By Richard Sisk
The War Report
U.S. and coalition troops increasingly dislike and distrust the Afghan army and police forces they train and fight alongside — and the feeling is mutual.
The cross-cultural contempt has been marked by a spike in “green-on-blue” killings, military-speak for Afghans turning their weapons against the allies, that threaten to scuttle the Obama administration’s strategy to turn over security responsibilities to the Afghans by 2014.
A scathing report on the killings commissioned by the U.S. military for NATO rejected previous claims by Western officers in charge of the training that the incidents were isolated and did not have political motives.
“Lethal altercations are clearly not rare or isolated; they reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat” to the coalition from Afghans in uniform that could be “unprecedented” in modern warfare, the report said, according to the New York Times.
In the latest incident, an Afghan soldier attacked his mentors yesterday and killed four French troops who were putting him through a grueling training exercise in the mountains of Kapisa province north of Kabul.
The Afghan soldier was arrested as a furious French President Nicholas Sarkozy immediately suspended the participation of French forces in training Afghans and threatened to withdraw the more than 3,300 French troops in Afghanistan.
“The French army is not in Afghanistan so that Afghan soldiers can shoot at them,” Sarkozy said in Paris. “From now on, all the operations of training and combat help by the French army are suspended.”
If the Afghans don’t clean up their act, “the question of an early withdrawal of the French army would arise,” Sarkiozy said.
The attack on the French was the fourth in three weeks on NATO troops by a member of the ANA (Afghan National Army) or possibly a Taliban infiltrator wearing a uniform.
On Christmas Eve, an Afghan soldier on patrol with U.S. troops opened fire on them in Farah province. The Afghan was shot dead and none of the Americans was injured.
Two French Foreign Legionnaires were killed by an Afghan soldier on Dec. 29, and Army PFC Dustin Napier, 20, of London, Ky., was killed on Jan. 8 and two other U.S. troops were wounded as they played volleyball in south-central Zabul province by a man wearing an Afghan army uniform. The Afghan was immediately shot dead by other American troops.
At the Pentagon, Navy Capt. John Kirby said green-on-blue attacks “do appear to be increasing in frequency in recent months. What we cannot discern is a cause for that.”
Kirby echoed comments from the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, saying “We also don’t believe this is an endemic or systematic problem.” But “I certainly can’t walk away from the fact that they’re increasing,” Kirby said.
There have been no reported instances of unprovoked killings of Afghan soldiers by coaltion troops, but more than 50 U.S. and allied troops have been killed by Afghans in uniform since October 2009.
Other allies have also questioned the value of remaining in Afghanistan when the troops they train to fight the enemy turn into enemies themselves. Four Australian troops have been killed and 10 wounded by Afghan soldiers since last May and Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the deaths “raise many deep and troubling questions in the minds of many” in Australia, where support for the war is crumbling.
The report on Afghan troops going rogue, titled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility,” was based on hundreds of blunt interviews with Afghan and U.S. troops.
The U.S. troops accused their nominal allies of “pervasive illicit drug use, massive thievery, personal instability, dishonesty, no integrity, incompetence, unsafe weapon handling, corrupt officers, no real NCO (non-commissioned officer) corps, covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents, high AWOL rates, bad morale, laziness, repulsive hygiene and the torture of dogs.”
The Afghans were equally derogatory in rating the Americans, saying they were outraged by abusive behavior in raids on Afghan homes and by the U.S. troops “urinating in public, their cursing at, insulting and being rude and vulgar to ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) members, and unnecessarily shooting animals”.
ISAF officials in kabul quicly began pushing back against the report, the Guardian newspaper reported. The officials said the study was produced by an outside contractor and was not endorsed by ISAF.
The officials said the report “suffered from irrelevant generalizations, narrow sample sets, unprofessional rhetoric and sensationalism”
(Photo: Afghan forces on patrol under guidance of U.S. mentor. Defense Department photo.)
