Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Let's get the Taliban to train the Afghan Army!

This is such a great idea I'm not surprised one of the beltway think-tankers hasn't come up with it.

Instead of having Canada and the other ISAF partners making these ludicrous open-ended committments to "training" the Afghan army, why not let the Taliban take on the job?

After all, they're mostly Afghans, and would therefore be able to avoid all those emarrassing cross-cultural misunderstandings that constantly undermine our training efforts, such as the predeliction the Afghan army officer corps apparently has for sexually explointing pre-teen boys.

Secondly, if one of those recruits snapped and went on a shooting spree, he'd just be taking out a few of their own instead of the far more valuable ISAF members.

Thirdly, we'd save one hell of a pile of money. The tab for training this lot runs into the billions of dollars. The Taliban would be happy to train them for free.

Finally, it just makes good sense to have the winners train the army. The Taliban have fought the most efficient, modern, and technologically advanced military combine in the history of warfare to what a generous observer might concede is a draw.

Why do they need us to train them?

On the down side, I suppose if we went home and left them to their own devices they could no longer be relied on to follow our orders.

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