Asia Times: The newly-established Afghan National Army (ANA) launched on Tuesday its first military operation called Warrior Sweep. The ongoing operation against the regrouped Taliban/al-Qaeda terrorist forces serves as a real test for the ANA's military capability. However, given its apparent weaknesses, its predictable poor performance in a bloody war of attrition may well damage its shaky structure, along with the residual credibility of its political master, the administration of President Hamid Karzai...

...Operation Warrior Sweep could well serve as a first step towards that long-term objective. However, it is also meant to serve an American military's objective, ie, minimizing its increasing daily casualties by sharing the military burden with its unprepared Afghan counterpart. These two objectives do not seem to be compatible as the latter can only achieved at the expense of the former. The ANA engagement in military operations to replace to the extent possible the American infantry units will certainly help the Americans decrease their casualties, but at the expense of weakening the embryonic Afghan military, whose poor training ensures high causalities. The demoralizing impact of such a possibility on the low-paid recruits with questionable loyalty to the Afghan government is predictable. The main political victim of such a scenario will be that weak government, already struggling to create the basic components of a functioning central government, such as its military, to end the decades of lawlessness, anarchy and warlordism that have ravaged the country.

ed: hat tip barrisj