Afghanistan's Oversized Army Can't Read or Fight

Clint Eastwood is no Clausewitz -- or even much of a convention speaker -- but he was onto something when he intoned, in "Magnum Force," that "a man's got to know his limitations."

That lesson seems to have been lost on planners for Afghanistan's post-occupation security forces, envisioned at a strength of 352,000 in the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. The latest evidence of the gap between vision and reality comes from a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction on the force's level of literacy: According to one Bloomberg News story, more than half the force's members will probably still be illiterate after a $200 million literacy program.

In a country where only one-third of the population, and just slightly more than one-tenth of military recruits, can read or write, building a literate army was going to be a tall order. Back in 2009, when force levels were initially pegged at 148,000, NATO trainers set a not exactly lofty goal of graduating 50 percent of recruits with a 3rd-grade literacy level. Then, planned force levels more than doubled, and funding for literacy training stayed the same. Notwithstanding the program's catalogued defects, you can see where this unhappy math is going.