NTM-A in the News

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1	NATO’s Education Training Chief Unsure When Afghan National Security Force Will Be Fully Literate, By Edwin Mora, CNS News, 23 July 2010 An objective for when to expect a fully literate Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) has not been established despite an ongoing U.S.-led education training program in place, according to NATO’s education training chief. On July 14, during a Bloggers Roundtable briefing sponsored by the Department of Defense (DOD), CNSNews.com asked Dr. Mike Faughnan, chief of the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan Education Division Subject, “Is there a goal as to when you expect to have a fully-literate ANSF?” “We have not really established a timeline for completion of the [literacy] program,” the education training chief responded. “I would say at the minimum we will be doing this for as long as we are here,” he later added. “I hesitate to guess the total duration of the program, though.	10
2	Afghan Police Learn to Protect and Serve, By Judith Snyderman, Emerging Media, 23 July 2010 WASHINGTON, July 23, 2010 – Afghan Ministry of Interior officials recognize that their nation needs a professional, values-based police force, so they are working with NATO’s training mission in Afghanistan to embed a code of ethics into the foundation of the country’s police education system. Dr. Jack Kem, deputy to the commander of NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, said during a “DoDLive” Bloggers Roundtable on July 22 that the creation of the Afghan National Police Professional Education system will instill high ethical values in recruits and ensure that experienced officers adhere to them. He said introductory through continuing education courses will reinforce those lessons. “There are certain components that turn a job into a profession and then into a lifetime of service,” Kem said. He described the police code of ethics as including three basic precepts; service to nation, respect for citizens and the performance of police duties with integrity.	10
3	Suspected Afghan army trainer opens fire on fellow instructors, Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, 20 July 2010 KABUL -- A suspected Afghan army trainer on a shooting range in northern Afghanistan opened fire on his fellow instructors Tuesday, killing two American civilian trainers and one other Afghan soldier before being killed himself, NATO officials said. On a day when world diplomats gathered in Kabul for an international conference intended to further a transition to Afghan security responsibility, the violence showed the risks and setbacks that can come with a rapid expansion of Afghan military forces. The shooting, at a weapons training base near the city of Mazar-e Sharif, comes just one week after another rogue Afghan soldier killed three British soldiers at a base in Helmand province. "It's a great tragedy," said British Col. Stuart Cowen, a spokesman for the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, the command responsible for building up the Afghan security forces.	11
4	Soldier wounded while reportedly killing Afghan trainer who opened fire on base, By PATRICK DICKSON, Stars and Stripes, 21 July 2010 Two U.S. civilian contractors and an Afghan soldier were killed when the trainer turned from his shooting position at a firing range at Camp Shaheen and started to fire on friendly forces, military officials said. The trainer was then gunned down. Afghan officials said an argument had erupted during routine weapons proficiency training. No information was released on the reservist or contractors, who were training Afghan soldiers, pending notification of their families. Applicants for training jobs undergo a standard vetting process, according to National Training Mission-Afghanistan spokesman Lt. Col. David Hylton.	12
5	2nd shooting in month casts doubt on Afghan forces, By HEIDI VOIGT, Associated Press, 21 July 2010 NATO has six large training sites across the country, and there are about 20,000 soldiers and about 6,500 police undergoing training at any one time, said Col. Stuart Cowen, a spokesman for the NATO training mission. "We regard what happened yesterday as a tragic and isolated incident and we are looking at the training, and taking prudent precautions to make sure that doesn't happen again on our firing ranges," Cowen said Wednesday. He said that there is a strict program for vetting recruits before enlistment, including drug tests, physical exams and a check against a database of known insurgents. Potential recruits also have to get their community elders to vouch for them in a written letter. "People do fail selection," he said, specifying that about 7 percent of applicants do not make the cut.	18
6	Better NCO Training Boosts Afghan Army’s Capabilities, By Ian Graham, Defense Media Activity, 21 July 2010 WASHINGTON, July 21, 2010 – The influence of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in the development of Afghanistan’s military forces is possibly most apparent in its training regimen. Decades ago, a very top-rank-heavy Soviet-style system dominated the Afghan military, Army Sgt. Maj. Michael Logan, with NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, said. But now, he said, thousands of new Afghan troops are being trained by a strong corps of noncommissioned officers, a signature of the American military. Logan discussed how U.S.-style training has played a central role in the Afghan army’s growth and development over the past year during a July 20 DoDLive Bloggers Roundtable.	12
7	Gunfight Kills 2 Americans Who Trained Afghan Army, By ALISSA J. RUBIN and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr., New York Times, 21 July 2010 KABUL, Afghanistan — A seemingly routine training practice in marksmanship went fatally wrong on Tuesday when an Afghan Army sergeant turned his weapon on an American trainer and a gunfight began. When it was over, the sergeant, two American trainers and an Afghan soldier who had been standing nearby lay dead. The fight, which also wounded a NATO soldier, occurred near the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif at a training center for Afghan soldiers named Camp Shaheen, according to a statement from the NATO command and an Afghan defense official. The camp is used to instruct Afghan recruits in weapons use and other basic military skills, said Brig. Gen. Gary S. Patton, the deputy commander for the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan. He said the gunfight was under investigation by a joint American-Afghan team. General Patton said that he was uncertain about the motives of the Afghan sergeant, but that the military considered it “an isolated incident.”	26
8	Breaking Barriers to Enhance Afghan Air Power, By Rachel Eisenhower, SIGNAL, 20 July 2010 With the development of the Afghan Air Force six to nine months behind schedule, the commander of the Combined Air Power Transition Force is pushing for more technology, teaching tools and NATO support. The NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan’s Combined Air Power Transition Force (CAPTF), charged with developing military and police air power in Afghanistan, is pushing forward with the development of the Afghan Air Force. While the initiative has seen steady progress since its inception in November 2009, it still faces challenges with equipment, language barriers and a lack of support from NATO partners. Brig. Gen. Michael Boera, USAF, commander, CAPTF, NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan, coordinates development of the Afghan Air Force with U.S. Central Command, the International Security Assistance Force and the Afghan ministries of Defense and Interior. In a recent Defense Department Bloggers Roundtable, Gen. Boera explained the steps he is taking to make the air force fully operational by 2016.	17
9	Hey, no pressure, but winning war depends on the team, By Corinne Reilly, The Virginian-Pilot, 18 July 2010 In trying to explain the difficulties of the job from which he just returned - building from scratch a national police force and army in Afghanistan - Navy Capt. Mark Hagerott offers an anecdote. Several years ago, the American team charged with the task decided that launching military academies should be among the first steps. So they built one. Soon after it graduated its first class of Afghan officers in 2009, the officers received their duty assignments. That's when the Americans noticed the problem: Many of the Afghans who were assigned to dangerous front-line jobs failed to show up. It was quickly discovered that, through family connections and bribes, most had managed to secure transfers to safer posts, leaving the neediest areas uncovered.	10
10	NATO-sponsored program offers Afghan forces rudimentary education, By GEOFF ZIEZULEWICZ , Stars and Stripes, 16 July 2010 NATO hopes to get 100,000 Afghan soldiers and policemen to a third-grade literacy level by next summer, the official in charge of the Afghan National Security Forces Literacy Program said this week. About 14,000 Afghan National Police and 12,000 soldiers are currently in literacy programs, according to Mike Faughnan, head of NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan’s Education Division. The literacy effort — kicked off in 2008 and revamped in the past few months — aims to have 50,000 Afghan security forces members taught basic reading and numbers skills by December, Faughnan said Wednesday. However, reaching the third-grade level is just a start. Faughnan said that level is “not sufficient” for the force, and that curriculum to get Afghan troops to a fourth-grade level should be in place by September, with plans to teach to a fifth-grade level in the works.	23
11	NATO Trainers Increase Literacy in Afghan Forces, By Ian Graham, Emerging Media, 15 July 2010 WASHINGTON, July 15, 2010 – A lot has been said about the importance of training Afghan forces in the NATO mission there. But with an illiteracy rate reaching in some test groups higher than 89 percent, how can one teach a large group of recruits to be engineers or logisticians? Mike Faughnan, head of education for the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan’s Combined Security Transition Command, addressed the issue yesterday on a DoDLive Bloggers Roundtable. In 2008, a literacy program was established to train new recruits and existing members of Afghan national security forces who are either illiterate or don’t meet the 3rd-grade-level math, reading and comprehension minimum standard. About 25,000 Afghan personnel currently are enrolled in the program; by July 2011 Faughnan expects to have 100,000 students enrolled. To date, about 4,300 Afghans have graduated from the program.	25
12	86 Percent of Afghan Army Recruits Cannot Read and Write, Complicating U.S. Efforts to Train Self-Sufficient Security Force, By Edwin Mora, CNSNews, 12 July 2010 Simple literacy, it turns out, is one of the “biggest” obstacles to training the Afghan National Security Forces (ANF), according to Col. John Ferrari, deputy commander for the NATO Training Mission and Combined Security Transitions Command-Afghanistan. “Probably one of the biggest hurdles we have to overcome is literacy,” said Col. Ferrari on July 8 during a Department of Defense (DOD) press briefing about growing and sustaining the ANF. At the briefing, a reporter asked Ferrari, “What is one of the biggest hurdles you have to deal with?” He said, “Remember Afghanistan has been at war for 30 years, and neither the Soviets who were here before the Taliban nor the Taliban put people through school. So education was not prized. As a matter of fact, the Taliban shut down the schools.”	28
13	Afghan police chiefs brief NATO mentors, By Matthew Fisher, Calgary Herald, 11 July 2010 As scores of veteran Afghan policemen ran around the regional training centre grounds on Saturday pretending to fire red-coloured fake assault rifles, police chiefs from across southern Afghanistan watched through the windows of a hall where they were meeting with senior NATO officers charged with expanding and improving the much maligned force. "I don't think we anticipated the degree of difficulty that there would be for the commanders in the field," said Maj.-Gen. Mike Ward, the Canadian army officer who has headed all police training in Afghanistan since last year. One of the biggest headaches has been that 40,000 of Afghanistan's 107,000 policemen have never had any formal training. While trying to recruit and educate tens of thousands of new policemen to help confront the Taliban, there was also an urgent parallel need to train all those who had never had any training in the first place.	34
14	Literacy hampers Afghan training effort, United Press International, 9 July 2010 KABUL, Afghanistan, July 9 (UPI) -- Building an independent Afghan military is ahead of schedule, though the process is hampered by low literacy rates, U.S. commanders said. U.S. war planners in Afghanistan are pushing to build an independent Afghan military with more than 300,000 soldiers. U.S. Army Col. John Ferrari, the commander in charge of training for the fledgling Afghan military, said the process was ahead of schedule, the U.S. Defense Department said. Ferrari said there were now around 235,000 members of the Afghan army and national policy, putting the program "several months" ahead of schedule. War planners had set an October 2011 deadline for building an Afghan fighting force.	39
15	EXCLUSIVE: Foreign Officer Kept Afghan Soldiers From Going AWOL in U.S., By Jana Winter, FoxNews, 8 July 2010 During the course of his six-month tenure, Sultany said he spent his $600 personal monthly stipend — the same amount he received when he was a DLI student in 2009 — on his students and also paid his own money to set up and stock the new Afghan liaison office. He said he spent $500 a month on a rental car and hundreds of dollars more on fuel; he said he paid for cell phones and office equipment, including his computer. He said he had to borrow a printer and photo copier from the fully-staffed Saudi and Kuwaiti liaison offices nearby. (Col. Stewart Cowen, spokesman for the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, said that because Sultany transferred from student to liaison officer on short notice, funding support for him and for the new liaison office took did not come through until June. "If LTC Sultany needed to personally pay for administrative support, then these costs will be looked at and if appropriate he will be reimbursed," he said.) But there were larger issues to address, Sultany said. He found that many of the 46 Afghan military personnel who had gone AWOL had done so after they learned that they had flunked out of the program and would be immediately sent back home. Often, he said, they vanished just hours before their scheduled flight. The shame and humiliation associated with returning home without receiving the training they were in the U.S. to receive caused otherwise smart and responsible people to do extremely stupid things, like escaping, he said.	24
16	Buildup of Afghan Security Forces Continues, By Ian Graham, Emerging Media, 9 July 2010 WASHINGTON, July 9, 2010 – The push to build Afghanistan’s security forces to 305,000 members is ahead of schedule, but there are still some obstacles to overcome, a senior officer involved in the effort said yesterday. Army Col. John Ferrari, deputy commander for programs for NATO Training Mission Afghanistan and Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan, discussed the effort’s progress and challenges in a “DoD Live” bloggers roundtable. Ferrari is responsible for dedicating resources to the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army to fight the counterinsurgency and to aid in building the Afghan economy. The training commands work with regional coalition commands and Afghan security forces leaders to determine training, life-support and work construction projects, Ferrari explained.	27
17	Combating attrition among elite Afghan police, By JEFF SCHOGOL, Stars and Stripes, 8 July 2010 The Afghan government has approved an extra $50 per month for the elite Afghan National Civil Order Police in an attempt to reduce attrition, said Col. John Ferrari, of NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan. Known by its acronym ANCOP, the civil order police move around the country to serve in districts until a local police force is recruited and trained. Despite being touted as the best of the best, ANCOP personnel reportedly suffer from the same problems of corruption and drug abuse as local Afghan cops. ANCOP attrition varies widely per month. It was 11.2 percent in December and 2.3 percent in June, according to NATO Training Mission Afghanistan / Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan.	43
18	Command Works on Integrated Training for Afghan Forces, By Ian Graham, Defense Media Activity, 8 June 2010 WASHINGTON, July 8, 2010 – NATO Training Mission Afghanistan is developing a system that will help integrate training provided to Afghanistan’s security forces and civil servants. During a “DoD Live” bloggers roundtable yesterday, Army Lt. Col. James Baker, executive officer for the deputy to the commander of the training mission, said an educational system currently being developed in conjunction with the Afghans will help to bridge training gaps that came to light during operations in and around Marja in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. “[The NATO Training Mission] is currently working in collaboration with Afghan leadership and our coalition partners to establish the National Security Education System, which looks to integrate educational opportunities for security forces and ministries directly related to the Afghan national security program,” Baker said.	31
19	EXCLUSIVE: Number of Afghans Gone AWOL in U.S. Reaches 46, By Jana Winter, FoxNews, 7 July 2010 "Since 2002, 745 students have passed through the U.S. on this training and only 46 have actually gone absent without leave, and in 2009 there was a peak of 21 students," Col. Stewart Cowen, NATO spokesman, Afghanistan, told FoxNews.com. Citing statistics provided by the Department of Homeland Security, Cowen said 25 of the 46 remain unaccounted for. At least 18 of those are known to be in Canada. (Multiple sources told FoxNews.com that there is believed to be a strong network of former AWOL Afghans now living in Canada or illegally in the U.S., and students can easily find out how to get to Canada or leave town.)	39
20	General Discusses Afghan Army’s Development, By Christen N. McCluney, Emerging Media, 5 July 2010 Afghanistan’s army, with help from the NATO training mission there, is working to increase its growth, develop leaders and increase retention to make a stronger force. “What we do is generate and sustain and develop leaders for the Afghan National Army,” said Army Brig. Gen. Gary S. Patton, deputy commander for army training for NATO Training Mission Afghanistan and Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan, during a "DoD Live" bloggers roundtable July 2. The Afghan army has grown in quality and quantity, with significant progress in the past few months, Patton said. From May to June, the Afghan army grew by more than 4,000 soldiers to a current total force of 129,885 soldiers. These numbers put the effort at 6,000 soldiers above the goal for that time frame and ahead of schedule for growing the Afghan army, the general said. Patton said the Afghan army’s deficit of 12,000 noncommissioned officers stems from the fact that infantry numbers can be increased faster than it takes to make new leaders.	35
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