‘An Army for Afghanistan’

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/opinion/an-army-for-afghanistan.html

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The Afghan Army is now charged with leading an unfinished war against an ongoing insurgency. But how much do we know about the Afghan soldiers themselves?

To get a sense of the war through their eyes, we spent a year with one of them, a captain named Jalaluddin. He heads a front-line company of Afghan soldiers in Helmand, the country’s most dangerous province. His unit partnered with NATO troops at the start of their campaign, but now, ill-equipped and under-resourced, they have been fighting alone for more than a year.

This Op-Doc video follows the soldiers as they clashed with the Afghan Local Police, who were reportedly attacking a nearby army base. To determine the source of the attacks, Capt. Jalaluddin led his men into the heart of Taliban territory. In this video, we show the confusion that ensued, including the captain’s removing one man from the police compound. (We are told that he was interrogated and released because of a lack of evidence, like many prisoners taken by the army.)

Many worry that violence and chaos like this will only escalate in future months, and it seems President Obama shares some of this concern. After heated discussions with the Pentagon, last month he effectively extended the American military role there for at least another year, even though the United States and NATO ceremonially ended their Afghan combat mission last week. (The United States will keep up to 10,800 troops in Afghanistan to continue to carry out missions against the Taliban, and American jets and drones will support Afghan troops in combat.)

The Afghan Army faces many of the same challenges previously experienced by foreign troops: improvised explosive devices, Taliban ambushes and a distrusting local population caught between the insurgency and the army. As we see in this Op-Doc, even those who are supposedly fighting on the same side can’t always be trusted.