NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan

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Lt. Gen William B. Caldwell, IV in the News
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1   Link   Hate Pastor Behind ‘Burn A Quran Day’ Responds To Petraeus: ‘We Have Firmly Made Up Our Mind’
As ThinkProgress has reported, the Dove World Church based out of Gainesville, FL, is organizing an “International Burn a Quran Day” on September 11. Gen. David Petraeus warned yesterday that the hate campaign “could put the lives of American troops in danger and damage the war effort.” Gen. William Caldwell — the commander of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan — echoed Petraeus’ admonition on CNN yesterday afternoon: 		8
2   Link   Update On Progress — And Challenges — In Developing An Afghan Security Force
Despite significant challenges, progress is being made in Afghanistan. One of the cornerstones of the strategy employed to secure and stabilize the country is the development of the Afghan National Security Force, a task charged to the NATO Training Mission. Development of an enduring security force allows the Afghan Government to provide security for its people, a necessary pre-condition for the provision of governance and services. 		10
3   Link   GailForce: More On Afghanistan COIN Training, Gail Harris - Foreign Policy Blogs Network (2 Sept 2010)
Been on travel so haven’t found time to Blog. Before I hit the road, I participated in a Department of Defense sponsored Bloggers roundtable on Monday, August 23rd with Lieutenant General William Caldwell the Commander of the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan. It was enlightening and informative. As discussed in previous Blogs, this training is a critical part of the COIN strategy. Although training has been ongoing since at least 2002, the NATO training command was only activated in November 2009. General Caldwell began by explaining the mission stating it is essentially to develop Afghanistan’s Ministries of Interior and Defense.

The General didn’t pull any punches. He remarked before the command was activated, “the development of the Afghan National Security Force…was hampered by a lack of resources…there was little time really dedicated to building and developing the Afghan National Security Force as an enduring force…key inputs that addressed the professionalism and quality of the force, such as leader development, losses from attrition and literacy of soldiers and police were overlooked.”

General Caldwell said beginning in 2002 “the average raw growth was about 15,000 personnel in the Afghan National Army (ANA) and about 12,000 in the Afghan National Police (ANP)…These numbers were below the requirement to meet both the ANA and the ANP strength goals.” The trend has been reversed and both the ANA and ANP goals are currently three months ahead of schedule.
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4   Link   Leadership Development, Professionalism, and Transition
Professionalization of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) is the key to setting the conditions for transition of security responsibility to the Afghans. Professionalism can only be created through the development of capable leaders, and it is a vital foundation for future Afghan security and prosperity. Capable leaders are essential for long term sustainability in increased retention, decreased attrition and quality development. For these reasons, leader development has been the #1 priority of NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan since activation late last year.

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5   Link   Afghan military recruits get driver's ed
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- Trainers at an Afghan training facility said they are focusing on road education because more than half of Afghan army injuries come from road accidents.

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV, commander of the NATO-run Kabul Military Training Center, said 141 Afghan soldiers and recruits have died in rollovers and collisions since 2005 and many of the incidents could have been avoided by following the rules of the road, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

"We're losing them faster from vehicle accidents than combat," Caldwell said.

He said the center now employs 10 instructors to provide 191 hours of classroom and on-the-road training for recruits to help them learn road safety and proper operation of the more than 8,000-pound Humvees supplied by U.S. forces.
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6   Link   Video - Lt. Gen. Caldwell, Brig. Gen. Boera, CBS Evening News - Katie Couric (Aug 26, 2010)
(CBS) America's greatest challenge in Afghanistan is training the Afghans to handle their own security. CBS Evening News Anchor Katie Couric has that report as we continue our special series, "Afghanistan: The Road Ahead."

How do you build an army? One soldier at a time.

"In the last six months, we've recruited, trained, assigned and grown this army and police by 60,000 people," said General William Caldwell.

Nine years after the fall of the Taliban, the Afghan security forces are still a work in progress. The army is now 134,000 strong - the police numbers just under 110,000. The target is a force of 305,000 in two more years.

"It's just in the last two years that we have really gotten the strategy right here," Gen. Caldwell said. "We've committed the resources that are required."

Resources like more trainers and higher salaries. Soldiers and police are now paid $140 a month - the same salary the Taliban pays its fighters. The Afghans are also recruiting more aggressively. 		34
7   Link   Afghan security force training faces big hurdles - Sue Pleming, Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - High drop-out and illiteracy rates mean it will take until late October 2011 to build up Afghanistan's police and military so they can take the lead in more areas, a senior U.S. commander said on Monday.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon via video link-up from Afghanistan, Lieutenant-General William Caldwell said at the current pace of training, the Afghan army and police could take the lead only in "isolated pockets" of the country and with support from foreign forces. ...
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8   Link   If Afghan Troops Can’t Read Cat in the Hat, This War Is Screwed - Noah Shachtman, WIRED
By next October, if everything goes right in Afghanistan — like, almost perfectly — just about every local cop and soldier there should be able to read like a first-grader.

The American-led strategy in Afghanistan relies on training enough local forces to let the Afghans take over their own security. Right now, only 18 percent of those 243,000 cops and grunts have more than a Kindergarten-level ability to read. Which means they’ve got major trouble doing everything from keeping track of their gear to following a battle plan to getting paid, the general in charge of the NATO training effort says. In other words: If these local troops can’t learn their ABCs, this war is stuck. ... 		28
9   Link   Illiteracy, desertion slow Afghan training - Andrew Tilghman - Army Times
Extremely high illiteracy and desertion rates among Afghan army and police recruits have become the top challenges to standing up reliable Afghan security forces, a top Army general said Monday.

And that means recruiting and training Afghan security forces will have to extend well beyond the target date President Obama has set for beginning to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan in July of next year. ...
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10   Link   Afghanistan security force at least a year away - ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A senior U.S. commander on Monday wouldn't predict when Afghanistan might take control of its own security and warned that NATO needs at least another year to recruit and train enough soldiers and police officers.

The assessment by Lt. Gen. Bill Caldwell, the head of NATO's training mission in Afghanistan, further dims U.S. hopes that the planned U.S. withdrawal next year will be significant in size. ...
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11   Link   General: NATO, U.S. must train nearly three Afghans to get one soldier - Larry Shaughnessy, CNN
Washington (CNN) -- There's been talk in Washington for months of the July 2011 deadline, when President Barack Obama promised to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. He didn't say how many or how quickly. ... 		28
12   Link   ‘Training’ Equals ‘Transition’ in Afghanistan, General Says - Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael J. Carden, American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Aug. 23, 2010 – The training of Afghan security forces is a vital aspect in the American-led war strategy there, the U.S. commander charged with overseeing Afghan training said today during a video news conference from his headquarters in Afghanistan. ... 		23
13   Link   U.S. General Cites Goals to Train Afghan Forces - Elisabeth Bumiller, NYT (24AUG2010)
WASHINGTON — The American commander in charge of building up Afghanistan’s security forces said Monday that in the next 15 months he would have to recruit and train 141,000 new soldiers and police officers — more than the current size of the Afghan Army — to meet President Obama’s ambitious goals for getting Afghan forces to fight the war on their own. ... 		30
14   Link   Training Afghan Recruits, Behind the Scenes - Katie Couric, CBS (19AUG2010)
I'm here to interview and travel with General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Operation Enduring Freedom.

Yesterday, after we landed in Kabul, I met with Lt. General Bill Caldwell, the man in charge of the NATO training mission. We got to meet two Afghan pilots who are heading to Columbus, Mississippi, to train. They already had to learn English and the principles of aeronautics, and went to two military schools here in Afghanistan.

Their commanding general told me the first thing they have to teach these recruits (many of them are not the pilots) is how to open a car door. They've never driven. Then they have to give them a first grade education in reading because most are illiterate.
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15   Link   NATO’s Education Training Chief Unsure When Afghan National Security Force Will Be Fully Literate, By Edwin Mora, CNS News, 23 July 2010
On March 3, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, commander of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, said, that 86 percent of new Afghan recruits are illiterate.

“Our biggest challenge in the training base is the literacy,” he said. “About 14 percent [of recruits] are literate, which means that 86 percent really can't read or write. So that means everything we do is done on a show-and-tell basis.”

Faughnan, during the briefing, explained that the 14 percent literacy rate is derived from NATO’s “in-testing prior to the beginning of the [training] course,” and it includes individuals who “pass at the 3rd grade level.” 		55
16   Link   'Hard Is Not Hopeless' in Afghanistan, By JOHN A. NAGL, Wall Street Journal, 20 July 2010
Gen. Petraeus was tasked with building an Iraqi army in 2004 after we had demobilized Saddam Hussein's forces. The assignment was enormously difficult, but he had good raw material. The Iraqi population is literate and the Iraqi army had been very competent by regional standards.

The Afghan population, meanwhile, is rich with combat experience but short on soldiers who have graduated from staff colleges. They know how to fight, but not how to read. NATO efforts to build up the Afghan army and police suffered from a lack of resources until late in 2009, when Lt. Gen. Bill Caldwell was ordered to bring them up to speed. Talented as Lt. Gen. Caldwell is, he's still short on trainers, and he has to teach his Afghan recruits to read before they can become effective counterinsurgents. That will take time.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "All my generals are good—I want generals who are lucky!" Gen. Petraeus was fortunate when he took command in Iraq that years of outreach to the Sunni tribes were beginning to bear fruit. Former insurgents decided to join the Awakening movement to fight against al Qaeda. He organized them into "Sons of Iraq" militias that served as community police and drastically reduced violence levels. Recently deposed Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal tried to follow the same script and succeeded on a small scale, but he was unable to win Afghan President Hamid Karzai's approval to expand the program nationally. 		77
17   Link   Defense Bloggers of the Highest Order, By Rachel Eisenhower, SIGNAL Connections, 15 July 2010
In February 2007, footage of the Battle of Haifa Street was released during a press conference and made the evening and morning news cycles in the United States, only to be ousted hours later by reports of pop culture celeb Anna Nicole Smith’s death. Holt received a call shortly afterward from Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, USA, former deputy chief of staff for strategic effects, Multinational Force–Iraq, concerned about the lack of coverage. The general challenged Holt to find another way to spread the news.

Holt had been monitoring a self-professed group of “milbloggers,” who followed the military and the conflict in Iraq closely through news outlets. With such a wide spectrum of writers and a huge amount of Web traffic, Holt saw an opportunity to engage. “Links are the currency of the ’net,” he said, and rather than drive bloggers to other news sites, Holt aimed to give them more access and make all the information linkable to the Defense Department’s website.

Rear Adm. Mark Fox, USN, served as the first speaker for a roundtable discussion on the conflict in Baghdad. Holt sent invitations to the milbloggers, and the response exceeded expectations. The group came armed with knowledge, explains Holt. “This discussion was absolutely amazing—these guys were well-studied. They weren’t easy questions by any means, but they were fair.” 		45
18   Link   Turkish officers training Afghan military leaders, World Tribune, 2 July 2010
Officials said Turkey has increased military and security training to Afghanistan as part of the NATO stabilization campaign. They said hundreds of Turkish officers were serving as instructors to the Afghan Army and police.

"The Turkish military contingent is no longer going to train basic soldiers, but will focus totally on training leaders through a program," U.S. Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, commander of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, said.

In a briefing on June 19, Caldwell said the leadership training program has already begun. He said the Turkish effort has been taking place in Camp Gazi in the Afghan capital of Kabul. 		79
19   Link   Pakistan and China to hold anti-terror drill, By Agence-France Press/Associated Press of Pakistan, 2 July 2010
Some key US officials involved in Afghanistan said they knew nothing of the arrangement. “We are neither aware of nor have we been asked to facilitate the training of the Afghan officer corps with the Pakistani military,” Lt Gen William B Caldwell IV, head of the Nato training command in Afghanistan, said.

Washington has spent $27 billion to train and equip Afghan security forces since 2002, and President Obama’s war strategy calls for doubling the strength of both the army and police force there by October 2011 to facilitate the gradual departure of US troops.

This week, Gen David H Petraeus, confirmed on Wednesday as the new US and Nato war commander, said the US wants to “forge a partnership or further the partnership that has been developing between Afghanistan and Pakistan”.
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20   Link   NATO Struggles to Train Afghan Army, But Officials Cite Progress, Jennifer Glasse, Voice of America, 14 June 2010
The NATO training mission has been criticized for shortening basic soldier training courses. Mission leader Lieutenant General William Caldwell dismmised the concerns, saying training continues in the field with Afghan soldiers partnered with NATO forces.

"If we're not there with them we're not continuing their development, which is really important. So we have to be out there with them in the field, operating with them," Calwell said. "We have not done that well in the past."

Caldwell and his Afghan counterparts report progress toward the goal of training 171,000 Afghan soldiers by October. Some mistakes have been made, they admit, but add they have learned important lessons. Afghan analyst Kate Clark is skeptical the NATO team is offering anything new.
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