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The World
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SUNDAY, MAY 30, 2010
Training of Afghan military, police more on target
Beefed-up program puts forces ‘on path’ to hit goals, report says
by Greg Jaffe
A U.S. military review in Af- ghanistan has concluded that the addition of more than 1,000 new U.S. military and NATO troops fo- cused on training has helped sta- bilize what had been a failing ef- fort to build Afghanistan’s securi- ty forces, but that persistent attrition problems could still hin- der long-term success. “We are finally getting the re- sources, the people and money,” said Army Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who heads the NATO training effort in Afghanistan and oversaw the review of his com- mand’s past 180 days. “We are moving in the right direction.” U.S. war plans depend on Af- ghan forces maintaining security
in areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the U.S. mili- tary is adding 30,000 troops this summer. More broadly, the Oba- ma administration’s counter- insurgency strategy places a heavy emphasis on an expansion of the Afghan security forces be- fore the United States begins to withdraw troops in July 2011. Caldwell’s report card on the
training effort, which The Wash- ington Post obtained in advance and is expected to be released within the next couple of days, paints a mixed picture. On the plus side, new money
for pay raises has helped boost a recruiting situation that was so dire last fall the Afghan army was shrinking. The progress has bol- stered expectations that the Af- ghans will meet the Obama ad- ministration’s goals of expanding the size of the police force to 109,000 officers and the army to 134,000 soldiers by the fall. For the first time in years, the Afghan forces are “currently on
path” to meet the ambitious growth targets, the assessment states. It isn’t yet clear how well those forces will perform once they are in the field, which is the most important measure of suc- cess, Caldwell said.
Still, thousands of additional
U.S. and NATO soldiers have ar- rived in Afghanistan in recent months, leading to a vast im- provement in the ratio of recruits to trainers at the Afghan training bases. Today, there is about one trainer for every 29 or so recruits. “In some areas last fall, we had
one trainer for every 466 recruits,” Caldwell said. “When you have that kind of ratio, it means that people aren’t receiving any train- ing.” The additional trainers have helped double the number of new Afghan soldiers who meet the minimum marksmanship stan- dards by the end of basic training, the report states, although it is still lower than U.S. commanders would like. About 65 percent of
the graduates passed the marks- manship test in May. The number of police recruits enrolled in basic literacy programs has also more than doubled, to 28,000 from about 13,000 last fall.
Despite those improvements, police and army units are still struggling to retain personnel, es- pecially in critical areas where fighting is heavy and the demand for forces the greatest. U.S. and Afghan commanders,
for example, have made signifi- cant use of the Afghan National Civil Order Police, who are more highly trained than the regular police, to hold areas that U.S. troops have cleared of insurgents. In Marja, the site of the largest U.S.-Afghan offensive of the war, the National Civil Order Police moved in shortly after the U.S. and Afghan army push this spring. The assessment found that the
attrition rate in the Civil Order Po- lice is about 70 percent. That’s lower than it was at the end of
2009, the report states, but still “unacceptable and unsustain- able.” The Afghan army has missed its
attrition goals for two of the past four months, a vast improvement over last fall and winter, when the army was consistently failing to meet its targets. Caldwell, how- ever, said attrition still remains too high in the south and east, where Afghan forces are engaged in the heaviest fighting. To fix the problem, U.S. and Af- ghan officials are weighing the possibility of increasing combat pay and giving soldiers a break from battle. “We are working real hard to set up a system to rotate units” out of areas where combat is heaviest, Caldwell said. U.S. commanders have said the
performance of Afghan police and army forces in Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city, is es- sential to the military campaign planned for the area this summer. There are concerns that, as fight- ing with the Taliban increases, re-
cruitment and retention could suffer. To ensure continued progress, the report states that the number of military trainers must continue to grow. “In order to increase the probability of success, additional personnel are required,” the re- port says.
Earlier this spring, the Penta-
gon rushed to fill a near-term training shortage by deploying about a battalion of troops for about three months. Over the lon- ger term, the military is depend- ing on its NATO coalition part- ners to deploy as many as 750 ad- ditional police and army trainers. U.S. officials are cautiously opti- mistic that they will get most of those trainers and that the in- crease in instruction will lead to an overall improvement in the force. “We’re going to start seeing a more professional Afghan force in the field over the next eight to 12 months,” Caldwell said.
jaffeg@washpost.com
Mexican pirates are attacking Americans on a lake along border
pirates from A1
glers is raising already-high tem- peratures along the southwest border. Answering calls for help, President Obama last week or- dered 1,200 National Guard troops to the region. The pirates claim to be “feder-
ales,” or police, but instead are brigands — with the letter “Z” tat- tooed on their necks and arms — from the notorious drug cartel Los Zetas. The Zetas are on a ram- page of killing and extortion along the Mexican border as they fight gun and grenade battles against the military and the rival Gulf Cartel. “Within the last month, with all the feuding going on over there, the dope smuggling has dropped off and it is starving them. This water is Zeta central. They con- trolled the whole lake. They dis- tributed everything. Now they’re desperate and diversifying,” said Jose E. Gonzalez, the second in command of the Border Patrol’s Zapata station, which operates an around-the-clock maritime pa-
trol. At least three armed robberies
have been reported in Mexican waters. The Texas Department of Public Safety put out a warning for people to stay on the U.S. side. On Memorial Day weekend, when 200 bass boats would usually be in town, only two dozen were seen at county ramps Friday afternoon. One group of pirates was savvy enough to demand the memory chip from an angler’s camera, lest they be identified. Another fisher- man told authorities that armed men came roaring toward him. “I saw ’em, and I saw they were ma- chine guns. They were that close, they were 15 yards away from me,” San Antonio bass chaser Richard Drake told a local television sta- tion. “I was scared.”
‘Some bad boys out there’
Last week, Border Patrol agents tried to follow a Mexican boat filled with men wearing ski masks, but it was too fast for the agents and entered Mexican wa- ters, where U.S. law enforcement is forbidden.
Olga Juliana Elizondo, the
mayor of Nueva Guerrero, Mexi- co, said ranchers are harassed on their land, motorboats have dis- appeared, vehicles have been sto- len and tourists have fled. “We hope this ends soon,” she said. “We’ve all heard about the pi-
rates, and we’re all sticking to the American side of the lake, be- cause those are some bad boys out there,” said Dwayne Deets, a fish- erman from Houston who was sliding $50,000 worth of cream- colored bass boat, bristling with sonar and GPS electronics, down a ramp in Zapata. Deets said Texans loved fishing
the Mexican side. It is legal to car- ry a loaded firearm in a boat in Texas, but it is illegal to bring am- munition or weapons into Mexi- co. “I just pray no one gets killed out there,” he said. The International Falcon Res-
ervoir was born in the early 1950s, when engineers erected a dam on the Rio Grande, flooding the banks and inundating towns on both sides. The 98,960-surface- acre impoundment stretches 60
miles and provides for irrigation, power, flood control and recrea- tion in the area. “Until this started, we fished
everywhere, and we never cared about the border, Texas to Mexico. But now? No. Hardly anybody is fishing the Mexico side of the lake,” said Tom Bendele, who with his brother owns the Falcon Lake Tackle shop in Zapata, now serv- ing as the de facto intel center on all things piratical. Out on the water, with a report- er in tow, Tom Bendele pointed out the picket line of 14 large con- crete beacons that mark the inter- national boundary. Some are swimming distance from the Texas shore; others are miles out in the middle of the lake. Bendele ventured up the Rio Salado cove on the Mexican side, where two of the acts of piracy oc- curred. Around the bend, the steeple of the church in Old Guer- rero is now mostly underwater. The shoreline is lonely mesquite brush, dotted by rough fish camps used by Mexicans who string gill nets along their side of the lake,
hauling up tilapia, carp and bass. Though illegal in the United
States, the Mexican netters often cross into the Texas side to fish, playing an endless hide-and-seek with Texas game wardens. Bendele cut off his engine, and
the boat rocked in the cove. “You could see how it would be easy to get jumped in here,” he said. “No- tice you don’t see any Americans.”
‘They watch us’
Out on the water with the U.S. Border Patrol, roaring right down the international boundary line but careful never to cross into Mexico, Gonzalez and a crew pointed out spot after spot where they have intercepted tons of marijuana crossing the lake. The Border Patrol seized 18,000 pounds of marijuana in the lake region last year, worth about $14million at $800 a pound; it will likely confiscate even more this year. “But, man, they are so good at counter-surveillance,” Gonzalez said, describing the lake as kind of a Wild West on the water. “They
watch us, they watch our boats, our cars, our homes. The smug- glers, they know every move we make.” The traffickers cross day and night, driving boats with bales of marijuana right into the back- yards of homes along the lake. They rent cabins at the lakeside state park and stash dope there. The border agents point to a three-story house built like a watchtower on the Mexican shore. The officers frequently see observers with binoculars on the roof. Up and down the lake, net- ting boats are idled. Nobody waves. “We’re telling folks that right
now, Mexico is not safe. Don’t cross, because we can’t go over and help you. It’s just an imagi- nary line, but it’s a line I can’t cross,” said Jake Cawthon, a Texas game warden. He said that any- one fishing the Mexican side these days has “got to have one hand on their fishing pole and the other on their boat keys, ready to haul back home.”
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