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Afghanistan may struggle to recruit enough soldiers for its armed forces, but it’s swimming in generals.
The country has close to 1,000 officers of general rank on its books — more than the United States, whose military is three times as large. And off the books? No one knows.
New names are added to the roster at a rate far out of proportion to battlefield realities, where the Afghan armed forces — the army, national police and intelligence forces, numbering 350,000 in all — have been steadily losing soldiers and territory to the Taliban. Meanwhile, retirements are rare.
The United States government, which picks up much of the tab for the Afghan military, can’t pin down the number of generals. “We still don’t know how many police and how many soldiers we’re paying salaries for,” said John F. Sopko, the United States special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. “We don’t even know how many generals. It is pretty pathetic, and here we are, 15 years into this.”
It’s nice work if you can get it, with fairly good pay, fringe benefits and a pension. So how do you become an Afghan general?
Some of them have climbed the command ladder for decades, working hard and surviving purges by successive governments. But others took much easier routes.
Suppose you are the young son of a former warlord who has just died. Along with condolences, the government will make you a general, as if the rank were hereditary. Commissions are also handed out as political thank-yous to male relatives of important figures. And in the golden age of general-making — the 1990s civil war — they were sometimes distributed in lieu of pay.
In the anarchy that followed the Soviet withdrawal and the fall of the Communist regime, hundreds of generals were born overnight. Sibghatullah Mujadidi, the interim president of the mujahedeen government, which was backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, had little to offer the disheveled fighters who crowded his waiting room, so an aide kept note of whoever asked to become a general.
According to Abdul Hafiz Mansour, who ran state television at the time and is now a member of Parliament, a confidant of the president — often his son — would turn up at the studios every evening to hand the news anchor a list of new generals to declare. One night, he said, there were 38 names.
“The list would be handwritten on a plain sheet of paper — there was no logo, no official stationery,” Mr. Mansour said.
The list sometimes grew mysteriously on the way from the president’s office to the studio. Mr. Mansour said he knew of current generals who had gotten their rank in those days through a little clandestine photocopying and the stroke of a pen.
In response to the TV announcements, rival factions across the country would summarily declare their own generals. The former warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who now serves as vice president of Afghanistan, awarded stars to many of the men closest to him, and even printed his own currency to pay them. The joke was that among General Dostum’s bodyguards, there were no colonels.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/w...y-do.html?smid=tw-nytimesworld&smtyp=cur&_r=0
@pakistani342
The country has close to 1,000 officers of general rank on its books — more than the United States, whose military is three times as large. And off the books? No one knows.
New names are added to the roster at a rate far out of proportion to battlefield realities, where the Afghan armed forces — the army, national police and intelligence forces, numbering 350,000 in all — have been steadily losing soldiers and territory to the Taliban. Meanwhile, retirements are rare.
The United States government, which picks up much of the tab for the Afghan military, can’t pin down the number of generals. “We still don’t know how many police and how many soldiers we’re paying salaries for,” said John F. Sopko, the United States special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. “We don’t even know how many generals. It is pretty pathetic, and here we are, 15 years into this.”
It’s nice work if you can get it, with fairly good pay, fringe benefits and a pension. So how do you become an Afghan general?
Some of them have climbed the command ladder for decades, working hard and surviving purges by successive governments. But others took much easier routes.
Suppose you are the young son of a former warlord who has just died. Along with condolences, the government will make you a general, as if the rank were hereditary. Commissions are also handed out as political thank-yous to male relatives of important figures. And in the golden age of general-making — the 1990s civil war — they were sometimes distributed in lieu of pay.
In the anarchy that followed the Soviet withdrawal and the fall of the Communist regime, hundreds of generals were born overnight. Sibghatullah Mujadidi, the interim president of the mujahedeen government, which was backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, had little to offer the disheveled fighters who crowded his waiting room, so an aide kept note of whoever asked to become a general.
According to Abdul Hafiz Mansour, who ran state television at the time and is now a member of Parliament, a confidant of the president — often his son — would turn up at the studios every evening to hand the news anchor a list of new generals to declare. One night, he said, there were 38 names.
“The list would be handwritten on a plain sheet of paper — there was no logo, no official stationery,” Mr. Mansour said.
The list sometimes grew mysteriously on the way from the president’s office to the studio. Mr. Mansour said he knew of current generals who had gotten their rank in those days through a little clandestine photocopying and the stroke of a pen.
In response to the TV announcements, rival factions across the country would summarily declare their own generals. The former warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who now serves as vice president of Afghanistan, awarded stars to many of the men closest to him, and even printed his own currency to pay them. The joke was that among General Dostum’s bodyguards, there were no colonels.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/w...y-do.html?smid=tw-nytimesworld&smtyp=cur&_r=0
@pakistani342
It's only a matter of time before Pakistan teaches Kabul a lesson. Before you square up to Pakistan please ask your paper tiger generals to learn spit shine shoes...this will be there occupation in the near future for colluding with India
