reminds me I have to go remind him how wrong he was about Dubai.

[Yupster]

3. It's certainly not fair to blame the US for ARVN's collapse

It was their country and it was up to them to defend it.

On the other hand, we certainly didn't give ARVN a fair chance.

We trained them on how to fight our way. Our way of fighting was based on high mobility and liberal use of ordinance.

Then once we left we reduced their aid. That of course forced decisions on them they wouldn't otherwise have made. For instance, if we gave them all the oil they wanted, they wouldn't have had to evacuate the Central Highlands. They certainly had not been defeated there.

One other thing that should be mentioned is the oil crisis of 1973-74. Oil prices skyrocketed after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. For us it was a pain to have to spend twice as much on gasoline.

Think of what a disaster that was to the South Vietnamese government. It was the oil crisis more than anything that grounded ARVN's mobility.

Even 'worsier' was the effect it had on Cambodia. Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge and the NVA just a few months before Saigon fell. No one ever accused the Cambodian Army of not fighting. They fought to the bitter end, and unfortunately the bitter end was their last motorized vehicles running out of gas on the highways and the Killing Fields was the result. In 1974 US aid to Cambodia (almost all military) was cut from $ 362 million to $ 200 million. This plus the doubling of oil prices was the end of a non communist Cambodia.

[14thColony]

4. I spent a year helping to train the Afghan National Army

I served as a military adviser to HQ Training Command, which trains everyone from new recruit privates to officer candidates to staff officers -- vaguely modeled on US Army TRADOC for those who get that reference. In my experience in that year, the actual available-for-duty rate of the overall army was about 50%, and I heard through colleagues that the police were even worse off. For a brand-new recruit battalion entering basic training, we ASSUMED a 25% desertion rate (not attrition rate, just desertion rate). Some battalions reached 50% before the end of training.

In my experience, here are some of the main issues:
1. The ANA is a volunteer force and the Afghan societal view is that if you voluntarily joined then there is no social stigma on voluntarily leaving either.

2. Because of (1), the ANA get a lot of 'seasonal recruits' -- guys that join in the winter when the agricultural work dries up, but then split in the spring when the planting season kicks off again.

3. Soldiers are treated like shit, or "worse than animals" as one told me (considering how I saw animals being treated, that's a chilling thought). We had a riot at the main MEPS station in Kabul one night because some recruits finally fought back against some staff who would rape them in the middle of the night. Don't even get me started on the barracks and the food. Corruption rules the ANA, and money is siphoned into every pocket along the way, leaving soldiers with little or nothing. One company down south was wiped out in an ambush while on patrol because their commander had SOLD ALL THEIR AMMO to line his own pockets, but still sent them out on missions. With no cultural stigma against desertion and virtually no chance you'd ever be caught, would you stay?

4. The Taliban use the ANA for THEIR basic training as well. Why bother training new fighters when the Americans, French, Brits, Canadians, Romanians, et al will do a way better job, plus feed and pay your recruits so you don't have to? And when they leave they bring a couple of uniforms, helmet, and a rifle to boot! Score!

5. The ANA's requirement to ethnically mix all units to a fixed proportion means that on average about 2/3s of soldiers will be serving in a province far-removed from their own, where they probably don't speak the local language and have little in common with the local people. And IF they get paid (assuming their commander hasn't embezzled all their money) they have the anguish of trying to figure out how to get the money home to their family in a country which is in-essence a cash-only society, at least outside Kabul.

6. Their officers are mostly incompetent, corrupt, uncaring and incapable -- hardly inspirational stuff. The new generation of lieutenants trained by the British and the US/Turkish teams are much better, but they're also too junior to change much and disillusionment was becoming a problem with them. Of the senior guys, the Soviet-trained ones were by far the best, but they're dwindling in numbers and they're still oftentimes corrupt as well.

7. And IF by some miracle you survive your two-year enlistment, since there is very little chance for progression in the ranks of any sort, why on earth would you re-enlist? This is more about retention than desertion, but retention is probably an even worse problem that is even less-reported (retention rate was about 10% as of 2007).

[Vidar]

5. Thank you for the first person insight.

[trungpa ricochet]

6. Substantial documentation...thank you.

This post supports with first-hand evidence what I thought about the way things work in Afghanistan. Basically the US and other foreign powers are attempting, noble as they may be, to form entire institutions from scratch, depending upon social dynamics that have never existed before. Loyalty to a "nation" in the sense we have of it is probably something that will be hard to kindle and even harder to maintain. This process, if it occurs at all, will surely take generations to implant. Afghanis know tribal and family bonds, but I think "pro patria" is a lost cause. There are so many terrible problems in Afghanistan. Foreign powers cannot fix them. Only Afghanis can make Afghanistan.

[Bigmack]

7. Yup... trying to "form entire institutions from scratch"...

Trying to bring a 14th century people into the 21st century by sheer force of our bombs... and, of course, the force of our moral superiority.

The White Man's Burden is alive and well, and I see the extra-special Irony in that phrase.

[Tracer]

8. Thank you.

Your experience reinforces my thinking regarding the "training" of Afghanistani troops that Obama proposed last night.

We NEVER hear this side of the story.

[KansDem]

9. Well, that certainly puts the kibosh on our "training security forces."

How can you "train security forces" if there are no "security forces" to "train?"

We've had seven years...give it up now!

[mstinamotorcity]

10. ok you mean

they don't want to go to the afterlife and be with their seventy two virgins for the cause,well now i am surprised:sarcasm: :sarcasm:

[SpiralHawk]

11. "Desertion is cool. Smirk." - xCommander AWOL (R)

"Hell, it's a republicon tradition, so this just shows that the Afghanis are following my lead. Smirk."

- xCommander AWOL (R)