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A fledging force made up of tens of thousands of new recruits and a few experienced officers is performing quite well In many ways the platoon of soldiers heading into the fields of Zhari, near Kandahar city, could have been on one of the hundreds of patrols Nato forces conduct every day in Afghanistan. Nothing about their behaviour was exceptional. In an area thick with IEDs, they kept apart from each other. The captain leading the patrol kept in constant touch by radio with his colleagues near the town of Sanzeray. At several points, he ordered his men to drop to one knee and scour nearby tree lines through the sights of their brand new M16 rifles. In fact, these men tramping around the sweltering countryside were something very rare indeed: an entirely Afghan unit operating completely independently of foreign forces. Captain Halim Khan did not even bother informing his US colleagues that he was taking his men for a march into the surrounding countryside. The only thing out of the ordinary was the fact that Khan, a hardened former mujahideen who fought against the Russians, had not felt the need to put on any body armour or a helmet. “It is good for officers to show they are not afraid of the enemy,” he said. It was a sight that would delight western policymakers, who have staked all on an exit strategy in which the Afghan National Army (ANA), along with the police, will take complete control of the country’s security by the end of 2014. At that point nearly all foreign troops will have either left Afghanistan or fallen back into non-combat support roles. It cannot come a moment too soon for the US rank-and-file who typically conduct two joint patrols a day in Zhari with their Afghan colleagues. The Afghans in turn do at least one independently. Many of the US soldiers make no attempt to disguise their weariness with a war that they think has dragged on too long and cost too much money. “A lot of us don’t understand why we are still here,” said one US soldier, on his third tour in Afghanistan. The frantic, multibillion dollar effort over the past two years to get the ANA ready to shoulder responsibility has been one of the most extraordinary episodes in the west’s 10-year engagement in Afghanistan. On taking command of the military training mission in November 2009, the US general William Caldwell declared himself horrified with almost everything that had been done in the years before his arrival. The ANA was largely illiterate, the private sector contractors paid to train them were doing a hopeless job and attrition rates were so high that in some months the total size of the force actually decreased. Realising the depth of the problem, the US threw money at the mission, running crash courses in reading and writing, getting rid of as many contractors as they could and raising ANA salaries to push up recruitment. This year alone $12bn (£7.4bn) will be spent on building the ANA, a sum equivalent to Afghanistan’s entire economy. Even though an army of sorts has existed since 2001, the net effect of this scramble is that the ANA is now a fledgling force made up of tens of thousands of new recruits and a sprinkling of experienced officers. So it is remarkable that this instant army is performing quite well, even in a place such as Zhari, a long-time Taliban stronghold where the terrain could almost have been purpose-built for guerrilla warfare. Part of the 205th “Hero” Corps, widely regarded as one of the ANA’s finest, the soldiers in this area have developed capabilities that would have been undreamt of just a few years ago. After the patrol, Khan goes to a cupboard in his office and scoops up armfuls of night-vision goggles. It is the sort of hi-tech kit the Americans have long resisted giving to the Afghans, fearing they would be lost or, worse, sold so that the highly restricted technology would end up in enemy hands. But in Zhari the ANA are trusted enough to be lent the equipment, allowing them to carry out patrols at night. “They can be incredibly aggressive in a fight,” said Max Ferguson, an American captain who lives side by side with the ANA in another outpost near the village of Kandalay. In one recent case an ANA platoon leader spotted a group of concealed insurgents and sent four of his men to apprehend them. “In American terms that would be a suicide mission, but the Afghans just went and did it,” Ferguson said. “They are like dune buggies that can just zoom about, while we are like big heavy tanks that can’t do anything quickly.” During a previous visit to Zhari in 2008, the Guardian occasionally saw tiny contingents of ANA wearing mismatching uniforms, carrying a bizarre assortment of old weapons and meekly following the Canadian forces. Three years on, what one US official in Kabul calls “Caldwell’s New Model Army” has done much to complement the security gains won by the huge number of US troops sent to Kandahar and Helmand as part of Barack Obama’s surge strategy. With the risk of ambushes greatly diminished on the main roads, the ANA now move around in smaller, lighter convoys. The commander of the 205th Corps, Brigadier General Abdul Hamid, points to progress in the districts where he says people from outlying areas can now come to the office of the local government boss to discuss problems. Insurgents are still active, but operating in smaller groups they are struggling to inflict the damage they once did, he said. However, there is still a long way to go. The Americans say discipline within the ANA needs to improve. At 5am, when a patrol was supposed to leave, the Afghans were still waking up, praying and getting their kit together while the Americans, ready to go, had to sit around for an hour. A few weeks previously the ANA had lost a pair of the precious night-vision goggles on a night patrol and then showed no inclination to go and find them. The goggles had been lost after a piece of string that was meant to keep them permanently attached to the soldier was hacked off. The Afghans are also far less assiduous than Nato troops about only walking on the most difficult and arduous terrain in an effort to avoid the low metal IEDs that are invisible to traditional detection devices. Presented with an inviting gap in one of the towering two-and-a-half metre walls that cut up the countryside, US troops will nearly always avoid such an obvious place for an IED. More often than not the ANA watch their US colleagues haul themselves over the wall and then take the easier route. But Ferguson’s biggest concern is the mundane business of logistics and the struggle the Afghans have keeping themselves supplied with food, water and fuel for even a 24-hour period. “It’s partly our fault because sometimes we spoil them by stepping in and taking care of this stuff for them,” he said. In the three ANA companies the Guardian spent time with, we did not meet a single Pashtun soldier who hailed from the south, where recruitment has bumped around at less than 3%. Although around half the soldiers were Pashtuns from eastern provinces, the remainder were from other ethnic groups from the north and could not speak Pashtu. Several analysts have raised this as a key weakness of the ANA, saying it is seen in the south as an occupying force. Tom Johnson, professor of national security affairs at a military university in Monterey, California, believes the under-representation of Pashtuns is far worse than reported as some non-Pashtuns simply lie about their ethnicity. But in opinion polls and interviews, Afghans nearly always declare the ANA to be the institution they respect the most, in sharp contrast to the police who tend to be locals and therefore mixed up in tribal disputes. “One hundred percent of the locals see us as much better than the Americans because we are Afghans and Muslims,” said Mohammad Farza, a charismatic lieutenant and platoon leader, whose efforts to speak Pashtu, his second language, raise smiles among the locals. “But they hate the police who are always stealing money and causing problems for them.” In addition to the weak police, the office of the district governor is “weak, ineffective and corrupt”, said Ferguson. For their part, Afghan officers complain about their equipment, particularly the hand-me-down Humvees that the Americans gave up driving years ago. Instead they want tanks, heavy weapons, and artillery and fighter planes – all things ruled out for now. Johnson thinks the ANA stands almost no chance of holding on to gains by the time the US quits. He pointed to the fact that an April report by the US defence department admitted that in the entire country just one ANA unit was capable of operating independently. “My students who have served in Afghanistan tell me that there is no way they would ever trust the ANA to guard their rear flanks – that for me is the bottom line,” he said. One cause for mild optimism is the fact that transition has been done before, by the Soviet Union when they pulled out all combat troops in 1989. To the surprise of most observers the regime they left behind did not immediately crumble, but fended off the mujahideen, a far stronger force than today’s Taliban, for three years. The government was finally overwhelmed only after the Soviet Union collapsed and stopped paying the bills of the Afghan army of the day. The biggest question may not be the ANA’s ability to turn up on time for patrols but whether the US will agree to pay for its running costs. Estimates suggest that after 2014 the ANA and the police will require $6-8bn a year. Although that is a fraction of the $120bn the US is spending on its own military operations in Afghanistan this year, it is a vast sum that would see the country consuming more direct US military aid than Israel and Egypt combined. “With all the constraints on the US economy and the collapse in public support for this war I think it is going to be very hard to continue to spend billions and billions of dollars,” said Johnson. “I don’t think we have the luxury of being able to follow the Soviet model.” Afghanistan Nato Jon Boone guardian.co.uk