INTERVIEW with Lt. Gen. Caldwell


Written by Ali K. Chishti • Region • January 2011

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, commander of the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTM-A) and Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, is one of the most senior American generals in the region. Currently, he commands a multinational organization that employs trainers. He develops the interior and defence ministries that train and educate personnel in the police, army, air force, logistical systems and medical systems.

Lt. Gen. Caldwell’s mission is critical to ISAF’s overall strategy of transition of security to the Afghan government. He talks about it to Ali K. Chishti in this exclusive interview for SouthAsia.

Ali K Chishti: General, according to a recent survey, only 27 percent of Afghan soldiers could work unsupervised and the rest are reliant on NATO troops, while there were twice as many casualties during a battle in Laghman where 300 soldiers were ambushed by the Taliban. What are you actually doing to make them work unsupervised?
Gen Caldwell: More and more partnering is starting to take place daily where coalition forces, under the ISAF joint command are out with fielded forces and they continually have joint assessments to assess the capability of the Afghan forces to operate independently from coalition forces. Right now this is still a very young army and police force.
The support structure is going to be built over the next 15 months. The build out of the army and police doesn’t finish until October 31, 2011. So, all kinds of capabilities needed to operate independently have not yet been built and fielded into the force structure. Again, our focus until now has been a very infantry-centric force and getting as many ground units out there that could be engaged in fighting insurgency with coalition forces, providing all the support behind them. So even though you may find some units today that have a leadership that’s maturing well, and is able to plan, coordinate and execute missions, they still are dependent on coalition forces until we finish the build out of the army of police.

Is the Pakistan Army or police working to train Afghan National Forces and police, or assisting the ISAF, NATO forces to train the Afghans?
Currently there are no Pakistani military or police trainers inside our organization in Afghanistan. Islamabad offered some assistance to the Afghan government to do some training inside Pakistan for both the Afghan army and police. But the numbers have been very minimal that they’ve taken up and sent for training.

Could you provide a breakdown of trainers pledged, by country and specialization, including the countries that are not part of NTM-A, but contribute to ANSF training? If this is outside your lane, could you request MOI and MOD to answer this question?
We have many different countries engaged and involved in our efforts with trainers and we’ll be glad to provide that data to you. We do break it down by country, both within NATO and outside of NATO. And we can set that up and pass it through back to you.

What are you training them to understand about the enemy they face, especially the internal divisions of the coalition facing us, and the desired end state of the conflict? If you train an officer, how does he understand who is the enemy, how they’re divided, and how we want this conflict to end?
Right now, the focus is on developing the operated COIN environment, the counterinsurgency environment because that will change with time. So in their training programs at the basic level, it’s very COIN-centric. When you move to the mid-level we don’t have large numbers going through it yet, but we do have a mid-level command staff college here. That’s longer and obviously far more comprehensive, and looks beyond the days when we anticipate that they would be able to handle the insurgency that exists here down to a low level, and would in fact reorient and be able to use their forces in a more holistic manner. The Afghan Airforce we are developing where four of our Mi-17s were deployed in Pakistan for relief.

How do you address literacy? What kind of things are you doing for the soldiers?
Last November, when a member from the U.S. asked us about literacy in the force, my first reaction was we don’t do literacy training. We train soldiers and policemen to go out and serve their country. And what I quickly recognized is that unless we don’t take on literacy, we will never professionalize this force. Where it became stark notice to me is when we’re out on a range and you recognize that the young soldiers can’t even read the serial number on their weapon. So you ask yourself: how can we establish accountability for the money that the American taxpayers put in over here, if they can’t account for their equipment properly? If they’re issued a sleeping bag and other types of military gear and they’re given a piece of paper that shows what they’ve been issued, how are they able to read that and understand the basic stuff they’re responsible for and are supposed to maintain accountability of? They’re absolutely dependent on somebody else.

How is the Afghan local police program going to lay out in relation to the ANP, Afghan uniformed police units on the ground. Will the program involve those armed villagers answering to an ANP commander? And is there any concern about them being a force outside the conventional police realm?
The Afghan president signed a decree earlier last December to go ahead and start allowing the Interior Ministry to work out the procedures that will allow this process to take place. A couple things about the ALP: one is, it’s not going to change the face of the security nationally. But it could have a tremendous impact locally, which is a clear distinction.
It has the potential to thicken the security forces operating out there in some areas where this kind of force would take place. They will be answerable to national authorities. Their pay will come through the Interior Ministry and their chain of command is through the same ministry down to what is being called the deputy chief within the district, who will have the command and control, the guidance and direction over any Afghan local police. They are there for defensive purposes. They’re going to be restricted to only operate in the areas in which they’re locally formed. I think the Afghan president, who has spent a tremendous amount of time in the development of the decree that he signed is that there was no opportunity for some kind of rogue element of form out of this, so all the controls that have been placed upon it and their need for it to remain under national control.. And I understand that until I saw it time and again here to realize that for us to professionalize this force, to ensure that it’s going to be enduring and self-sustaining, we’re going to have to take on literacy – which today has about 27,000 police and army in mandatory programs – growing to 50,000 by this December.

So by next June, we will have 100,000 men and women in the police and army in continuous education programs, working to improve their literacy to about the third-grade level.