US tactics ill-suited for Afghan troops - The Boston Globe: "I visited a camp for training a new Afghan National Army, which then numbered some 10,000 strong. The goal was to mold Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and the rest into a truly national force, even though Tajiks of the Northern Alliance dominated the government then as now. There was worry that the Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group and the backbone of the Taliban, felt underrepresented in Kabul.
Talking to American officers involved in building a modern army out of the ashes of a long civil war, I remembered a scene in a camp along the Pakistani border nearly 20 years before. Then Americans were supporting the resistance to the Soviet occupation, but the training of the “holy warriors’’ was very different. I was shown how an innocent-looking piece of pipe could be smuggled into Soviet-occupied Kabul and be fitted to another innocent-looking pipe, smuggled in separately, and then filled with explosives."
