“Some astonishing facts about Afghan National Forces”

By October 2012, the Afghan Security Forces had a strength of 352,000. The Afghans claimed that it would cost $6 billion a year to maintain all the forces after 2014 — state income in '14 was not more than $3 billion.

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In 2012, half of Afghanistan’s army was addicted to drugs; sixty-five employees with the main spy agency in 2013 were fired because they were hooked on opium.
Illiteracy too haunts the already punch-drunk ANA.

A staggering 95 per cent of military and police recruits are robustly illiterate. In 2013, 30,000 soldiers deserted out of a total force of 185,000 under the ministry of defence.

Because of their poor level of comprehension, ANA soldiers have killed American troops in a manner the American psychologists can’t fathom.

The levidence of discipline problems within the Afghan forces came to light in the documents made public by the website WikiLeaks, mostly raw coalition field reports from 2004 through 2009.

A report from April 11, 2009, said border police in southern Afghanistan were high...

..on opium and having a party when they got into a fight with interpreters used by coalition forces who shared the base. The fight ended with a single gunshot that killed one of the police. The coalition soldiers writing the report said they weren't sure who fired it.

Another report in the leaked documents described an incident in which an Afghan soldier was said to have shot his sergeant after an argument at their base in Helmand province in the south. The report said the soldier was arrested and the sergeant evacuated for treatment.

The frequency of incidents in which Afghan soldiers and police get into fights or shoot each other or civilians is alarming, a senior officer of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization revealed. The leaked documents described at least 72 such incidents.

In 2010, the US spent $11 billion on the ASF — the largest single-ticket item in the defense budget. But in early 2011, the annual attrition rate from the Afghan Army was still a staggering 24 percent: that is, one in seven newly enlisted soldiers was deserting.

86% of the soldiers were illiterate, and drug taking was an endemic problem. The police were even worse. In June 2011, 5,000 deserted, or 3 percent of the army, and there were no punishments for desertion.

US recruitment policy included a strict ratio established in 2003 among all ethnic groups for ANA. Tajiks could not be over 25% in the army, but in 2010 they constituted some 41 per cent of soldiers and officers in the army, while Tajik officers commanded 70% of the units.

Tajiks are overrepresented, constituting 39% of the officer corps, well above the official target of 25%. But their overrepresentation comes at the expense of the Uzbeks and Hazara, not Pashtuns. Pashtuns made up 42% of the officer corps, just below the official target of 44%.

Reference:

1. Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of Pakistan and the West
2. Report by Paul D. Miller in Foreign Affairs (2 April 2014)
3. Khaled Ahmed, Sleepwalking to Surrender