Lots of 'green on blue' attacks.

That's because the coalition keep killing their families.

And no one wants to be called a towel head by their so called friends.

Maybe they made them play AFL, that would drive anyone to go postal.

The Afghani soldiers have a pretty good inkling of what the coalition of the killing think of them, and Muslims in general.

Training Afghani's was always a bad idea and was always going to be a failure.

I feel sorry for the families of the dead soldiers, but when the boys and girls go off to fight terror, it's always a likely possibility.

Ain't no fortunate son's.

FFS, just get out of the place. I don't go tipping our hand in with out allies so recklessly next time.

G Washington, farewell address, 1796:

"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils"

We should never had been there.

My sincere condolences to the families of the brave Australian soldiers serving with our NATO forces in Afghanistan.

I have joined this forum from Scotland to make this post. British and Australian forces are serving with NATO-ISAF in Afghanistan but most of the military and funding comes from our American friends and allies and so I am addressing myself to the leadership role that all partners in this mission might hope from the USA and NATO generally.




The Afghan National Army, the “green” force is rotten, if not to its core then to much of the periphery. Some of the green is more like gangrene (gan-green, get it! )

The problem I see is in the disconnect between the political control (Karzai) and the funding (mostly from the USA but anyway internationally funded).

Quote:


Karzai as the “duly” (ahem) elected president of Afghanistan is perfectly entitled to run an Afghan national army but Afghans should pay for that themselves.

Afghanistan is a poor nation and could not afford that much of an army but if they paid for it themselves, at least the Afghan national army would likely be honest, accountable to Afghans and take on limited tasks – secure the presidential palace, military headquarters and might be up to defending the capital Kabul and surrounding land, maybe.

Now the issue is this – to secure all of Afghanistan, even to secure our supply routes, we need lots of troops and it makes sense to have some kind of Afghan force to help us – but we need a bigger and better green force than the Afghans can afford to pay for. (Also why would a national Afghan force want to prioritise defending our supply routes? They wouldn’t want to.)

So the West, NATO needs to pay for some green Afghan forces – that’s a good idea, if, if, if, if and only if, those green forces we are paying for are auxiliary to NATO-ISAF – run by NATO-ISAF – under the control of a NATO general, maybe an American general if you could find a good one to do it.

That way we would only recruit capable Afghans into the green force we pay for and interact with daily. We’d be sure our green troops were loyal – wouldn’t shoot our blue troops.

No way would we have any incentive to spend our own money on disloyal incapable Afghans in green uniform so we would not do it, if we had political and military control over our green forces, which we would have if they were called “The NATO-ISAF Afghan auxiliary force” – with no pretence of them being an Afghan national force under Karzai.

However, some idiot has come up with the idea of paying Afghans to have an army funded by us but controlled by Karzai so there is no accountability. The people in charge, deciding who to recruit, can recruit bad soldiers because they get paid more by the US for soldiers, whether they be bad soldiers or not.

Why wouldn’t Karzai and this guy

Lt. Gen. Sher Mohammad Karim, Commander of the Afghan National Army

recruit junkies, thieves, murderers and agents for the Taliban into the Afghan National Army?

Why wouldn’t they recruit anybody they can find into the Afghan national army if, for every soldier they can name, they get paid more US dollars?

Where’s the incentive for Karzai and Karim to recruit only good soldiers? There isn’t any incentive at all.

Again the US ends up funding corruption.

If a green soldier kills a blue then who gets held responsible in the chain of command?

Nobody gets held responsible.

Who should get held responsible? The US and NATO should. We should blame ourselves for paying anything for an army which we do not have any political control over.

What on earth does Panetta (and what did Gates before him) think he is (was) doing trusting this guy Karzai and his general Karim with billions of US tax-payer dollars to pay for a green army?

Why are NATO defence ministers happy with the poor leadership from NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis? Shouldn’t the NATO leaders have spotted this fatal flaw in green troop organisation and tried to re-organise green forces as I suggest here, if they know what they are doing (which they don’t)?

The competent answer to green on blue attacks is to split up the Afghan army into two distinct forces -

• a national Afghan army which Afghans pay for and is commanded by the Afghan president and whichever general he/she wants to appoint. (dark green)
• a NATO-ISAF auxiliary force of Afghans and others, funded by the US and other NATO countries and international donors. This would be commanded by our generals. (light green)

So there should be two green armies – each of a different shade of green. Karzai’s dark green he would use to defend himself and his capital. Our light green we would use to defend our supply routes and to support our operations in Afghanistan generally.

Only when the Afghan economy had grown to the point that they could afford to pay for a big enough army to defend the whole country would we transfer our light green army over to Afghan national control and then we could leave Afghanistan in the hands of Afghans.

So long as we are paying for an Afghan force we must retain political control over it otherwise it fuels corruption and does little or nothing to help to fight the enemy we are trying to defeat and the green-on-blue attacks simply undermine political support for the whole Afghanistan / Pakistan mission.

Peter Dow, August 2012

My AfPak military strategy blog - "Sorry, you are not allowed to post messages containing active links to websites or images before you have posted 40 normal messages"

Sir Spot of Borg wrote on Aug 30^th, 2012 at 11:19am:


It is by all means right to question the politics and events that sends any of our soldiers into battle.

But to question the bravery of a dead solider (assuming of course that there is no evidence of any inhuman or traitorous behaviour of that solider) is just low. WTF is wrong with you?

Ex Dame Pansi wrote on Aug 30^th, 2012 at 10:52am:



Do you like these nasheed videos Pansi, this one has english subtitles so you can read the words  to understand the enemy.

... wrote on Aug 30^th, 2012 at 4:49pm:





Spoken like a true civilian, the ability to pass judgement on those who serve is easy from the  safety of your couch.


When a civilian has to do their job all while being shot at by someone bent on killing you, then you can have an opinion of what it means to be a hero, until then it's best to be quiet.