http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090914/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_training_the_army

is a link. Summarizing: they say that 90 percent of the Afghan army cannot read, even many of the officers. So they can’t read maps or directions. They do mention Sen Levin and say that the Afghan Army faces a lot of challenges. So we better count on staying there and doing most of the actual work.

Sigh.

Afghanistan raise an actual army right now? Yeah, right. Even if you could get the amount of personnel needed to form up to 3 battalions from opium pickers and farmers, how many of those under paid,under fed, and under educated people are you going to have loyal to your battalions when the day is done? Remember these guys love to switch sides when approached by the highest bidder. Now, do not get me wrong, but the military has the same problem that Karzi has… loyalty to the highest bidder. And when you have the kind of problems the United States and NATO has of “winning the hearts and minds” there is no way you can field an army in a seizable time frame.

Levin old buddy…lets cut the crap, shut your mouth, and speak intelligibly. Lets let the military fight the war,and keep our big mouth shut. I am pretty sure the military knows what it needs to fight a war properly.

When someone says that the Afghans need to more than double the numbers of the Afghan Army and police, I wonder where the simple stuff such as uniforms, radios, vehicles, etc will come from?? Where will those folks have offices and barracks and chow halls?? Afghanistan doesn’t have a lot of empty buildings, and they can do some training under trees, but they have a real winter there!

So it is easy to declare that this MUST be done, but I even question if Afghanistan has the available people. To put a tribesman into an Army, you have to build them up so they can handle the task. They may be wiry and tough, but subsistence farmers can’t pick up a heavy pack and move forward into combat. They can spend all day harvesting opium — but carrying a load and working as a team is not what they know how to do.

Even in the US, where we have lots of available people and lots of logistics, adding another brigade takes time. Of course we have a lot of overhead that Afghanistan does not have, but we have a lot of advantages as well.

So, Sen Levin can say that we MUST and they SHOULD all he wants, but he does not have to get out there and try to get some enthusiastic heroin dealers to leave their villages and start acting like an army.