The Foreign Service Journal, December 2014

30 DECEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL leadership are the Achilles’ heel of the Afghan forces now ghting bravely and successfully to defend their country. ese weaknesses will not lead to a near-term dissolution of the Afghan military; we have done a good enough job for the Afghan forces to survive for at least several years. But our origi- nal plans never envisioned a complete U.S. pullout by 2016, as is now projected, and did not account for the continued strong support the Taliban is getting from inside Pakistan. Over the longer term, without our technical assistance and support, the Afghan Security Forces will deteriorate from an e ective national defense force into fragmented, abusive units that threaten the success of everything the Afghan people have achieved. Toward that end, we should carry out an immedi- ate review to identify what capabilities and equipment Afghan forces need for the actual threats they will face in coming years. 3. Change the way we provide assistance to Afghanistan to focus on direct aid to Afghan institutions. Pres. Ghani, who has worked at the World Bank and was the rst post-Taliban nance minister of Afghanistan, is intimately familiar with the way international assistance has traditionally been delivered and the problems created when it is done the wrong way. His 2008 book (co-authored with Clare Lockhart), Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World , explains that giving aid directly to foreign governments, even taking into account corruption and other risks, is often more e ective than funneling it through expensive third-party organizations. In most cases, nongovernmental organiza- tions excel at delivering material and issuing reports, but do not foster the local institutional capacities necessary to work assistance givers out of their jobs. We need to consult and cooperate with Pres. Ghani’s government to put these lessons into practice. is will be hard and will require cooperation from our Congress and our bureaucracies in ways they have not done before. But we have a historic opportunity to make our aid truly e ective. 4. Develop mechanisms to right the wrongs we in icted in the name of counterterrorism. Particularly during our early years in Afghanistan, when our strategy centered on bombing and conducting “in-and- out” special forces raids, we routinely killed noncombatants; needlessly injured, imprisoned and humiliated many Afghans; and damaged homes, businesses and the very fabric of society in ways we still don’t understand very well. More recently, especially when General Stanley McChrystal was in command there, we reversed many of these practices Afghan National Army commandos stand in formation during the graduation of the ANA’s 7th Commando Kandak on Jan. 21. The commandos were trained by Afghan instructors and mentored by U.S., French, Canadian, Jordanian and United Arab Emirates special operations forces to provide a rapidly deployable light infantry unit to the Afghan National Security Force. ISAF Joint Command /U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Logan Tuttle