The Problems with Ghost Soldiers

Unethical behavior in the military is criminal, financially ruinous, wastes time through endless training programs, and undermines the "integrity" part of JJDIDTIEBUCKLE. It also degrades readiness and lethality. The most glaring example of how unethical behavior and corruption undermines the operational capability of a military force was the problem of the “ghost soldiers” of the Afghan National Army.

The Afghan National Army (ANA) was created by President Hamid Karzai in December 2001, following the US invasion on 7 October 2001. The ANA was intended to provide security, combat the Taliban insurgency, and support the government's stability. Training for the ANA was split between various NATO countries, including the US, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

U.S. Army Sgt. Kevon Campbell uses a Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment to check the identity of an Afghan villager in southern Ghazni province, Afghanistan, 8 April 2012. Photo by Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod.

The US was the primary source of funding for the ANA, totaling over $88 billion dollars from 2002 to 2021. The size of the ANA in 2019 was approximately 195,000 soldiers but faced the problems of high desertion rates (around 25% in 2009) and high illiteracy rates (approximately 90%).

“Ghost soldiers” were an ongoing problem for the ANA. These were either deserters, deceased individuals, or completely fictitious troops, whose continued presence on the rosters allowed corrupt commanders and other officials to embezzle their salaries and their equipment.

Similar problems existed in the Afghan National Police (ANP) as well as in the education department. One report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) noted that there were not only ghost students but also thousands of ghost teachers and even hundreds of ghost schools. (Sopko, 2017, p. 4-5)

According to the 30 April 2016 report from SIGAR, “neither the United States nor its Afghan allies know how many Afghan soldiers and police actually exist, how many are in fact available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities.” (Sopko, 2016, p. 66)

To solve this problem, the U.S. government instituted a biometric ID system starting in 2005. In 2006, a defense contractor named Viisage was granted $10 million to manufacture a device called the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE), and by 2007 the device was used in Afghanistan to eliminate ghost soldiers (Atherton, 2022).

The data collected through HIIDE and paperwork such as enlistment applications captured not only a recruit’s name and date/place of birth, but also “details on the individuals’ military specialty and career trajectory, as well as sensitive relational data such as the names of their father, uncles, and grandfathers, as well as the names of the two tribal elders per recruit who served as guarantors for their enlistment” (Guo & Noori, 2021)

All this information was stored in a database called the Afghan Personnel and Pay System (APPS). Used by both the Afghan Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense to pay the members of the ANA and ANP, it grew to contain information on half a million members of the army and police forces.

U.S. forces in Afghanistan not only wanted this biometric system to eliminate ghost soldiers but also to identify enemies. “Knowing who belongs in a village—who they are, what they do, to whom they are related, and where they live — all helps to separate the locals from the insurgents” (Branson, 2011, p. 23).

According to (Guo & Noori, 2021), the database came with no deletion or data retention policy, even for extreme contingencies. Such as national takeover by the Taliban.

Even before the American withdrawal in August 2021, the system’s security was compromised. For example, in a series of kidnappings in May 2016, the Taliban captured between over 200 people traveling on the Kunduz-Takhar highway. While being held in a nearby mosque, HIIDE was used on the prisoners, and 20 were killed for being members of the army or police. (TOLOnews, 2016)

When the biometric identification system was used for its intended purpose, it produced staggering results. For example, in 2019 there was a purge of 42,000 ghost soldiers due to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANSDF) switching “to counting only troops validated as existing by biometrics, rather than relying on the numbers reported by field commanders.” (Sisk, 2019)

This purge emphasized the extent that ANSDF commanders were inflating their ranks, and it corroborated findings by SIGAR as well particular instances reported by Helmand’s provincial council. In 2016, for example, in Helmand Province, 40% of the listed troops were nonexistent, with one base of 100 soldiers having only 50 present and another of 300 having just 15 during an attack (Rasmussen, 2016). The purge of 42,000 ghost soldiers showed that the ANA was a far smaller force in reality than on paper.

The rapid takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in August 2021 was made possible by these inflated numbers. Khalid Payenda, the former finance minister of Afghanistan, stated that “most of the 300,000 troops and police on the government's books did not exist,” and that the numbers may have been inflated more than six times. (BBC, 2021)

The U.S. no longer controls Afghanistan, and there is a real possibility of reprisals by the Taliban against members of the ANSDF. APPS and HIIDE are supposedly secure, but the Afghan government was introducing its own biometrics ID system when it fell. Their system included ANSDF membership information, and there is some evidence that the Taliban have access to it. (Roy, 2021).

In conclusion, unethical behavior and corruption can lead to combat ineffectiveness even to the point of losing a war. The ongoing problems of biometrics systems under Taliban control show that timid leadership and half-hearted solutions rarely achieve solutions.

 

Bibliography

Atherton, K. (2022, 9 February). The enduring risks posed by biometric identification systems. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-enduring-risks-posed-by-biometric-identification-systems/

BBC. (2021, 10 November). Afghanistan's ghost soldiers undermined fight against Taliban - ex-official. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59230564

Branson, D. (2011, April). The Commander’s Guide to Biometrics in Afghanistan. CJIATF 435. https://info.publicintelligence.net/CALL-AfghanBiometrics.pdf

Guo, E. & Noori, H. (2021, 30 August). This is the real story of the Afghan biometric databases abandoned to the Taliban. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/30/1033941/afghanistan-biometric-databases-us-military-40-data-points/

Rasmussen, S. (2016, 17 May). Afghanistan's 'ghost soldiers': thousands enlisted to fight Taliban don't exist. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/17/afghanistan-ghost-soldiers-taliban-babaji

Roy, S. (2021, 26 November). Neo-Taliban Turns Digital: A Reconquest Strategy. The Geopolitics. https://thegeopolitics.com/neo-taliban-turns-digital-a-reconquest-strategy/

Sisk, R. (2019, 2 August). Afghanistan Loses 42,000 Troops in Crackdown on 'Ghost Soldiers'. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/08/02/afghanistan-loses-42000-troops-crackdown-ghost-soldiers.html

Sopko, J. (2016, 30 April). Quarterly Report to the United States Congress. SIGAR-2016-04-30QR. https://www.sigar.mil/Portals/147/Files/Reports/Quarterly-Reports/2016-04-30qr.pdf

Sopko, J. (2017, 28 March). Schools in Balkh Province: Observations from Site Visits at 26 Schools. SIGAR-17-32-SP. https://www.sigar.mil/Portals/147/Files/Reports/Special-Projects/Special-Projects-Review/SIGAR-17-32-SP.pdf

TOLOnews. (5 June 2016). Taliban Used Biometric System During Kunduz Kidnapping. https://tolonews.com/afghanistan/taliban-used-biometric-system-during-kunduz-kidnapping

A Review of David Kilcullen’s The Dragons and the Snakes

Kilcullen’s “Dragons and Snakes,” hereafter abbreviated as “D&S,” is quite ambitious: it describes the evolution of warfare during and following the GWOT, arguing that state and non-state actors have undergone coevolution, with the end result that our adversaries’ warfighting techniques have changed in ways our military is currently unable to match.

D&S begins with a quick overview of the vast hinterland that was the time between the end of the Cold War and the earlier parts of the Global War on Terrorism. The important aspect of this overview is the relative sophistication of five of the dominant politicians of that era: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Vladimir Putin.

When Putin came into office, he inherited the shambles that was Russia after the fall of the Soviets. To rebuild his country, he proposed to Clinton that Russia be allowed to join NATO. Other than the presidents and the prime minister, politicians at the time regarded that proposal somewhere on the spectrum between absurdity and incredulity. None of those politicians recognized what Putin was really doing: in popular vernacular, he was “trolling.”

Putin was taken seriously, with Tony Blair proposing to create a NATO-Russia Council to have Putin’s representatives meet with NATO leaders before making key decisions. Bush proposed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Russia. After all, Bush said that he “looked the man [Putin] in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Eleven weeks later, Russia sent tanks into Georgia.

The Obama Administration then suggested a “reset” and created a commission to strengthen and expand security cooperation between us and Russia. Russian special forces were trained by US special forces, Russian officers received NATO training, and so on.

Yes, Putin was indeed trolling, and at a masterful level.

Kilcullen then moves into the period starting with the GWOT and leading up to today. Using a metaphor by former CIA Director James Woolsey, the author divides our enemies into “dragons” and “snakes.” The dragons are state actors (in the Westphalian sense) mainly China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The snakes are either collapsing states or non-state actors, principally Islamic terrorist organizations.

All throughout the GWOT, both the dragons and the snakes were keenly interested in our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were doing two things: observing and evolving.

Observing other countrys' wars is nothing new: the French, British, and Prussians sent observers to watch the Civil War, with interest in tactics, strategies, and technologies. Currently, everyone is watching the Russia-Ukraine war, with keen attention paid to the use of commercial-quality drones and other tactics.

From these observations, two critical events serve to shape the evolution of military thought amongst both the dragons and the snakes: the US invasion of Iraq in 1992, and America’s difficulties in the asymmetric wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The 1992 invasion proved that the US was masterful at a particular style of war: conventional force-on-force battles with integrated land and air operations. China and Russia observed this and deduced that America cannot be dominated using this form of warfare. They also deduced something else: that Americans, in part due to the smashing success of the invasion, had constrained itself into believing that the type of war demonstrated during that invasion was the only type of warfare.

The second observation was the difficulty the US had in fighting insurgent forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as the GWOT switched from being a symmetric to an asymmetric conflict. This was also nothing new, as Russia saw in its own involvement in Afghanistan and during the Chechen Wars. What made the American experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq different was that it was America that was involved: the insurgents were able to hold their own against the same military that won so easily the pre-insurgent phase of the Iraq war. If Russia had suspicions that their losses in Afghanistan and the First Chechen War were due to military inadequacy, then America’s experience, with its preeminent military, dispelled those suspicions.

Faced with this, Russia and China had to evolve, to discover new types of warfare.

The route taken by Russia was to pursue “liminal warfare,” which adds cyber, economic, and psychological tools to the kinetic weapons endemic to conventional warfare. The idea is to operate using those new tools below a threshold (what Kilcullen calls the “response threshold”) that America and other Western nations would resort to conventional warfare. The bulk of the desired outcomes are achieved below this threshold (the luminal stages), and these desired goals are primarily to “shape” not only particular actions of the Unites States but also to provide cover or at least plausible deniability should the response threshold be crossed.

Kilcullen provides numerous examples of liminal warfare in action, the most important one being Russia’s capture of the Crimea in February 2014 – the world didn’t know what Russia was doing until it was too late.

Russia’s new approach to warfare is “vertical” in that the stages of war are cumulative, determined by the extent the US recognizes that clandestine activities occurring and our ability to determine who is performing these acts; Russia attempts to minimize the operational signatures of their operations, move the thresholds, and so on.

In contrast, Kilcullen portrays China’s approach as “horizontal.” China’s approach is to use “unrestricted warfare” as described by Qiao and Liang in their book with the same name. (Kilcullen notes that the title “Unrestricted Warfare” would be better translated as “Warfare Beyond Rules”). Unrestricted warfare uses several non-lethal tactics including international lawfare, economic aid warfare (think Belt and Road Initiative), drug war (fentanyl in particular) and so on. These tactics aren’t used in isolation, instead they use a “diversity of tactics” as Antifa would say. The number of available tactics is what gives unrestricted warfare its horizontal quality.

It is interesting to compare luminal and unrestricted warfare, but it is more illuminating to compare those forms of warfare with the way warfare is conceived in the West. The primary difference is that the West considers warfare to be strictly one involving military action, whereas liminal and unrestricted warfare involve both military and non-military forms of action.

We essentially have a mismatch in the concepts of warfare. There are three consequences to this mismatch:

1. Many of our actions (in particular, economic policies related to international trade) we think of as peace time competition but are considered to be warfare, especially in unrestricted warfare.
2. China and Russia can be engaging in warfare, but we don’t know it and we cannot respond militarily.
3. Because we don’t know we’re being attacked, we cannot predict escalation.

What can be done about all this? How do we fight the ascension of these dragons? With regards to foreign policy, Kilcullen offers several options:

1. Double down - continue interventionalist foreign policy, strengthen our military accordingly, and incorporate new technology along the lines of the Pentagon’s “Third Offset Strategy.”
2. Go with a “managed decline” approach (presumably only regarding foreign policy).
3. Take a Byzantine approach, meaning, delay until something better comes along.

Kilcullen’s recommendations on foreign policy are as follows:

“…return to offshore balancing, disengaging from permanent wars of occupation, ceasing any attempt to dominate rivals or spread democracy by force, and focusing instead on preserving and defending our long-term viability.”

This is very reasonable, except the part about “offshore rebalancing.” Continuing with his recommendations:

“Rather than dominating potential adversaries, our objectives can and should be much more modest: to prevent them from dominating us, to do so at an acceptable and sustainable long-term cost, and to avoid any action that harms the prosperity of and civilizational values that make our societies worth living in.”

Thus, by quitting our “forever wars,” we get a type of peace dividend: we get a chance to focus on societal resilience and attempt to reconcile our current domestic political differences.

D&S is extremely readable, even by someone lacking deep knowledge of foreign policy. The most valuable part for me was the discussion of liminal warfare. My only criticism is that it didn’t go into sufficient depth on liminal maneuvers. This is a minor complaint, and quite understandable given the text’s wide scope.

 

Bibliography

Chase, S. “Marketing Violence: A Closer Look at the “Diversity of Tactics” Slogan.” Minds of the Movement Blog, 2017. Retrieved 28 April 2024 from https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/blog_post/marketing-violence-closer-look-diversity-tactics-slogan/

Kilcullen, D. “The Evolution of Unconventional Warfare.” Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies 2 (no. 1), 2019.

Kilcullen, D. The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Nadeau, R. "Justus Scheibert and International Observation of the Civil War". The Gettysburg Compiler, 2014. Retrieved 28 April 2024 from https://gettysburgcompiler.org/2014/12/12/justus-scheibert-and-international-observation-of-the-civil-war/

Qiao & Liang. Unrestricted Warfare. Shadow Lawn Press, 1999. Retrieved 28 April 2024 from https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf