KABUL: In powdery desert sand to the east of Kabul, the west’s main weapon against Afghanistan’s notorious regional warlords is slowly being honed. US special forces are trying to create an Afghan army that will have a national sense of identity.

“Don’t just grab his gun — shoot him!” shouts an American instructor as the pointman in a squad of eight Afghan volunteers advances gingerly across the sand, then leaps into a wadi and seizes a Kalashnikov rifle from one of four “enemy” who pop out of hiding. No blanks are fired in their make-believe exercises. When they point their guns the trainees merely shout: “Bang bang.”

The first two light infantry battalions in this embryonic army are going through a 10-week course. Yet it is hard to see how this effort can train enough soldiers fast and properly enough to fill Afghanistan’s desperate security vacuum.

The Kabul-based government of Hamid Karzai is already having problems appointing officials to civilian jobs in the provinces. Strongmen like Ismail Khan in Herat or Abdul Rashid Dostum in Mazar-i-Sharif run their regions like private fiefdoms, charging customs duties from traders and passing little to the national exchequer. They refuse Kabul’s nominees for key posts. Getting these warlords to disarm their militias will be trickier unless they are challenged by superior force.

A United Nations-mandated international security assistance force (ISAF), with 5,000 foreign peacekeepers, was deployed to Afghanistan after the Taliban collapse. But the United States insisted it remain in Kabul. Although the Afghan government and senior UN officials would like to see ISAF extended to other regions, Washington blocks this.

Now pressure is mounting for change, after the recent loya jirga showed that the regional warlords carry undue political weight. Senior US senators from both parties last week called for an extension of ISAF. A Washington think-tank, the Henry L Stimson Centre, said ISAF — headed by Turkey — should be quadrupled to 18,500 troops and deployed to seven other cities besides Kabul.

The new Afghan army is meant to be multi-ethnic so that the troops develop loyalty to the country as a whole, like the royalist army of the 1970s and the communist army of the 1980s. US trainers say they keep no figures but random interviews with three volunteers revealed two Tajiks and an Uzbek. There appears to be no ideological bar. One trainee had fought in the forces of the communist President Mohammed Najibullah, which resisted the mujahideen for three years after Soviet troops withdrew.

In spite of the claims of multi-ethnicity, Pakhtoons suspect the army is weighted against them at officer level. They see that 90 of the 100 officers promoted by General Mohammed Fahim, the defence minister who led the largely Tajik forces of the Northern Alliance into Kabul after the Taliban withdrew, are Tajiks from the Panjshir valley.

The biggest contradiction is the presence of Fahim’s own forces. He keeps an estimated arsenal of 300 tanks and 500 armoured personnel carriers north of the city and in the Panjshir valley. In Kabul he has 10,000 troops. Fahim would like to make them the core of the national army. The fact that he keeps such a large force in the capital, although ISAF is meant to run security, is a deliberate show of strength.

With troops from 19 nations, some international officials criticize ISAF for weakness. “In essence, it is just a police force. It has very light weapons and nothing more impressive than armoured Land Rovers,” says a senior UN adviser. “If Fahim wanted to mount a coup, they could not stop him.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.