When President Obama announced that he intends to ‘finish the job’ in Afghanistan, I wondered exactly what job he was referring to; finding Osama bin Laden? Denying al-Qaeda a safe haven? Democratization? Promoting women’s rights? Curtailing the opium trade? All have been cited over the past eight years as reasons for staying in Afghanistan.

With public support eroding by the day, fighting al-Qaeda now tops the list of excuses. In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown is telling us we must stay the course in Afghanistan to keep our streets safe. Tenuous connections between Afghanistan and home grown terrorists aside, it is clear that from Washington to Whitehall there is a concerted effort afoot to buy time for the coalition to achieve an honourable exit.

NATO's Road to Nowhere

34,000 additional troops for Afghanistan – that’s what media reports are suggesting ahead of President Obama’s official announcement. It doesn’t matter if it’s 3,400, 34,000, or 40,000 plus troops; in my view, the situation in Afghanistan is no longer salvageable. As far back as early 2006 I was arguing that a tipping point had been reached. That year, British and Canadian forces were dispatched to Helmund and Kandahar to battle a resurgent Taliban. It was abundantly clear even then that more troops were needed to dominate the ground, but with so many NATO countries refusing to deploy to hard areas, there weren’t enough willing to do the job. Instead of demanding more support, NATO commanders bowed to political pressure. If there’s one thing I learned during my twenty-three years as a soldier, it’s that Generals who drop their pants for politicians lose military campaigns.

Earlier this year, I wrote in The Circuit that Afghanistan had passed the point of no return and that all out civil war is inevitable. I still stand by that assessment. Discord between the Pashtoon and the Northern Alliance is as strong as ever. The West can send more troops, swell Afghanistan’s security forces and press President Karzai to clean up his government but what will all this achieve in the long run? Most Afghans have lost faith in the coalition and Karzai. NATO countries can ill afford to keep pumping money into the military effort (money which in Britain’s case would be better spent fighting terrorism at home). The Pashtoon insurgency shows no signs of abating and as I’ve argued before, there is nothing to stop NATO-trained Afghan forces from joining the opposition when the West does finally leave.

What is the point of sacrificing more blood and treasure to what has become an unwinnable campaign? The bottom line is US and NATO forces need to pull out now. It may sound callous, but only the Afghans can sort themselves out.

It’s understandable that western leaders are keen to show they’ve achieved something worthwhile in Afghanistan, if for any reason than to justify the deaths of so many brave, young soldiers. Instead of flannel about al-Qaeda posing a threat to our streets, coalition countries would do well to focus on another unfinished job relating to Afghanistan – tracking and capturing Osama bin Laden ( if indeed he is alive and in the region). It would not require a prolonged troop commitment; just good human intelligence followed by a clinical drone air strike (which have been very effective at eliminating al-Qaeda leaders in recent months). Taking out bin Laden would be a concrete achievement. Besides, wasn’t he the reason the West invaded Afghanistan in the first place?

Bob Shepherd is an ex-SAS soldier and best-selling author of The Circuit. To read more blogs, please visit: www.bobshepherdauthor.com

Part II

When NATO military officials meet in Brussels later this month, they will be asked to contribute more resources to step up the training and expansion of Afghanistan’s security forces. In the second instalment of this two part series, Bob Shepherd, ex-SAS soldier and best-selling author of The Circuit examines how politically motivated recruitment and training schedules compromise the safety of coalition soldiers and threaten to undermine the justification for the war in Afghanistan; containing the threat from al-Qaeda.

Rapidly accelerating the expansion of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police is understandably attractive to western military and political leaders sick fed up with explaining mounting war causalities to an increasingly sceptical public. But what looks good on paper has already proved tragically short-sighted in practice.

In Part I of this series, I explained how poor recruit-to-mentor ratios severely diminish the efficacy of ANA training packages. But of all the deficiencies surrounding the development of Afghanistan’s security forces, none has more far reaching consequences in my view than the failure to adequately vet recruits.  The importance of due diligence on ANA and ANP recruits cannot be overstated. Without proper checks, Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathisers and other undesirables can infiltrate training programs, gain valuable intelligence and even target coalition troops directly.  Tragically, this issue received long overdue scrutiny when five British soldiers were killed by a ‘rogue’ ANP trainee earlier this month.

ANA Recruits: What are we doing?

Investigations into the shootings are ongoing but there’s little doubt in my mind that the drive to fill recruitment quotas and meet unrealistic training deadlines played a role. You only have to look at ANA training schedules to see that politics is taking precedent over military best practice when it comes to ramping up Afghanistan’s security forces. ANA recruits are given ten weeks of basic or ‘warrior’ training. NATO is quick to point out that this is the same amount given to US infantry soldiers in Fort Benning, GA, USA. The comparison is highly misleading in my opinion. Unlike the majority of US military recruits, the vast majority of Afghan security trainees are illiterate and do not speak the same language as the NATO mentors overseeing their instruction. As a seasoned commercial security trainer in hostile environments and former military instructor, I’ve seen forty minute lessons stretch into two hour marathons when a translator is thrown into the mix. NATO’s training schedules make no allowances for this; otherwise ANA warrior training would be well over ten weeks.

Politics would also appear to be trumping best practice in NATO’s ANP policies. Afghan National Police are often assigned to serve in their own communities. This is not the case with ANA soldiers who are deployed outside their home provinces far from the reach of tribal affiliations. In fact, tribal links are viewed as so insurmountable that the ANA doesn’t recruit soldiers from Taliban strongholds such as Helmund and Kandahar provinces. Yet NATO is content to recruit police from Taliban areas.

Beyond the immediate threat posed by possible Taliban infiltration of NATO mentored training programs is the disturbing question of what will happen when coalition forces do finally pull out of Afghanistan. How many dodgy Afghan recruits will transfer their NATO taught skills, not to mention a good deal of NATO weapons and equipment to the Taliban and al-Qaeda? Rather than attempt to step up training schedules, NATO would be wise to take a step back and examine the potential fallout of its current Afghan policies.

For more blogs by Bob Shepherd visit www.bobshepherdauthor.com.

Part 1

When NATO military officials meet in Brussels later this month, they will be asked to contribute more resources to accelerate the training and expansion of Afghan security forces. In the first of this two part series, Bob Shepherd, ex-SAS Soldier and best-selling author of The Circuit offers a sobering reality check on the efficacy of NATO’s mentoring programs and what it means for western exit strategies.

Since 2004, I’ve had occasion to see Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police training programs in action. I’ve shared live fire ranges and training areas with ANA and ANP recruits and accompanied journalists doing stories on security sector reform. What I’ve witnessed has convinced me that in its present form, NATO’s mentoring of Afghanistan’s security forces is at best woefully inadequate and at worst, dangerously short-sighted.

One problem which I’ve seen time and again with ANA training programs is poor instructor to student ratios. In order to achieve an effective training package, there should ideally be one seasoned instructor to every dozen recruits. In April this year, I watched a single NATO mentor give two hundred ANA trainees a lesson on how to strip and assemble an M 16 rifle. The recruits were sat in semi-circular rows stretching the length of the Kabul Military Training Center parade square. As some parts on the M 16 are tiny, it was clear to me that only the trainees positioned front and centre had a clue what they were being taught. The rest were talking to each other or nodding off in the hot afternoon sun. Over the years, I’ve seen identical lessons at the KMTC with the same distorted mentor/recruit ratio; the only difference was prior to 2009, the trainees worked with AK 47s.

ANA Recruits at the KMTC: Does The Instructor Have Everyone's Attention?

Live fire exercises are another area where a scarcity of NATO mentors can render a lesson pointless. I’ve watched fifty ANA recruits lying in the prone position, firing at targets which most of them missed (I could see the rounds striking the ground in front and to the side of them). The recruits received virtually no coaching during the exercise. The few NATO mentors on hand were too busy trying to keep them from hurting themselves or each other. The mentors didn’t check the targets at the end of the exercise because the tight training schedule didn’t allow it. The recruits had to be rushed off the range to make way for another group of trainees. In my view, they learned nothing aside from how to convert live rounds into empty casings.

In light of such episodes, the idea that Afghan forces will be ready to take over from NATO troops in the next few years is nothing short of absurd. Yet it remains a cornerstone of western exit strategies from Afghanistan. Next week, in Part II of this series, I’ll examine how the drive to step-up recruitment and training of ANA and ANP compromises the safety of coalition forces and risks undermining the justification for the war in Afghanistan; containing the threat from al-Qaeda.

For more blogs by Bob Shepherd visit www.bobshepherdauthor.com.

We have our first guest blogger today in Bob Shepherd, who has frequently appeared on Film@11 shows like “Common Sense.” Shepherd is, hands down, one of the savviest people when it comes to Afghanistan. He has traveled throughout the country many times over the last five years, providing security for journalists and dignitaries. He is considered one of the best in the security business – something he describes in his excellent book The Circuit, which takes a critical look at the lucrative military contractor world. And he is also a marvelous photographer (you can see some of his work here), SAS veteran and proud Scotsman.

Shepherd recently launched his own blog, http://www.bobshepherdauthor.com, which we are very pleased to feature as our first “Blog We Like.” Anyone interested in Afghanistan should make it a required reading stop.

Bob Shepherd, on the scene

The Taliban must have been rubbing their hands when the White House and Downing Street congratulated Hamid Karzai on his default Presidential victory. ‘What is astonishing is two weeks ago they were arguing that the puppet President Hamid Karzai was involved in electoral fraud,’ said a Taliban statement, ‘… but now he is elected as President based on those same fraudulent votes, Washington and London immediately send their congratulations.’

The West’s hypocrisy is nothing exceptional in Afghanistan. As a matter of necessity, Afghans always back the winning side. Thirty-five years of civil war have taught them to value survival over political principals. I know one Afghan who jumped from the Soviet Army to the Mujahudeen in the 1980s. When the Taliban came to power, he joined them. When they were ousted, he went to work as an interpreter for the US military. Basically, whoever has the upper hand in Afghanistan has his support.

Through my work as a security advisor to the media in Afghanistan, I’ve met Karzai five times. He’s no different than the majority of his countrymen. Educated or illiterate, Afghans can run rings around the average westerner when it comes to surviving. Karzai has kept the West’s backing in part because he is a puppet, but mostly because he’s left them no alternative. For eight years he’s done what is necessary to rein in potential rivals. Appointing warlords and drugs traffickers to ministries is one example (better to have them in government than on a battlefield). Rigging elections is another.

As a retired member of the British military, I am sickened and outraged that British troops were maimed and killed securing polling stations for a sham election in an inherently corrupt political system. Now, the White House is deciding whether to commit 40,000 additional troops to a campaign that has and will in all likelihood continue to make a mockery of the ideals the US and NATO are fighting to promote. I understand why General Stanley McChrystal is asking for more boots on the ground. He wants to prevail. That said, in my view, more troops will not achieve this. Sending more soldiers to Afghanistan will only result in more coalition and civilian deaths.

As the former Soviet Union learned all too well, troop deployments are no silver bullet. At the height of its ten-year occupation, the Kremlin had approximately 120,000 troops in Afghanistan. By the end of this year, the US and NATO will have approximately 108,000. If Obama grants McCrystal’s request, the coalition will definitely surpass the Soviet campaign in boots on the ground.

The Soviets finally tired of sacrificing soldiers to the futile task of trying to convert Afghans to a system of government they didn’t want or respect. They are the biggest failures in Afghanistan in modern times. If the US insists on committing more troops to the conflict, the coalition could very well usurp that title.

- Bob Shepherd

The Times of London is sticking by its story that Italy paid bribes to the Taliban in the Sarobi area, east of Kabul, last year while on patrol. The French took over the territory believing it was relatively quiet, and within a month suffered 10 casualties and 21 injuries.

Both the French military and the Italian government deny the report, but surely this won’t make those NATO meetings very pleasant. There was already discord among the NATO countries regarding duty in Afghanistan–we saw it firsthand in 2005, when the situation was relatively good–and although not necessarily related to the Times report, French president Nicholas Sarkozy is refusing to increase the Gallic contingent.

Great Britain, however, is–500 additional soldiers to its approximately 8,300. And Bob Shepherd, a SAS veteran and security contractor who has traveled through most of Afghanistan between 2004-2009, believes this is flawed.

“You could put 40,000 in Helmund alone and it won’t make a difference,” he said. “It’s just going to mean more deaths to soldiers and more money, and right now we can’t afford it. Britain is about to implode–I don’t know how you (in the U.S.) are doing, but we can’t afford to bethere.”

As for the potential to pay off the Taliban, Shepherd points out that “Mullah Omar and his people won’t negotiate with the U.S. and coalition forces, but the people below him will, as long as they get paid something. Forget a surge (like in Iraq)–you have to pay money and a lot, but the question is, how are you going to get it together, and how long are you going to do it? We’re all in tough, tough times right now.”

There are settlements and there are settlements. Before I traveled to Israel and the West Bank, I pictured Israeli settlers as fringe Israelis who have set up temporary structures on a hilltop (of the type that international media-savvy Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kindly demolished for the cameras in July 2009). Those do exist. What I wasn’t prepared for was the concrete and asphalt, the well-maintained streets, schools, shopping centers and synagogues. They are full-fledged towns.

At the same time, Netanyahu has made it clear that he’s not about to get serious about dismantling anything anytime soon, either, despite President Obama’s repeated demands that he do just that. This attitude is in apparent opposition to Israeli law which prohibits Israelis from entering certain areas of the West Bank entirely: areas like Hebron, where a large red sign at the city limits spelled out, in Hebrew, Arabic and English, that Israelis were barred from entry except to visit the synagogue.

Unsurprisingly, the settlers don’t like this, and they’re not afraid to show it. Near the entrance to one of the main settlements we noticed a poster that depicted Obama in a keffiyeh and proclaimed him an “Anti-Semitic Jew Hater”.

There is enough such distrust and nastiness on all sides to make logical people simply walk away, and it permeates at all levels. When I arrived in Tel Aviv, a three year old Algerian stamp in my passport meant that I was detained and questioned for fifteen minutes by Israeli authorities. My colleague, Michele, who had collected stamps from old favorites like Lebanon, Libya and Afghanistan, spent four hours in their care.

Even in the West Bank we ran into trouble. We’d heard that a major Israeli checkpoint had been removed outside the town of Jericho, and went to have a look. The checkpoint was indeed gone, replaced by Palestinian soldiers, who demanded to see Michele’s passport and know what she was up to: her looks had apparently convinced them she was Israeli. Her New York driver’s license didn’t seem to help.

Eventually we made it to Jericho and took refuge from the heat in a breezy coffee shop. Over cups of thick, cardamom laced coffee, we reflected that the bulk of the money to build the settlements has come from private donations, and most of these donors are Jewish organizations based in – wait for it – New York City. For example, the Hebron Fund is located about eight miles from Film@11’s Brooklyn office.

As I reviewed footage I shot of trash-strewn nets hung above Hebron’s market streets to protect them from the settlers, and of a Palestinian house burned by settlers who wanted the residents gone, I had to wonder, what kind of people are these?

- Ned Thorne

On Friday, “NOW” on PBS ran an excerpt of a film the talented Michal Zilberman did. We were delighted to read the responses on the “NOW” message boards, where we found ourselves to be beloved.

What’s our response to the response? Check out our new episode of “Political Graffiti,” where we start with Gaza and finish with the West Bank settlements.

Coffee in Hebron with Wahid

President Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al-Arabiya TV outlining, in broadest terms, the administration’s goal to revamp relations with the Middle East.  He told Hisham Melhem: “We are ready to enter initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest.”

One mutual interest in the region: a stabilized Afghanistan.  We spoke with our favorite Afghanistan expert, and Council on Foreign Relations connection, Elizabeth Rubin.  She explained how we are not going to fix Afghanistan without the help of a former ally in the region.  So we’ll have to fix that relationship before they will help us.  And they are not going to make it easy.

More from our interview with Elizabeth Rubin, our favorite Afghanistan expert from the Council on Foreign Relations.

In this excerpt, she breaks down who The Taliban are, who they were when we first started fighting them, and who they are turning into, and who they are not.

The White House website is spelling out the new administration’s agenda on a dedicated page.  The only country referred to by name on the list of new policies is Iraq.  Where’s Afghanistan?  Throughout the campaign promises to end the war in Iraq went hand in hand with refocusing on Afghanistan.  Afghanistan policy appears at the top the Foreign Policy page as “Afghanistan and Pakistan” with the pledge to commit more troops to stabilizing Afghanistan.

Elizabeth Rubin from the Council on Foreign Relations spoke with Film at 11 during the campaign and gave her assessment of the original military commitment to Afghanistan and the fight against the Taliban and how that all worked out.