For the families of the three members of the British Army who lost their lives at the hands of a renegade Afghan soldier early on Tuesday morning, the incident is a total tragedy. But for the Nato mission in Afghanistan, it is a most deadly wake-up call. The Western strategy is based on strengthening the Afghan National Army and police, so that they can progressively assume responsibility for the security of their own country. That has to be the right approach – but such events underline how much more easily this is said than done.
We have experience in many campaigns of building up local military and security capacity – Sierra Leone and Kosovo are two small recent examples, Iraq a very fresh one. But doing it quickly and doing it well often conflict. Nato has already increased the Afghan army to a strength of 134,000 in a handful of years, and the aspiration is to reach 171,000 by 2014 – which is growth on steroids. Indeed, this is the crux of the problem: as the numbers rise, the quality suffers and the risks increase.
