Elite Afghan soldiers stand in formation at the School of Excellence, where Afghan commandos and special-operations soldiers receive training on Feb. 27 at Camp Morehead in Afghanistan. (Tim Craig/The Washington Post)
An Afghan soldier stands on a junked Russian tank left behind after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Camp Morehead and ANASOC are located on the site of a former Soviet base. (Tim Craig/The Washington Post)
CAMP MOREHEAD, Afghanistan — Sgt. Jawed Hazara, with an elite Afghan army commando unit, chugged an energy drink, grabbed his M-4 assault rifle and hopped into the driver’s seat of a military pickup truck. The 24-year-old was directing a convoy of commandos on night patrol in the southern outskirts of Kabul.
“Now, we do my job,” Hazara said as he fumbled with his radio and sped off the base. “By the grace of God, I will do a good job.”
Indeed, if large swaths of Afghanistan are to be saved this year, that responsibility is likely to rest on how Hazara and 11,500 other Afghan commandos perform as their country staggers into the 15th year of the Taliban insurgency.
Despite more than $35 billion in U.S. support since the Taliban was driven from power here in 2001, the regular Afghan army is still broadly criticized as ineffective because of defections, timidity and an inconsistent command-and-control network. But U.S. and Afghan officials believe the army’s commando and special-forces units can fill the void and should be sufficient to reassure nervous Afghans that the Taliban won’t be able to fight its way back into power.
“All of the things you read about in the news — the units keeping things from going very wrong” are the commandos and special forces, said U.S. Army Col. Joe Duncan, commander of the Special Operations Advisory Group, which supports the Afghan National Army’s Special Operations Command (ANASOC). “You won’t find commandos laying down their arms and refusing to fight.”
Afghan commandos eat lunch near the headquarters for the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command (ANASOC) at Camp Morehead in Afghanistan. (Tim Craig/The Washington Post)
But the Afghan army’s heavy reliance on its commandos is controversial, amid sharp disagreements over the effective deployment of elite forces. And especially this year, the stakes could not be higher for the commandos, as well as Afghanistan’s broader security force, which comprises about 320,000 soldiers and police officers.
Afghan intelligence assessments suggest that the Taliban has between 45,000 and 65,000 fighters.
