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In many ways Afghan soldiers are better suited to complex counter-insurgency operations than either the British, whom the Afghans remember as brutal 19th-century imperialists, or the Americans, whom they see as our modern-day equivalents.
Afghan forces understand tribal dynamics and the fluid nature of village influence and they can exploit them. When, as sometimes happens, they are heavy-handed, it is marginally less galling to the people whom they hurt because they are, at the very least, fellow Afghans.
For all these strengths, the Afghan Army is perhaps a generation from taking full control of this graveyard of empires. Any date for outright transition reflects waning Nato interest in the nine-year war, rather than progress on the ground. The army and the police are growing fast. There are 30,000 soldiers in training. But the numbers are not enough to quell an ideological insurgency against a government that is seen as predatory, selfish and corrupt.
The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kabul
In many ways Afghan soldiers are better suited to complex counter-insurgency operations than either the British, whom the Afghans remember as brutal 19th-century imperialists, or the Americans, whom they see as our modern-day equivalents.
Afghan forces understand tribal dynamics and the fluid nature of village influence and they can exploit them. When, as sometimes happens, they are heavy-handed, it is marginally less galling to the people whom they hurt because they are, at the very least, fellow Afghans.
For all these strengths, the Afghan Army is perhaps a generation from taking full control of this graveyard of empires. Any date for outright transition reflects waning Nato interest in the nine-year war, rather than progress on the ground. The army and the police are growing fast. There are 30,000 soldiers in training. But the numbers are not enough to quell an ideological insurgency against a government that is seen as predatory, selfish and corrupt.