Training the Afghan Army

Training the less fortunate is something Canadians excel at. The inegalitarian nature of the trainer/trainee relationship appeals to the innate sense of superiority that lies at the heart of the Canadian psyche.

Our perpetual training missions in Haiti are a good example. I was a schoolboy in short pants the first time I read about Canadians heading to Haiti to train their police, and we’ve been sporadically training them ever since. The results?  None to speak of.  Haiti continues to have one of the most inept and corrupt police forces in the world.

The national newspaper of record informs me today that our training mission in Afghanistan is struggling. Not struggling to find recruits, but to keep them. Seems the locals like to join up, stay for a spot of training, hang around for a few pay checks, and then they and their kit are gone. In many cases, not just gone, but gone to the other side.

It costs about $3,000 to outfit an Afghan recruit. In a country with a per capita annual income of less than a thousand dollars, that’s a lifetime’s worth of Christmas presents all rolled into one!

Also attractive is that the C-7 or M-16 that comes with the new clothes is far superior to the commie-era AK-47s common among the Taliban. Until the introduction of biometric scans in the past year, signing up with the Afghan Army and making off with the kit was something a young fellow with ambition could do three or four times a year.

The underlying logic of the Canadian training mission is somewhat flawed, but it speaks to our unshakeable faith in our superiority, even in the absence of any evidence for it. Over the past ten years we in the virtuous West have spend almost $500 billion fighting the Taliban, or roughly twice the GDP of the entire country over that period of time. The results? After a glorious US-NATO victory in the initial months, the Taliban have gradually regained most of the country. They’re winning the war.

Which begs the question; why do we believe that they need us to train their army? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have your army trained by the guys winning the war, not the guys who are losing?

Maybe we could have the Taliban come over here and train our troops.