How to beat the Taliban in Afghanistan / Pakistan (and win the war on terror)

[Peter Dow]

So if I understand you correctly,

First of all, let me thank you for asking for clarification because there is even more to this than first meets the eye.

you want to substitute the corrupt Afghan National Army for a "NATO auxiliary supply route protection force" composed of.....former members of the corrupt Afghan National Army,

The ANA is institutionally corrupt because of the lack of accountability over how the money is spent.

That doesn't mean that all the individual Afghan soldiers are junkies, thieves, rapists, absconders, lazy, clueless, illiterate, phantom-names-existing-on-paper-only, Taliban-agents, green-on-blue-trigger-happy etc - just that Karzai gets paid more for more bums-in-uniform irrespective of the actual job they do and he who pays the piper doesn't call the tune here because as a national president we don't get to fire the Afghan president if we think he is corruptly misusing our money. Our sole method to account for how our money is used is to stop paying it over to Karzai to waste in the first place.

Now I have heard various stories from various sources as to the percentage of acceptable soldiers in the ANA and therefore I can't be specific as to what percentage would shape up for a real soldiering job. My purpose here is just to explain how we make up the numbers if there is a shortfall and there may not be.

NASPROFOR

For the "Nato Auxiliary Supply-route PROtection FORce" ("NASPROFOR" ) we'd pick the cream or at least the adequate soldiers from the ANA and if that is not as many as we need for the whole length of supply route we intend to defend then we certainly don't scrape the barrel and make do with poor or worse Afghan soldiers but recruit competent mercenaries perhaps from the surrounding countries which, just to list them, are India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and perhaps from countries further afield too.

Other factors come into play, for example, we know NATO relations with Iran are particularly tense at the moment so Iran may be the last country to ask to contribute mercenary troops for this new force because they may execute any Iranian mercenary who served NATO loyally or pretend to go along with NATO's plan but send undercover members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to act as double agents, seeming to serve NASPROFOR but secretly allowing Iranian weapons to pass along or across the supply line to Iranian-backed terrorists to attack our supply lines, bases or indeed anything in Afghanistan they wanted to burn to the ground which may be a lot of it which has come under Western influence recently.

Consider hiring mercenaries whom we can get for the price of Afghan soldiers but who can actually do the job competently and loyally and we can get in the numbers we need to form cohesive infantry units, meaning soldiers and their officers need to be able to communicate with each other easily, at least in the lower enlisted ranks and junior officers up to rank of "Reaction Captain".

So for example, one could imagine an Uzbek-staffed NASPROFOR component manning a stretch of supply route near where the supply route approaches the Uzbek border.

and bodies rented-out by tribal warlords?

"Bodies" are no good if they can't follow orders loyally and perform adequately in all the roles I have set out for the job. That's the test.