Afghans ask: 'Whose army is it?'

A squat soldier with red epaulets and a peaked officer's cap pounds out a martial pulse on a bass drum at the Kabul Military Training Academy, on the outskirts of the Afghan capital. Cadets dressed in US Army woodland camouflage uniforms and toting AK-47 assault rifles march in crisp formations. On a rocky hillside, soldiers in training run through duck-and-cover drills.

It's the beginning of a new day of exercises for the Afghan National Army (ANA). It's supposed to be the dawn of a new kind of fighting force in Afghanistan, one that is not aligned with tribal factions, but rather the civilian-elected central government. However, six months into its existence as a force, the ANA is in no position to be the savior of democracy.

American and French instructors toil to crank out a new ANA battalion (about 400 men), every 10 weeks, but face chronic shortages of recruits. Striking an ethnic balance in the ranks – crucial to the new Army's credibility in a country riven by factional conflict – has proved elusive. But the greatest challenge of all has come from, of all places, inside the Afghan Ministry of Defense, where the ANA has been viewed as everything from a nuisance to a menace.

"There are a lot of folks at [the Ministry of Defense] that question this as a waste of resources," says Lt. Col. Kevin McDonnell, commander of the US Special Forces troops who are helping to train the new army. "The idea is catching on. But it's going to happen on their timeline, not ours."

Concern inside the defense establishment about the ANA goes far beyond competition for resources; it is more a question of survival. The minister of defense, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, controls a private army of 18,000 men.

They are mostly ethnic Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley, north of the capital. His narrow interests as a faction leader are at odds with the sweeping mandate of the new Army – to replace regional militias with a single force answerable to the civilian-elected government.

"Fahim is fiercely protective of his power, and he sees the ANA as a threat," says Paul Burton, South Asia editor for Jane's, a defense publication. "It's small now, but the thing to bear in mind, if you follow the ANA through to its natural end, is that it entails the end of Fahim's force."

Fahim's militia is based close to the capital, forcing him to deal with the armed force growing on his doorstep.

One way for Fahim to approach this conundrum would be to create an army in his own image, and by all accounts the ANA is dominated by ethnic Tajiks at the expense of other factions, including the Pashtun, the largest single ethnic group in the country. At a recent ANA graduation ceremony, a portrait of Ahmad Shah Massoud, head of the ethnic Tajik Panjshiri clique until he was assassinated last September, was on front-and-center display.

"Yeah, there's a lot of Tajiks," McDonnell concedes. "But right now, we're limited to taking the people we can get."

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