A.S.H. Smyth

What Afghan soldiers really think – the same as us

‘The NATO Commander in Eastern Afghanistan has said that this year 54 foreign bases have already been closed…’

Last December Channel 4 aired a documentary entitled Billion Dollar Base: Deconstructing Camp Bastion, the predominating ‘takeaways’ from which were a) what phenomenal amounts of money we’d spent on our eight-year operation in and around Helmand Province, and b) how unimpressed the Afghan brass were by what ‘little’ we were leaving behind.

I found myself watching most of it through gritted teeth; but it was hard, nevertheless, not to have some sympathy for the incoming Afghan soldiery.

A new documentary film has now taken up that very story. Tell Spring Not to Come This Year (dir. Saeed Taji Farouky and Michael McEvoy) offers us a rare glimpse of the Afghan National Army – specifically, the heavy weapons company of the ANA’s 3/3/215 Corps, in Nahr-e-Saraj – as they take on the continuing Taliban (et al.) threat through the ‘transition phase’ and into their first year without the support of a standing NATO troop presence.

Many of them are evidently in two minds as to whether this is necessarily a good thing. A mid-ranking officer, at company prayers (sic): ‘In 2014 our foreign colleagues will be leaving Afghanistan… [They] supported the army, police and the Afghan state. They suffered a lot of casualties in Afghanistan. They spent a lot of money, they worked hard for over a decade. But now they’ve left us. Left us alone in this mess.’

And it is not clear that they are ready to deal with this mess unsupported. Their skills and drills are pretty dodgy; their infrastructure is unstable (nine months without pay, and counting…); and their company commander likens his relationship with his men to that of ‘God’ and his ‘servants’.

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