Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Uh-oh, we got an echo on the line.
Our guest is Brian Cluffley.
Can you hear me, Brian?
Yes, I can hear you loud and clear.
Brian Cluffley lives in France.
He's Australian.
He writes for Jane's Sentinel.
And he's got a piece at Counter Punch called Training the Afghan Army.
First of all, sir, could you please comment on the terrible massacre, supposedly a rogue massacre of a single soldier who had a breakdown.
Maybe remind the audience, if they missed it, what happened, and talk about what you think the reaction will be in Afghanistan, what it'll mean for the future of the mission there.
Right.
One has to be sorry for the people who were killed and their relatives, naturally.
One has also to be sorry for this man who appears to have been deranged.
In the early hours of yesterday morning, around about 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning Afghanistan time, he left his compound.
Now, of course, this gives rise to a question as to how on earth an armed soldier can go out for a walk at 3 o'clock in the morning without being challenged, but that's another matter to be found out by the authorities.
And he went to a local village not far away and killed some 16 people, of whom we think 9, perhaps, were children.
Now, passing over, if one can pass over, the tragedy that that was, one has to think about the wider implications, and it couldn't have happened, of course, at a worse time for relations between the United States or indeed foreigners in general and Afghanistan, be that the government of Afghanistan, which doesn't really represent the people, or the people of Afghanistan, or the Taliban who are standing in the wings ready to take over.
Whenever that may be convenient, whenever foreign troops leave, of course, the present government will fall.
So the implications are in the long term that even more damage has been done to relations, but right now, of course, everyone is hunkering down and waiting for the reaction on the part of the Afghan people and, of course, by the militants, and who knows what that will be.
Well, and Kabul has been in a state of riot over the most recent desecrations of the Koran, of course.
But I actually wanted to get, if we could, to the of course that you threw in there, that of course, without NATO, what is now the so-called government of Afghanistan will fall and be replaced immediately by those we call the Taliban insurgency, as just a matter of fact.
Is it that simple and to the point?
It's not, no, I fear it's not that simple because Afghanistan is not a simple country.
Well, of course, no country is a simple country.
But in Afghanistan you have got the warlords, you have got the drug barons, you have got the people in power in Kabul, and you have the Taliban, and you have the tribes who aren't necessarily Taliban, of course, they just want to be left alone to get on with their lives.
Now, when the foreign troops disappear, there will be no stability in Kabul, and it is more than likely that it will be a rerun of when the Russians left after their occupation, and eventually the country dissolved into anarchy, more or less a civil war.
And I fear that's what's going to happen next time, not that I am a supporter of foreign occupation of Afghanistan.
It should never have happened in the first place.
Right, yeah, just on the details, not necessarily the morality of it or anything, but in the Iraq war there was a time where it seemed like, hey, years of this, and they're completely failing to train up the Iraqi army, and this just can't work.
And then it turned out, yeah, they could, and they pretty much made the Mahdi army and the Bata brigade into the Iraqi army, and America bought them all the same kind of green uniform or whatever to wear, and now they're Maliki's army.
It sort of worked.
Is it impossible to work the same way in Afghanistan?
Yes, I'm afraid so.
There are decided differences between the two countries and instances in Afghanistan.
The training system has been so badly managed from square one that the only thing to do would be to start over.
The trouble is there isn't time to start over.
It's such a shambles.
It beggars description.
To think that you can train a soldier in eight weeks and then send them out in the field is absurd, to put it mildly.
It's a long-term process.
It takes a lot of very, very hard work, and it's got to be done by trained trainers, and this hasn't been happening.
Therefore, the state of the Afghan army is abysmal.
Now, this isn't to say there aren't some excellent individuals and leaders and lead in the Afghan army.
It's just that they're really up against it in a big way.
The training system does not work.
Well, it's surprising that the Afghans would need any training.
They're Afghans.
Don't they already know how to fight?
Yes, they do.
By Jove, I wouldn't like to be up against a bunch of Afghans, equal for equal, as it were, because they are very, very sharp soldiers indeed.
But there's more to it than that when you're fighting a modern war against a very skilled, irregular militant opponent.
You've got to be able to fight in units, not just in small penny packets of raiding parties, which is exactly what the army and the foreigners, of course, are up against.
The sophistication of the foreign forces in Afghanistan is just amazing.
The gadgetry, the weaponry that they have is staggering.
And they are, at the moment, on the back foot.
What's going to happen to an Afghan army that isn't going to have anything like the equipment and training that the foreign forces have?
One difference, too, I guess, would be that in the Iraq war, they were fighting for the majority, and it was a long and bloody battle to complete the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad, kick all the Sunnis out and make it an 85% Shiite city.
But when they were done, they were done.
Whereas here, we're fighting for a minority that will always need us.
A minority that will always need us.
That's not exactly democracy, of course.
No, not exactly.
Although, maybe it is.
But the government in Kabul can hardly be declared or claimed to be representative of the people of Afghanistan.
I mean, it's absurd to even think about that.
It isn't.
And, of course, it's almost entirely corrupt.
Which is, to put it mildly, regrettable.
They will fight as hard as they can, of course.
But I think a lot of them, at the first sign of trouble, will be on the plane to Dubai with a few million more dollars in their suitcases.
All right, y'all.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Brian Cluffley.
He writes for one of the Jane's magazines.
I forget.
There's a lot of different ones.
And he's got a piece at Counterpunch called System Failure, Training the Afghan Army.
Counterpunch.org.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I was reading this article, Training the Afghan Army.
It's by Brian Cluffley at Counterpunch.org.
System Failure.
And he writes also for Jane's Sentinel.
I'd never heard of that one before.
But, okay.
And the story is that our guest, Brian, has experience training an army.
Actually, he says in the article, or I guess, sir, you say in the article, when you got home to Australia from Vietnam, you were put in charge of training a bunch of guys.
So you happen to know what it means to put together an army.
And you happen to know that that's not what is going on in Afghanistan.
Could you elaborate about that a little bit for us, please?
Well, it's quite simple.
When I got back from Vietnam, I was given what was laughably called a rest posting, which meant getting up at 5 o'clock every morning to go on an early morning run with the soldiers, amongst other things, and working extremely hard to train hundreds of soldiers.
Because at that time, we had, of course, conscription in Australia, just as there was in the States.
And it was a very, very hard job.
It was tough, but I had some superb instructors, really professional guys in my company.
Not only that, of course, the advantages were that we all spoke the same language.
Now, this doesn't happen in Afghanistan, of course, because there are many languages and dialects.
Everyone was literate.
All the recruits were literate.
Well, in Afghanistan, in the Afghan army recruiting system, you hear various claims about literacy, but at the most it would be 25%.
After all, that's about the literacy rate for the entire country.
And there are many, many other differences between a conventional Western military training system and the problems that are being faced in Afghanistan.
It hadn't been thought through.
It wasn't planned properly by the foreign nations who undertook training.
And consequently, we are left with chaos.
Well, does it make sense that maybe the policy, and I don't want to be too conspiratorial about it, but maybe the policy is not really to win there.
I mean, what are they trying to do, create a Western European, Westphalian nation state?
Maybe they just want to fight forever.
Oh, I don't.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I think they genuinely, the foreign forces, I think genuinely want to train the Afghan army to be as efficient as a Western military would be, or is indeed.
But that's just not possible, given the lack of system and the circumstances that appertain in Afghanistan now.
As I said earlier, it would be great to be able to start over, but it's too late to do that.
All they can do is stumble along, churn out soldiers, and try to reach the target figures.
And that's no way to train an army.
Well, now, I hate to admit that this is true, but I think that this is really true.
In America, if there's an anti-war narrative at all, it now belongs to war pigs, like Newt Gingrich.
Sorry, but that's pretty much the only thing you can say about the guy, I think.
And the narrative is, well, maybe these good-for-nothing Afghans just aren't grateful enough for all of the sacrificing we've done for them, and maybe we're just too good to help them anymore.
Seems like that might be the only anti-war argument that could possibly win around here.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe we should all get on board for that one.
Look, the Afghans didn't want us in there to begin with.
No Afghan asked the armies of the West to come in and take over their country.
It just doesn't stand up.
What all the Afghans want to do is to be left to carry on in their own way.
Now, the problem is, their way is not our way.
And their way is pretty chaotic.
In fact, totally chaotic.
The rights of women are just unbelievable.
The lack of rights of women, for example, are just unbelievable.
And they're not acceptable to us.
But who are we to stop preaching to everyone around the world?
And we've got ourselves in a real mess in Afghanistan, and I don't know how we're going to get out of it.
Yeah.
It really is amazing to read in your article just about the discrepancy in command structure of the NATO forces, where they don't even have one policy.
Never mind, you know, having the people that they're training up being from even compatible tribal groups or whatever.
But the different tribes in NATO, they can't get along either to even decide what they're doing.
Well, exactly.
In fact, it was put...
I haven't been in Afghanistan for, what, four years now.
But it was put to me by one Afghan who was asked, were these troops Canadian or British or American?
And he looked and he said, listen, you can't tell our tribes, one from the other, how the hell do you think...
Or as a matter of fact, can we tell yours?
They've got no idea who is doing what in their own country.
The whole thing is so chaotic, it's almost unbelievable.
But the foreign forces, they don't have the same rules of engagement.
And of course, they keep their rules of engagement secret, but naturally I've got a lot of old friends around the place, and I've found out the various rules of engagement.
And they are different.
But you can't have that.
You can't have 10,000 troops with one lot of rules of engagement, 20,000 with another, and so on.
It's not military.
It's not how you win wars.
Well, so now they say that they're not giving up.
2014 is just the beginning of the end, something like that.
What do you think?
How long is this going to last?
And very quickly, I'm sorry, we're right out of time here.
Okay, well, I was asked a few years ago at the Royal United States Institute in London how long it would last and how many people it would take.
And I said, you can put in half a million people and it would still last forever.
So, that's the end of that.
Well, but they could, I mean, the American, until the dollar breaks, the United States can continue to send men and firepower there, and they can't really be forced out.
No, they can't be forced out.
It's going to be Americans who are going to, the American public are going to force the troops out.
What's the point in losing all these young lives?
Just have a look at the casualties on ICasualties.org and see the ages of these kids.
It is disgusting.
Well, only if we could define our leaving as a victory the way they pretended and got away with saying that losing Iraq was a victory just a few months back, a couple of months ago, then maybe we could end it.
Yep.
Declare victory, come home, wipe the hands and say, okay, we're going to start over.
All right, thanks very much for your time, and it's a really great article here at Counterpunch, Training the Afghan Army at Counterpunch.org.
Brian Cluffley from Jane's Sentinel, thank you very much.
Thank you, goodbye.
