Press briefing

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL (Commander, NATO Training Mission -Afghanistan): First of all, let me just say on behalf of the NATO Training Mission I appreciate the opportunity today to just give you a quick update on where we are.

Just over 100 days ago the NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan activated inside of Afghanistan and I was given the fortunate opportunity to serve as its first commander. So we've been in existence, to be exact, 102 days today. A decision made last June here in NATO to form this command, to represent all the different entities that have something to do with the training, the education and the development of the Afghan National Security Forces.

It's a combined organization. We have over 20 different nations associated with this, with members part of our organization within Afghanistan. We have another 26 nations that contribute in some shape or form in kind with either monetary contributions, or donations of equipment or other type of activities.

We're made up of both NATO and non-NATO entities. We're military, we're police and we're civilians. We have different national police officers from countries such as Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain and others.

Each of these are contributing to both force generation and capacity building. We do mostly instructing and advising. Those are our two primary functions. We serve as instructors and advisors in helping build the Afghan National Security Forces.

When we say the Afghan National Security Forces we're talking about the army, the police, the army air corps, the medical facilities associated with those entities, logistics facilities associated with those entities, and we also do infrastructure development. We also are responsible for and indirectly, it's an organization which I'm dual-hatted as, called CSTC-A, the Combined Security Transition Command - Afghanistan which has been in existence for many years, but it has ministerial development. So we help develop the systems inside the Ministries of Interior and Defence.

Our budget that we operate with is right at about probably just under $1 billion U.S. per month. It is the funding that we have available to us to accomplish this mission that we've been given.

Our challenges that we faced over the last 100 days that we've seen, first and foremost is how do we take on and develop leaders inside of Afghanistan. When I say leaders, not only in the Ministries of Interior and Defence, but more importantly both within the army and the police.

And so leader development is our number one priority that we've taken on and are working very diligently. We want to figure out how to make them much more transparent, merit-based, assignments, promotions and everything else associated with what they do so that it reduces corruption to the greatest extent possible.

The next thing we were taking on and working is police reform. When somebody tells me that today the police are not well-trained, my answer is, they've never been trained. The way that it had been done for many years, until just in the last few months, we literally took and recruited somebody and then put them out on the street. We gave them a badge, a gun, and said you're now the patrolman in this area. There was no formal training process.

That was recognized and there is this thing called focused district development that was started about a year ago where we take and retrain police, or reform police that have never been trained. So what we have now instituted in coordination with the Afghans, is a policy where if you're going to join the police force you're recruited, you're trained, and then you're sent out to operate some place as a police person.

Today about 30 percent of the police in Afghanistan have actually been through the formalized training. The other 70 percent have not.

Attrition within the police force has been slightly improving over the last three months since NATO Training Mission stood up. A multitude of factors, not the least of which was, in the month of December the pay of the police was brought up on parity with the army. It had been less than the army before that. And the army pay had gone up in December, so when the police pay increased it increased in that same equal amount as the army. So that today whether you serve in the Afghan National Police or in the Afghan National Army you have pay parity and rank and longevity pay, which is a very positive step forward.

The greatest challenge we have in the police force right now is we have an organization called ANCOP, the Afghan National Civil Order Police, within ANCOP we do have an attrition about 67 percent. It is probably the best-trained, most-educated force that they have within the Afghan National Police. The challenge with it is high attrition. It's something that there's been an ongoing effort between the Afghan Ministry of Interior and us to work. We have a pretty good plan, I think, in place at the Afghans are going to institute around 1 May that will provide a cyclical program for the ANCOP so that in the future they not only will be trained, employed and then they'll have a period of rest, where they can go through literacy training programs, education, take some vacation time leave, and then go back to training and employment again. And that's an important step forward to get at that.

Because the overall attrition of the police themselves is about 25 percent, but within that one unique element of ANCOP it's obviously about 67 percent.

We've been working real hard at quality and quantity. Up till now everybody has focused on the quantity. How many police are you producing? How many army are you producing? What are the numbers, and we can talk those if you'd like, but within that it's just as important that we put as equal emphasis and effort on the quality of that young patrolman, that quality of that young soldier.

And so we've been spending a lot of time there. We are seeing some steady improvement in that as the number of instructors has gone up over the last three months. We were at about 33 percent of our authorized manning level when we first stood up. We're at about 50 percent now. And then just in that 17 percent growth of instructors we've put into the force we can already see a difference in the quality of the policeman and the soldier that we're producing. And it's in simple things, very important things for soldiers, like weapons qualification and the basic training program where there are soldiers that used to be about a 30 percent qualification rate for a soldier that went through the training program. Today we're moving up near towards 60 percent qualified.

Still not where we want it to be, but a step in the right direction. A different that we're seeing.

The structured nature of the Afghan National Army, we had originally been looking at several more years to continue growing the army. The international community has made the decision that we were going to grow the security forces to 305,000. That's about 171,000 army, about 134 thousand police.

If, in fact, that's the case, and that's what the international community has committed to at this point, we have restructured the growth of the army such that when it reaches 171.6—to be exact—thousand, it will be a balanced force. It will be a force that has the ability to be self-sustaining and regenerate itself. And that's a very important step that we did. Originally that would not come unless there was much more continual growth.

We're now going to set the conditions such that when it reaches 171.6 thousand in the army it has its logistics, its engineers, its medical, its supply systems as a part of that army.

And then the last thing I would just tell you is on manning. Now, NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan today makes up about just less than two percent of all the military forces that are currently in Afghanistan. A very small proportion of the men on forces deployed there, yet a tremendous return in its investment in terms of the long-term development and growth of this army and police force.

We see as our primary mission to develop enduring, self-sustaining systems that are going to last for a much longer time. It's not about just initially developing and producing an army or a police force. It's about developing and producing an army and a police force that can be self-sustaining, that's enduring, that can regenerate itself, that has the leadership necessary to continue to guide and lead into the future. So that therefore the coalition forces that are there today can be reduced in numbers because the Afghans will have the ability to be much more responsible for their own security and stability in the future and less reliant on the coalition effort.

So those are the key points I just really wanted to give you an update on. As the Secretary General said, I had the opportunity today to talk both to the Military Committee and the NAC and give them this 100-day update and take any questions they had, and just let them know where their NATO Training Mission, of which they've asked me to take the command of, is today and what we're doing for the government and the people of Afghanistan.

So with that I'll be glad to take whatever questions.

MODERATOR: Please identify yourself, just to help out the General.

Q: Ben Nimmo from the German Press Agency, DPA. A question on the numbers. First of all, you said you're at 50 percent of the manning levels required at the moment, ballpark figure. Is that 50 percent of the figure you would require to get to the overall figure of 305,000 or is that 50 percent of what you would need to get to the 200-odd that it was before? And can you just give us a little bit more detail on the numbers of where you're at now with OMLTs and POMLTs in relation to the overall requirement? Thank you.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: Now it's a good question to clarify. What I was talking about - 50 percent of the manning of our internal organization of NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan itself. That 50 percent manning is what we currently have in our organization. It's not in the Afghan National Security Forces. Right now for the growth of the Afghan National Security Forces we are looking for still some additional pledges by the international community with some additional trainers to assist us in this effort to grow both the army and the police forces as we move forward.

Today we are able to continue the growth, but to increase the quality of the recruit both in the army and the police. It will require us to put some additional trainers into the program.

And in terms of OMLTs and POMLTs, there is a slight... you know, our job is to do the training of the forces that are then sent down to the operational force. OMTs and POMLTS work out in the operational force and so it's not an item that we have daily oversight of. We're aware of, but not an item that we have responsibility for.

Q: General, David Brunnstrom from Reuters. Just to follow-up on that question, to actually bring the numbers up to 300,000 how many more trainers do you need from international forces? And also on the issue of attrition rates, is there any evidence that people who are beginning police or military training are then going over the insurgencies? I mean is there any danger that you're actually helping to train insurgents to shoot straight?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: On those two questions, the first thing I see on the numbers that we're looking for there's about 1,200 additional trainers and instructors that we're looking for today. There has been some commitments made by the international community, perhaps up to as many as 700 very recently. Those obviously are not yet in country. We're encouraged, the fact that there is still an ongoing discussion. We're very fortunate that the Secretary General and SACEUR are both continuing to advocate and ask the international community for additional assistance. But that still does leave us with a delta of about 700, 650 trainers that we're still looking for. In addition to those that have been committed and pledged to arrive in theatre to start being employed and used in the operations.

What I would tell you is one thing we have done is as we bring new recruits in, we have started... we now do biometrics on every single new recruit. There's two things that are part of it. We do not only the eye retina scan, and the fingerprints, but we also do the... you have to produce a letter from somebody in your village, your district, your province, who can attest your ability to serve the country of Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan.

And so the measure that we've put into place is to track that very carefully so that as a young man, and very few select women, come into the police and army, we in fact now have a good database to start from to track them.

There have not been large numbers. There's literally been only a handful since I've been there, of those that we have not allowed into the army or police based on the biometrics. But in fact, it has raised the red flag on a few cases. Again, just a handful, where we've gone back in and done a little more look at a person's background based on something that was there in this biometrical database.

So that's the method by which we're working toward, so that we preclude having somebody come in that should not be serving.

The second part of that is this idea of leadership. When we said our number one focus is working on leadership, if young men and women are properly led, both in the police and the army, what we find in any military system or any police system, then you normally you build the allegiance, the trust, the confidence, so that they want to serve in the organization of which they're a part. And so therefore leadership is very important.

We don't have a lot of the mid-grade level leaders today. They are not resident. It takes years to build mid-grade level leaders. It does in any army or police force. You know, a short 16-week course sets the conditions, but it takes years of experience and mentoring to produce a mid-grade level leader. So we're putting a lot of focus in that are there too because we understand that not only will it drive down attrition, it will increase retention and also instil in those young men and women a much greater desire to serve the people of Afghanistan.

MODERATOR: Quick follow-up David? Go ahead with the follow-up. Go ahead.

Q: Just to follow-up, the question really was not so much how you're screening people before they come in, if people leave what then happens to them? Is there any evidence that people that you're training then go over to the insurgency better trained then they were before?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: Obviously we don't track what each person does after they leave this service in the military, but what I can tell you is based on the fact that we have biographic data, if, in fact, somebody were picked up and identified as a Taliban member, an insurgent and we're given biometrical data we'd be able to determine if they had previously served in the army and the police. Again, the databases are fairly new. Only been doing it for a short period of time, but in fact, I think longer term there'll be some indication.

But otherwise, we just don't track people after they leave the military and there's nothing I've seen yet that would indicate what you're asking about.

MODERATOR: I think you had a question in the front?

Q: Nawab Khan from the Kuwait News Agency KUNA. General, you said that here were 20 nations involved in the training of... training missions in Afghanistan. From these 20 countries are there any from the Arab and Muslim world involved, or will you call on the Arab and Muslim world to get involved in the training mission? Thank you.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: That's a good question. We, in fact, have a couple of ongoing initiatives right now that we are looking at. There is an ongoing dialogue between the Ministry of Interior and the country of Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey where they have had discussions about training.

I do know that today the country of Afghanistan, on bilateral arrangements, has people training on their own, that they've worked with other nations in that part of the world, about 12 different nations. Again, not something that's done through NATO Training Mission, but they, on a bilateral basis, have both officers and NCOs from the police and the army and other nations, not several hundred altogether probably, that are training in that part of the world through some sort of professionalized training, whether it be education or professional skills training.

One thing we're doing right now is recently Turkey, for example. Turkey came up to us in December and said “we would like to train some Afghan army soldiers inside of Turkey. Would you be willing to assist us?” And we said well, we'd be willing to move the soldiers to Turkey if once they arrive there you take care of and provide for everything from that point. You do the training, the transportation, the facilities, the ammunition, instructors, you do everything once they're inside of Turkey. We'll continue to pay their salaries, but we'll move them there to Turkey and you take control of the training and all support requirements associated with that, and then after 30 days we'll pick them up and bring them back and at the same time drop off another group of soldiers.

So we're on our third month of doing that with the country of Turkey. So yes, we are looking at and exploring different types of options and we, of course, very much want to have that part of the world engaged and a part of and be associated with the training and the education of both the army and the police forces.

MODERATOR: Pascal. Pascal.

Q: Yes, I'm Pascal Mallet from Agence France-Presse, AFP. General, to make it very simple, and follow-up to my colleague of Reuters, David, on figures. You said, I understood well, that about 1,200 additional trainers and instructors were requests, but that already 700 have been provided, or am I wrong?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: No, in this last force generation conference that took place last week there are pledges and commitment of... does somebody have the exact number? Five-forty-one. Total pledges. Out of the 1,200 or so that we were looking for in this last force generation conference there were commitments and pledges of 541.

Q: Five hundred... but the total that you would like to have under your responsibility would be then how many? Because 1,200, plus how many today?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: That leaves us... the total number of trainers altogether that are uniformed personnel, both police and army is about 5,200.

Q: Before or after the 1,200?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: I'm sorry, the total amount that we would want in the very end would be 5,200. Today we have in NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan approximately... do you have that data there?

UNIDENTIFIED: The current shortage is about 1,901.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: Okay, I can give you specific data. Our current shortage today is about 1,901 to be exact. We've mitigated that through using some contractors and bilateral arrangements to where then we have a delta of about roughly 1,200.

We went into this CJSOR conference last week asking for 1,200 instructors and trainers. We had pledges and commitments last week of 541. That's going to leave you a delta there of about 660 that we're still looking for. And of course, those pledges and commitments we're still going to look to arrive in Afghanistan, so that we can employ them in the country of Afghanistan.

MODERATOR: Just here.

Q: General, Martinez de Rituerto with El País from Spain. The army has already gone through a serious exercise of its capabilities now in Marjah. What is your assessment about how the Afghan soldiers have been doing? And what are the shortfalls? Thank you. If at all?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: No, that's a great question. And the reason why a lot of times people want to talk just statistics and so last week I spent Monday and Tuesday down in Helmand province in Marjah, actually talking with and being around the Afghan National Police forces and the Afghan Army soldiers so that I could see the end product and how it's operating down there in that area.

I would say most of us saw it performing better than I think the expectations were. Then you say, what are those expectations? What I would say, the expectations we had were perhaps not as promising as we saw them actually doing. If I took the commando unit that I saw down there, exceptional. The commandos, we have seven battalions or Kandaks or commandos today, we're building two more for a total of nine, they performed superbly. Well trained, well led, well organized, superb organization.

The ANCOP, the Afghan National Civil Order Police, that were brought in and are being part of the hold phase down there, I would say are performing very well, but they went through a little retraining program by coalition forces just before being employed and behind the combat forces who had just done the clearing operations. So they're now part of this whole phase in certain areas and they're doing very well.

There's no question there's room for growth. It's like any army. You never quit growing, you never quite developing, you never quite training. It's something you do throughout your entire career. And that's something we're trying to instil also in the Afghan Army and the police forces so they understand even though you may have gone through basic training and collective training, when you get out to the field you have to continue training and growing and developing. You have to go back to leadership courses for your mid-grade level leaders. It's a life-long process of growing and developing and educating them.

But back to your basic question, overall the forces performed, I would say, better than most had expected them to, which is very promising for the possibility of what can be, as we continue to move forward from here.

Q: Klaus (inaudible) from Financial Times, Germany. Three questions about the training itself. First question is, is there a huge interest among Afghans to let's say to become policemen or whatever? So do you have, let's say, a lot of people who really want to become that? Is there a lot of interest?

Second question is, could you just tell me a little bit what the typical training day looks like, let's say if there is a schedule. Is it eight hours, is it ten hours? What do you focus on?

And the third question is, what is the main challenge? What is the main difficulty when you educate these people?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: Well, first of all, I'd say on recruits if you had asked me that in November I would have said we're very challenged, and I'm not sure that we're going to be able to make the growth numbers that we're being asked to do.

Last September only about 880 Afghans, recruits, came into their army. About 880. In December it was 7,800. That's about almost a 800 percent-plus increase in the amount of recruits. In the months of December, January and February we've recruited well... and I say we. We haven't done anything, the Afghan leadership has. The Afghan leadership has recruited well over 7,000 young men, some women, into their army each of those months. And to the point where they have recruited so many in the last three months that we have not been able to put everyone right away into training because we just didn't have that throughput capacity built to handle that large number of recruits.

If the Afghan leadership can sustain that kind of recruiting numbers the amount of growth that we do in the army can be unlimited, if they can keep producing those kind of numbers. It's phenomenal what they're doing.

They didn't do it earlier last year, but starting in December, January and February they have three months now they've been doing it. I would say a trend may be starting that they're proving.

Now these are traditionally the highest recruiting months anyway, so I don't want to give the false perception that they're not. They are. Traditionally December, January, February, March are the highest recruiting months.

However, we have never seen these numbers of recruits during this time of the year ever before. So that's the key difference. So we, in fact, are getting more than enough recruits to come into the army and into the police forces that we need right now.

As far as a training day goes the training day, by their standards, is a pretty full day. They're up about 5:30 in the morning and they go pretty much to about three or four o'clock in the afternoon. They go about five and a half days a week. So it's a fairly full day for them. Especially for these young men that have never done something like this before.

Our biggest challenge in the training base is the literacy. Most of the young recruits that come in, we have about a 14 percent literacy rate, which means of these young soldiers coming in, not the officers and NCOs now, but the soldiers. About 14 percent are literate, which means that 86 percent really can't read or write. So that means everything we do is done on a show-and-tell basis. We show and tell them how to do it and they hands-on repeat it and do it. And that iterative process continues. It's not like we can hand them a manual and say, read this or go read these instructions because they don't have the capability to do that. Eighty-six percent of them do not.

So what we're doing, it's a show-and-tell way of instructing. Therefore, you need a higher percentage of instructors because you need to be able to let them repeat it multiple times with some good instruction associated with it when you're dealing with that kind of illiteracy challenge.

Now what we are going to do here towards the end of this month, we're going to bring literacy, very basic literacy into the training programs.

Q: (Inaudible...)?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: Yes.

Q: (Inaudible...)?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: No, we're going to bring in Dari for them.

Q: (Inaudible...).

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: Yeah. And what we're going to do is we're going to teach them letters, alphabet, numbers and how to write their name. I mean, that's our goal, is that everybody will come out of basic training being able to understand all the letters of the alphabet, how to write their name and understand the numbers. Which is a major step forward.

And then the intent is, longer term here, to put literacy programs out into the army itself so that we continue increasing their levels of literacy. We're not expecting to make them high school graduates. We're just expecting to get them to basic literacy standards of about third grade over a time period, because then they'll take tremendous pride, self-pride in who they are as a person. They'll remember that it came from their government, that gave them this uplift in who they are as a person, and they'll feel a much greater sense of ownership in the whole process and a commitment to their country.

I've got to tell you, the thing that surprises me, I walked in being told there's two different languages, Dari and Pashto. There's the challenge of literacy. You're going to find out that when you get there too that people don't really understand this nationalistic fever of being a part of a country. You know, they're all very tribal in their nature.

Yet, in fact, I go out and talk to almost all these new recruits coming in and I wander through the crowds with my translator talking to them, and they all want to serve their country. I really thought most I would hear was, I'm glad you've brought the new pay in now that it gives me a basic standard of living. I want to serve the country cause I can have a nice basic standard of living now. There are $165 a month we pay them when you first come in.

But that's not the case at all. Most of them say I want to serve my country, I want to be a part of the Afghan Army. For any of you who haven't been out there I would say please come and we'll take you out and put you into the training centres and let you just talk with these young men and some women we have. And experience it yourself. Absolutely unattended, we'll send you out there and just let you wander around.

I think most of the press people that I've been able to get out there and spend some time in a training base walk away really surprised too at how enthusiastic these young men are about serving their country. I mean, they really want to. So the key is, how do we keep that energy, that excitement that brought them in, instilled in them throughout the process and out into the army? And again, that goes back to leadership. And having the right leaders out there with those soldiers and those policemen.

MODERATOR: Okay, we have a question in the front here.

Q: General, Ahto Lobjakas, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. I don't want to be a spoilsport but following on for what you've just said, are you aware, or are you concerned about the fact that although you seem to have about 40 percent of the army now Pashtun ethnically representative as far as the country goes, these Pashtuns would mostly be recruited for the northern and eastern areas, and very few of them, if any, come for the south, which coincidentally is where you're having your biggest problem in keeping the country together? Is this something you... is this something that registers with you? Is this something that you actively address in your policies? Thank you.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: Yeah, that's a great question. We are very, very concerned about that. And it's an ongoing dialogue we have with the Afghan leadership.

The question really being asked is, do you track ethnicity inside the army ranks? And the answer is yes, we do. Do you track it by officers, non-commissioned officers and enlisted? And the answer is yes, we do.

And then the next question is, do you track it too by provinces? And the answer is, yes, we do. And so what are the results that you see and are you satisfied with that? And the answer is no, we're not satisfied with the number of Pashtuns that we see coming into the army from the south. Although we have a good Pashtun representation if you were just to look at the ethnicity of the army and say how many Pashtuns do you have, it's quote/unquote, fairly representative of what most people think is the percentage of Pashtuns in the country. But the challenge is only about two or three percent come for the south. And that, in fact, if what we're trying to change is the dynamics of this country to make the southern Pashtuns feel more a part of this nation and take greater ownership in it, we're going to have to do a better job of recruiting down there.

And so we've had long talks with Minister Wardak, General Bismillah Khan Mohammadi and about how as this Marjah operation moves forward that people down there see the difference that's taking place, because it's not about a military operation, it's about a government bringing basic services back to their people and taking ownership of the area and being held responsible to the people's basic needs, of which the military helps set those conditions. But it's the governance piece that's going to be critical.

And so as they watch this and see this the effort that we want to make now is to go in behind that and try to get some of the young Pashtuns from the south to be willing to join their army and their police forces. We have to do better.

We have a small media advertisement campaign that we're going to launch in about another 30 days down in the south encouraging Pashtuns from the south to join the police and the army and so we are hopeful that that will help change some of the dynamics and take us from two or three percent to a much higher percentage, because it needs to be representative of their whole nation.

MODERATOR: A question in the front.

Q: (Inaudible...) News, Japanese Daily Newspaper. Last year when I went to Afghanistan there was talks that Taliban paid better than the ANP or ANA, giving them more motivation over the young Afghans, but the salary situation has improved?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WILLIAM B. CALDWELL: Yes. The new pay system that was just put into place in December pays a basic recruit in the army or the police $165 a month. Then if they're in a hazardous area like down in the south, they get an additional $45 or so extra a month above that. And then if they've been in the army a certain amount of years then they get some additional longevity pay.

What we were shooting for with the $165 is to give them enough money that they had the ability to live a decent standard of life, not exceptional, but just bare minimum decent standard of life within Afghanistan. And that $165 does it by all the economic equation and factors that were utilized to come to that amount.

Because what we wanted to do was have a soldier and a policeman be able to serve their country and not have to do anything else to provide for their family than just serve their country. I mean, which is a reasonable expectation. We do it in any other nation today.

And then that would also help reduce corruption because then there'd be less inclined to look for ways to make a little additional income to support their family just so they could feed them.

So this money is enough that a young soldier can, in fact, feed their family now. Especially once they've served a little longer and they get promoted because the pay starts going up and longevity pay starts going up.

We are very much aware of generally what a Taliban foot soldier makes. And it various. Obviously in reports from around the country. But we are, if you were to try and make some comparable amount we are comparable to probably what we hear and understand most foot soldiers will make doing something for the Taliban.

So what we have hoped has been created, the Afghan government has created, is the ability for a young man or woman now to join and serve their country and be able to provide basic subsistence for their family rather than have to turn to some other way of life to make some money.