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NATO's Afghan Strategy Taking Longer than Expected

Jennifer Glasse | Kandahar 11 June 2010

The head of NATO forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal says his planned offensive for the country's south will be delayed because it's taking longer than expected to win local support.

American Lieutenant General William Caldwell started NATO's training mission in Afghanistan six months ago, and while there has been progress in training the army and police, Caldwell says there have been many lessons.

"The biggest lesson I think as we all know, nothing happens as fast as we would like it to happen," says Caldwell.

Caldwell was brought in as part of General Stanley McChrystal's Afghan Strategy which focuses on winning the trust of the population. Caldwell says Afghan security forces must show they are trustworthy.

"The way you really win over the people is by your demonstrated actions, out there operating among them and that comes from a professionalized force," Caldwell adds.

Building a professionalized force has been fraught with challenges – Caldwell says the biggest one is illiteracy - the vast majority of police and army recruits can not read or write. That means getting the forces up to standards will take time.

"When somebody says to me when do you think you'll really see the professionalization of the police and the army and the air corps, my response is probably not until next year," says Lieutenant General William Caldwell.

U.S. President Barack Obama has set July, 2011 as a benchmark, when he expects to gauge Afghan progress and hopes to begin pulling out American troops. Right now thousands of U.S. forces continue to pour into the country, mainly in the South ahead of a planned offensive this summer. This week McChrystal admitted that action will be delayed because winning the support of the people of there is taking longer than expected. British Major General Nick Carter heads NATO forces in Southern Afghanistan. He says the solution isn't just a military one.

"This problem is very much a political problem and the old Clausewitzian dictum (Clausewitz was a Prussian soldier and military theorist) that war is an extension of politics by other means is reversed in Afghanistan, Politics is really an extension of war by other means. And that's because governance has to be the determining criteria with all of this," says Carter.

Carter says the plan on paper at least is simple.

"What we're trying to do is to connect the Afghan population to its government," says Carter. "We do that through having more representative, transparent and inclusive government, and we do it by having the security fully in support of Afghan government."

But NATO is not in charge of the Afghan government, it works alongside it. And critics say one of the biggest challenges to success in Afghanistan is that NATO is perceived by the people to be propping up local leaders widely seen as corrupt.