The Taliban in 2001 was famously suspicious of television cameras. The Taliban of 2009? They have press secretaries, one of whom—described as the “chief spokesman of the Taliban in Swat” was recently arrested.

Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, has a magazine empire. The al-Qaeda of 2001 now has splintered into various divisions, and each one has its own media outreach, according to Gregory Johnsen, a former Fulbright Fellow in Yemen and currently a PhD candidate at Princeton. He tracks Yemen on the blog Waq al-Waq but points out that even al-Shabaab in Somalia has media productions and spokesmen.

Johnsen translated the latest issue (the 11th) of Sada al-Malahim (The Echo of Battles). The magazine is published online by the recently merged al-Qaeda in Yemen and al-Qaeda Arabian Penninsula.

But who did the cover shoot?

Now, you might be asking yourself, “What would be in such a magazine?” Sure, the cover features a grenade in the background and a beaker filled with liquid in front of it. But there are publication staples like a front-of-the-magazine piece (this one by the leader of AQY/AQAP, Nasir al-Wahayshi), congratulatory notices (for weddings and suicide bombs) and a women’s column (describing how to support your jihad man). There’s no advertising, like we would think of, although there is an editorial e-mail.

But primarily the magazine is concerned with theological and legal reasons to explain AQ’s actions. “They have their target market,” Johnsen says, “mostly in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. And they’ve done a very good job in Yemen creating a narrative.”

According to Johnsen, the magazine is most useful as a gauge for what’s happening within the organization. And the article that struck Johnsen most was an anti-Shia screed (“The Apostates: Stages of Confrontation”) by a former Guantanamo Bay detainee named Ibrahim al-Rubaysh.

“Yemen and Saudi Arabia are very different,” Johnsen says. “Anti-Shia [writings] are not common in Yemen, and a growing anti-Shia rhetoric suggests a much more Saudi influence. Whether this means the beginning of a trend or it’s a one-off is impossible to tell.”

But something to watch, especially as Yemen teeters on.

–Michele Mitchell

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.

Three years after our first trip to Afghanistan the country is spinning out of control. What are the candidates going to do to stabilize the region after seven years?

So who is going to work with us to keep Afghanistan from sliding into chaos?  And who should we be talking to?