....Over the course of the six-year international presence in Afghanistan, the country has become the largest narcotic-producing nation in the history of the world. Moreover, civilian deaths reached an apogee in the past year. Suicide bombings, rare prior to 2005, have increased and have become more deadly. Widely publicized suicide and kidnapping attacks against foreign civilian targets have made international agencies reluctant to work throughout significant portions of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, coalition forces failed to convince the people that they were more discriminating in their use of violence than the insurgents, while casualty rates among coalition and Afghan forces are the highest they have been since the start of the conflict. In the economic realm, instability cut direct foreign investment in half over the past year, after five years of gains. Afghans living in the once quiet center, west, and north of the country have grown increasingly frustrated with the central government’s and international community’s focus on the south and east. In the words of one political correspondent in Mazar-I Sharif, a city in the north, “Our people are today living in a state of disappointment.”
In the wake of such bad news, ISAF and the separate U.S.-led Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (
CSTC-A) have sought, with limited success, to increase the number of ISAF and U.S. advisors in the country so they can more quickly and effectively transfer security responsibility to the Afghan National Security Forces (
ANSF). This plan, however, is not working. Without the following 12 major and rapid changes to its structure and execution, the advisory effort will fail to arrest the growing insurgencies in Afghanistan......
The Advisor Mission in Afghanistan
Bookmarks