The challenges of mentoring the Afghan National Army

Soldiers from 2 YORKS make up the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team (OMLT) Battle Group in Helmand province which is responsible for mentoring and liaising with the 3rd Brigade of 205 Corps of the Afghan National Army (ANA).

Based at Camp Tombstone, adjacent to Camp Bastion and the ANA's Camp Shorabak in Helmand province, the OMLT Battle Group's role is to train the ANA in the skills it needs to successfully function on its own and therefore take over security in Helmand province.

In addition to training, the 2 YORKS Battle Group has a responsibility to act as the liaison, not just between the British-led Task Force Helmand (TFH), but also between 3rd Brigade ANA headquarters and the US-led Task Force Leatherneck, which operates in the parts of Helmand that TFH does not cover.

It is a broad remit for the 2 YORKS Battle Group, which began a six-month tour in Afghanistan last September, but being the first unit to carry out the mentoring and liaison role in Helmand for a second time, they have been able to build on their previous experience from 2007/08.

Of the personnel currently deployed, roughly 50 per cent have carried out a similar role before, including the battalion's Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel David Colthup, who is also personally responsible for mentoring General Mohaiyodin, Commander of 3/205 Brigade of the ANA.

Lt Col Colthup says the mentoring role has many challenges and is rewarding and frustrating in equal measure:

"There is real satisfaction to be had from seeing visible progress being made by the ANA," he said.

"Whether that is at the very lowest tactical level by an individual Warrior in the ANA getting better in his skills as a private soldier, or at the higher levels of the brigade headquarters where they start to understand that processes, when refined and developed, become more efficient and effective, and therefore the organisation as a whole is moving forward.

"So it is rewarding in that sense but frustrating in that progress can be slower than we would like it to be, that levels of competence and levels of literacy in certain officers is not as high as we would like it to be, and is not as high as they would like it to be, that holds back progress.

"They still don't manage their manpower as well as they should do or could do.

"That is not the fault necessarily of brigade headquarters, just institutionally the ANA isn't properly set up to manage its leave in a formed way to ensure that everybody is paid on time and on a regular basis to ensure that those who are genuinely good operators, the best soldiers and NCOs [non-commissioned officers], are promoted and rewarded.

"There is still too much of a tribal feel to it and I think that will endure for a very long time, so you don't always get the best commander in the best location and that can cause frustrations."

As of late 2009, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops had trained over 90,000 Afghan soldiers and 80,000 Afghan police.

It is planned that by October 2010 the Afghan National Army will be 134,000-strong, and with such a rapid increase in numbers comes the need to build up a corresponding officer corps, especially junior officers and NCOs, as Lt Col Colthup explained:

"It is a real challenge and it is not something that is just going to happen overnight.

"If we look at ourselves, the British Army is an institution that has its roots grounded in close on 350 to 400 years of operating, with all the traditions that goes with that.

"The strength of our senior NCO corps and particularly our warrant officers comes from the way we grow and build experience in our officer corps and the way in which we train and the way in which we operate.

"What we need to remember is that the Afghan National Army is a very young institution.

"It has a number of individuals in it that have a significant amount of operational military experience going back to the days of fighting with the Russians against the Mujahedeen and that shouldn't be discounted, but the challenge that they have today is growing an army almost from scratch and doing it rapidly, and doing it at the same time as they are fighting - particularly in Helmand - in day-to-day operations.

"That is not the way that if you were to sit down with a blank piece of paper and say 'how should we grow an army?', you wouldn't try and do it as quickly as this ideally, and you wouldn't try and do it concurrent to fighting operations.

"But we are not in an ideal world so we have got to make the best of things. There is no short route to getting senior NCOs and junior officers to being experienced in my opinion, an old head on young shoulders, it will come over time."

In assisting Afghanistan in building up its army in a short period of time, British soldiers are working very closely with their Afghan counterparts.

While this achieves results, it has been suggested that the Afghans build trust in the individual rather than the institution, hampering progress as battle groups change every six months or so and those important personal relationships are lost. Lt Col Colthup said:

"I think there is a high degree of mutual trust and respect between the British Army and the Afghan National Army.

"But a large amount of it is vested in personal relationships, but then again that is very much the Afghan way of doing business and you invariably find that, or at least I invariably find doing work with the Brigade Commander, that business and social pleasure are often intertwined on a very much daily basis.

"You can't just sit down and expect to rattle through ten issues you might have that you want to discuss and then leave and see him later.

"It takes time to go through each individual issue which are then mixed in with stories he wants to relate to you about why he can't do a particular thing.

"I used to think that better progress might be possible in the future in this regard by having certain key individuals doing longer tours but I think as we develop the mentoring pace, certainly, mentors become in the longer term more like advisors, who aren't necessarily drawn from a single battalion in the way we have done it up till now.

"You can see a point at which my role for example could be better performed by someone who is able to devote longer to it - say a nine-month period perhaps - and have a greater effect over nine months than you can have over six."

However, for the time being 2 YORKS have six months in which to help develop 3/205 Brigade of the ANA and Lt Col Cothup's ambitions for that time are to bring the ANA closer to TFH when planning and carrying out operations. He explained:

"For us this time around the key area we want to concentrate on, on top of just progressing the part of getting the ANA more efficient and better developed, is to play an active role in joint planning and joint execution of operations, all part of General McChrystal's directive on embedded partnering.

"There are unique challenges to that as a concept. Some are easier to overcome than others, but for Task Force Helmand and 3 Brigade ANA that challenge is further complicated by the physical dislocation of the two headquarters, one being in Lashkar Gah and one being in Shorabak, a 15- to 20-minute helicopter ride apart.

"So for the moment at least the OMLT will be playing a key role in bringing together the working relationship between Task Force Helmand and 3rd Brigade in a way that has not been done in the past and we are on the cusp of doing this.

"I think we can see some real advantages and benefits coming from an inclusive working relationship in terms of joint planning and execution of operations on a joint basis."

It is an aspiration shared by the ANA, and in particular they are looking to increase their ability to deal with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in order to relieve the pressure on ISAF ordnance disposal experts:

"From an ANA perspective, one of their key aspirations is to be able to do more in counter-IED," Lt Col Colthup said.

"We spend a lot of time training, or assisting in the training of, Afghan soldiers to make sure they are as well prepared as British soldiers are for operating in an IED threat area.

"What they don't have at the moment is the sort of equipment and training that we have to dispose of IEDs once they are confirmed and found on the ground and that remains an ISAF lead at the moment.

"But it is something that training is starting to take place on and it is one of the key aspirations, certainly of this brigade, to ensure they have got the ability to dispose of IEDs in a similar way that we do it."

So how does Lt Col Colthup see the future of mentoring the ANA and the possible shift to increased partnering?

"Certainly in the transitional period between where we are now and where we end up in say a year to two or three years' time you can't say that you can suddenly drop mentoring and just do partnering.

"I think that as the partnering relationship between the two partners builds and grows over time, that mutual trust and understanding between both gains real traction, that you can scale back but not reduce the amount of real mentoring that you do.

"Ultimately your mentors will transition into becoming advisors much as the British Army has done in other countries around the world, in Africa for example, and does in certain parts of eastern Europe, for example British Military Advisory and Training Teams, that sort of construct is where mentoring might end up in the future.

"But at the moment I see the role of mentors as still being vital as those individuals who are able to dedicate genuine time, energy and effort into improving the various functional parts of the ANA, for example the brigade headquarters, in a way that a partner, I don't believe, has the capacity to do."

To see how mentoring is being carried out on the ground, further articles on some of the individuals involved will be published over the next week.

Tomorrow, Major Bruce Radbourne, head training mentor in the 2 YORKS Battle Group, explains how the British Army is helping to train ANA recruits for deployment.

See more stories about 2 YORKS mentoring the Afghan National Army under Related News.