DRUG USE, POOR DISCIPLINE AFFLICT AFGHANISTAN'S ARMY

KHADAKALAY, Afghanistan-It took a few tense seconds for U.S. and
Afghan soldiers to realize that a sudden burst of gunfire and
explosions one recent afternoon wasn't aimed at them but at a
different patrol a mile away.

Everyone relaxed. A U.S. lieutenant resumed chatting with village
elders. And four Afghan soldiers leaned back on some idle farm
equipment and lit up a joint in full view of U.S. troops and an
American reporter.

Use of marijuana, opium and heroin among Afghan troops, even while on
patrol, is just one of the challenges coalition forces face in working
with the Afghan National Army as they begin a major push against the
Taliban in and around the southern city of Kandahar.

U.S. soldiers complain that poor discipline, drug use, a trigger-happy
attitude and general carelessness by Afghan soldiers are putting
American lives in danger and could ultimately undermine efforts to win
over wary Afghans, the main aim of the campaign.

The U.S. strategy for leaving Afghanistan is heavily dependent on
building capable Afghan military and police forces that can take over.
At a conference in Kabul last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai won
international backing for his forces to take the lead in securing
Afghanistan by 2014.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staffs, backed
Mr. Karzai's deadline in comments in Kabul this weekend, but he
acknowledged that significant challenges first must be overcome.

"It will take a continued concerted effort to train Afghan security
forces to succeed here and to take this responsibility," Adm. Mullen
said. "It's well within reach to achieve the outcome that President
Karzai set for 2014. I wouldn't say it's easily achievable. We'll have
to work pretty hard to do it."

An Afghan defense ministry spokesman, Gen. Zahir Azimi, said there
were few drug or discipline problems in the Afghan army. The marijuana
smoking on the patrol was a rare one-off incident and was being
investigated, he said, adding that if the soldiers were found to have
been getting high on duty, they would be discharged.

U.S. soldiers here have sometimes been disciplined for marijuana use,
though commanders say they don't know of any cases of U.S. troops
openly smoking pot while on patrol in a hostile area.

The latest evidence of discipline problems within the Afghan forces
came to light this past weekend in the trove of 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 just two
days earlier 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; it wasn't clear whether he survived.

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 said on Monday. The
leaked documents described at least 72. The NATO officer described
such fights and shootings as a consistent problem.

Problem soldiers most often are new recruits, pushed quickly out of
basic training to fill recruitment goals, say U.S. and Afghan
officials. The Afghan army has grown rapidly to almost 134,000, while
the police force is quickly closing in on 109,000, a target set for
October. By the end of 2011, the goal is 171,600 soldiers and 134,000
police.

In contrast to the fresh recruits, many veteran Afghan enlisted men
and officers have fought for one side or the other during the 30 years
of war in their country. They remain eager to battle the Taliban, and
the U.S. soldiers who have fought alongside them praise their bravery
in battle, even if they often lack the training and discipline to
fight together as a cohesive unit. Top U.S. commanders also praise the
elite Afghan commando units as highly effective forces.

"They're bulldogs," said Staff Sgt. James Kazukietas of the 101st
Airborne Division, deployed in areas outside Kandahar. "They're not
always taking aimed shots, but they're taking shots. They just need to
be refined."

U.S. and allied commanders have presented as one of their public
messages the notion that Afghans are full partners and are leading
many operations.

They used this message during February's offensive in the southern
area of Marjah, where coalition forces did much of the heavy lifting,
and are now pressing it as the coalition begins an effort to secure
Kandahar and the surrounding Taliban-held hinterlands, the heartland
of the insurgency.

As thousands of newly deployed U.S. soldiers take up positions across
the southern region, almost every American unit is being paired with
an Afghan one. They are sharing bases, going on combined patrols and
planning operations together.

With the primary focus placed on protecting civilians and propping up
Afghanistan's weak government, rather than on killing Taliban, Afghan
forces must begin taking a lead role, U.S. commanders say.

Yet they often lack the ability and wherewithal, according to Western
officials and experts. And even when offering praise of veteran Afghan
troops, U.S. soldiers often end up criticizing what they consider the
occasional belligerence of their comrades.

Consider a recent meeting between U.S. and Afghan officers at a small
base west of Kandahar, Combat Outpost Ashoqeh. The Americans were
trying to plan an operation to rout the Taliban from a nearby village
and hoped to launch the mini-offensive within days.

There were problems, said the Afghan commander, Capt. Safi Ahmad. He
would need some men from another Afghan army company, but its
commander didn't want to spare them. There had been some kind of
shooting a few days earlier between men from the two Afghan units, so
they would have trouble working together, he said.

The U.S. officers nodded patiently. They tried, without success, to
get a clearer explanation of the shooting. They left the meeting
resigned to postponing the operation until at least late September,
after the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan that starts in about
two weeks.

"It may take even longer. We don't know," said Capt. Brant Auge, the
U.S. commander at the outpost.

Earlier this month at Combat Outpost Ashoqeh, U.S. soldiers thought
they were going to watch Afghan soldiers test-fire mortars on a
mountain behind their shared base. Instead, they found the Afghans
getting ready to bombard a village that is frequently used by Taliban
fighters to launch attacks.

No Taliban attack was taking place at the time, so shelling the
village was more likely to kill civilians than insurgents. Capt.
Ahmad, the Afghan commander, said later that his brigade commander had
told him to shell the village in revenge for recent attacks.

After frantic calls by U.S. and Afghan officers up their respective
chains of command, Capt. Ahmad was ordered to stand down.

"They have some problems," said Capt. Daniel Luckett,
second-in-command of a U.S. company at the outpost. But "we don't need
great-all we need is good enough."

Afghanistan's government doesn't disclose the number of its soldiers
and police killed. But officials say the deaths are widely believed to
far exceed the number of coalition fatalities, which stand at 392 this
year, according to the website icasualties.org.

A report on the Afghan army by the International Crisis Group, a
Brussels-based think tank, described a force riddled by ethnic and
political divisions and plagued by corruption.

"As a result, the army is a fragmented force, serving disparate
interests, and far from attaining the unified national character
needed to confront numerous security threats," the report said.

In Zhari, a district that includes the village of Khadakalay, most
people are Pashtun, the ethnic group at the core of the Taliban. But
many Afghan officers deployed in the area are ethnic Tajiks from the
north.

At Combat Outpost Ashoqeh, Capt. Ahmad proudly displayed, in the
windshields of his Humvees, pictures of the famed Tajik anti-Taliban
militia leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was murdered by al Qaeda
assassins on Sept. 10, 2001. Mr. Massoud is a hero in Tajik areas but
despised by many Pashtuns.

As for the Afghan police, many Afghan citizens appear to loathe them,
considering them little better than uniformed thieves and addicts.
U.S. soldiers say that in Zhari, police openly grow marijuana and
shoot heroin at some stations.

At a police post on the edge of Senjaray, the district's largest
village, the commander, who goes by the single name Sharabuddin, said
the villagers would "cut our heads off" if U.S. soldiers left. His
eyes were bloodshot, his clothes filthy, his manner indifferent; he
mumbled through much of the interview.

A spokesman for Afghanistan's Interior Ministry, Zemeri Bashary,
acknowledged the police face "difficulties" in combating corruption,
theft, abuse of power and drug problems. He said he wasn't aware of
specific allegations of drug use in Zhari district.

In an effort to improve Afghan forces, U.S. officials are training
more Afghan noncommissioned officers, the disciplinarians in Western
militaries. U.S. officials also try to lead by example. At the main
base in Zhari, the U.S. commander has ordered his troops to salute
superior officers-an exceedingly rare practice at war-zone outposts-in
order to give the Afghans a view of military discipline.

Basing Afghan and U.S. soldiers together is presenting unforeseen
cultural challenges. At one outpost in Zhari, according to coalition
soldiers, some Afghan soldiers turned showers into toilets and some
were found sexually pleasuring one another in the weight-lifting room.

There have been rare instances of Afghan soldiers attacking coalition
soldiers or contractors, including two in the past month. The latest
came last week, when an Afghan soldier at a training range in the
north shot and killed two U.S. contractors and another Afghan soldier
before being gunned down himself. The shooting began after a fight
between the men, officials said.

In the village of Khadakalay, the four Afghan soldiers who were
smoking marijuana while on patrol had recently been sent to replace
men who were wounded or went AWOL, said Capt. Ahmad.

After the patrol returned to its base, U.S. Sgt. Kazukietas was livid.
"They were just sitting there blazing away on a joint," he said to his
soldiers at a post-patrol debriefing. A few other U.S. soldiers said
they'd seen some of the eight Afghan soldiers on the patrol smack
children who were playfully begging pens from the Americans.

"They were the worst we've ever had," Sgt. Kazukietas said. "They're
going to end up with a reputation like the police."