Now, the ISAF has been training the ANA for a nearly a decade, and the Taliban is resurgent. There is relative peace in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and in the large western city of Herat, but many of the primarily ethnic Pashtun provinces bordering Pakistan remain contested. Regardless of how well the ISAF and the ANA perform, violent tribal feuding and internecine warfare will remain part of life in large swaths of the country; it is hard to imagine that Afghanistan will ever be fully pacified. Ancient rivalries and alliances are the core of the country’s tribal power structure, and the violent struggle to protect one’s power base is a perpetual endeavor for tribal leaders. The ISAF needs to decide what is an acceptable level of violence — and who should be responsible for containing it.
Whether they fight for the DRA, for the mujaheddin, for warlords against one another’s tribes, for the ANA or for the Taliban, many Afghans fight if they believe they are on the winning side. Some join the Taliban because they remember that the Taliban recently ruled Afghanistan and they believe it will rule again. Some Talibs fight because they believe, wrongly, that the ISAF is a coalition of conquering Christian armies occupying their country and battling their religion and culture. And many Talibs fight because they are very poor and disenfranchised and have nothing to lose.
Our men and women in uniform have performed heroically in Afghanistan, but it is now time for the ANA to be battle-tested on a large scale and to take the lead in fighting this war. Without major victories on the battlefield, and without seizing and holding battle space, the ANA will never attain the confidence and reliability it needs to be a viable force, and it will become more fearful of the al-Qaeda-assisted Taliban, less motivated to fight or even apathetic.
Regardless of whether a cease-fire is eventually realized with so-called moderate Taliban members and peace comes to Afghanistan in the short term, some hardened and irreconcilable elements of the Taliban are likely to fight on. It is likely that a lasting peace will be enforced only at the end of a gun barrel, and a large, empowered and professional ANA must be holding that gun.
Unless the ANA begins controlling territory on its own accord, compiling a winning record without direct ISAF military assistance, it is very possible that it will degrade and fragment after the departure of ISAF combat forces, much as the DRA disintegrated after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. The current civil war with the Taliban would expand, with deserting ANA soldiers fleeing with their ISAF-supplied weapons to join the Taliban or rejoin tribal militias. The ISAF-trained ANA could repeat the Afghan army’s history of collapse, ushering in an era of protracted violence and instability of a magnitude not yet seen in the region.
Michael F. Walker retired last year after three decades in the Central Intelligence Agency, most recently as chief of the Near East and South Asia division from 2007 to 2010. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies.
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