Afghan army slowly pulls itself up by bootstraps

By Sanjeev Miglani

PUL-I-CHARKHI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghan army recruit Mohammad Sediq is sitting out his class at a military academy on the outskirts of Kabul because his feet became swollen after he wore ill-fitting military boots without socks.

Another former school dropout slumps on a chair at the back of an open-air class on map-reading staring blankly, either unable to comprehend the language or the subject.

From such disparate and unlikely troops, the Afghan National Army (ANA), the key to the nation's long term stability, is being built from the ground up, as it were.

It lacks guns, tanks, planes. Its troops speak different languages, and its wages lag behind the salaries paid by a resurgent Taliban to their foot soldiers.

But it has fighting spirit. It can move fast in the rugged Afghan terrain and most of all, it is beginning to win respect in a nation with few institutions or contemporary heroes.

"This is our pride. This is our hope for the future," says Major-General Zaher Azimi, a former mujahideen commander and now an adviser and spokesman at the Afghan defense ministry.

"The only solution for Afghanistan in the long term is building Afghan institutions, and a strong military is the first of them."

Earlier this month, the government and the international donors that Afghanistan relies on, agreed to nearly double the strength of the ANA to 134,000.

The expansion of the Afghan army, together with a "mini-surge" of 4,000 U.S. troops, is a step toward fighting back a resurgent Taliban and al Qaeda in a year when violence has hit its worst level yet since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

"The ANA is not just the eyes and ears on the ground, it is intended to be the lead force on the ground," says Brigadier General Amin Wardak who heads the Kabul Military Training Center which every week churns out one battalion, comprising 1,200 soldiers, watched closely by mentors mainly from the U.S. army.

"We want our soldiers to be conducting operations in sensitive areas. They should be searching homes if it is necessary instead of foreign soldiers," he said.

A sharp rise in civilian deaths in air strikes by U.S. led coalition forces in a violent summer has fueled Afghan anger and prompted even more calls for a greater role of the Afghan army in the operations against the insurgents.

"An American soldier meets fire, he calls an air strike and there are always casualties in such a situation," says an Afghan defense ministry official.

"An Afghan soldier on the other hand is going to engage where the fire is coming from. He is not going to be calling air strikes."

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