PARTNER UP WITH THE AFGHAN NATIONAL ARMY? NOT LIKELY!

If you read the papers or watch the TV news, you get bombarded with lot of crap from our government about our troops in Afghanistan fighting in partnership with the Afghan National Army, a so-called army that we trained and supplied with weapons. And we also get all this shit about the war in Afghanistan being a NATO Coalition operation.

Forget all that phony propaganda about how the Afghan National Army is going to fight side by side with our troops before we withdraw from Afghanistan. Here is what it’s really like with our ‘fighting partners’ in Afghanistan. The truth is that for the most part, the Afghanistan war is an American operation. One of my former students and a longtime close friend - an Army Ranger on active duty with his reserve unit - sent me the following description of his experiences at a forward operations base [FOB]:

Hello from FOB Nejrab, Afghanistan! Finally, at our final destination. It is small but nice. I've definitely lived on worse. We have our own little compound, which is really cool. We have our own gym and mess hall, and the gym is great. The rest of the base we share with the French and Afghan National Army.

For awhile now, since they started shooting us in the back of the head, the ANA is locked out of our AO [Area of Operations]. Don't know how that's going to play out. They expect us to do joint ops with them, I don't know how.

The French are very risk adverse, and don't do much outside the wire. When they do, they are very "laissez faire", as they say, and do some really dumb things, like take off their kit, lay down on cots and take a nap, while pulling security. That is how the five of them got blown up down in Tagab this fall. The suicide bomber literally walked into their fighting position and detonated. They woke up dead. Then the PRT [Provincial Reconstruction Team] got into a fire fight trying to medevac them and break contact. Didn't hear that on CNN, did you? Hopefully, they will be pulling out soon and 1st Infantry Division will take over as our landowners.

The French do know how to party, though. They are allowed to drink, and they do it regularly. We can eat in their mess hall, and I'll give 'em this, they can cook, too.

There were large demonstrations outside the wire for several days after the Koran burning, and at one point, the French allowed the ECP [Entry Control Point] to be breached. Needless to say, we are shoring up our own base defense plan, just in case we have to execute plan "Alamo." Now, of course, we are dealing with the shooting down in Kandahar. The night that happened, we had the ANA start throwing rocks at some of our guys who were working on a vehicle down in our motor pool. Their compound is on the other side of a Hesco [barriers blast] wall. They are prisoners inside our FOB, and I can't imagine how they expect us to "partner" with them and run joint operations, ever. Of course, the ANA's relationship with the French is pretty much hate-hate, as well.

The mountains are breathtaking. This place would be really beautiful if there weren't people everywhere, inside and outside the wire, who want to kill us.