With more resources in Afghanistan, there would be faster results

Live from Afghanistan this morning in a press briefing held in the Pentagon, US Army General Robert Livingston, Deputy Commanding General of Combined Security Transition Command, said we will see a “different summer.” Since the last time he spoke, they have been mentoring the police, and looking towards the long-term efforts in Afghanistan.

One of the main focuses is to retrain and reinsert the police force, utilizing ANCOP to replace them. There is a training surge, he said, and they are primarily focused on individual training. ANCOP is a bit like a national SWAT unit, Livingston said, and they are divided into units, which are trained to act as a unit instead of individually. They are being trained for multipurpose tasks, but, the military needs more police trainers. The need for more trainers is being touched on but is not moving as fast as they would like.

Livingston reported an accelerated growth of the Afghan army, saying that it has nearly doubled, and they’ve increased the structure of the army by thirty percent. One of the major obstacles they have overcome is the AWOL rate from the army. It was good news, he said, and exciting, that the AWOL rate has gone from 18% to less than 8%. In addition to that, the “present rate” is climbing between 55-85% of members that are actually showing up regularly. In the last year, over seven thousand NCOs have been added to the ranks. He said that within the country, corruption is seen as a need for survival. They have been removing the needs for corruption, and have seen tremendous progress in the last six months.

The specific element involved in the retraining efforts that he attributes to the decrease in the AWOL rate is they are dealing with the Afghan army through their own chain of command. They implemented mentoring, and emphasized the need to grow the army into and effective trained element. Overall, Livingston said, the army and police are well positioned, and they are seeing good results. If they had additional resources, there would be greater results, faster.