As Afghan soldiers and police struggle to contain an escalating insurgency that has targeted several cities in recent weeks, the country’s special forces are being tested as never before.
Trained in counter-insurgency tactics at the elite School of Excellence near Kabul, these soldiers led the battle to retake Kunduz, after regular forces fled their posts last month to cede the northern city to militants they easily outnumbered.
“The credit for the Kunduz victory goes to the Afghan special forces of the police and Afghan National Army,” said interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi, referring to the government’s recapture of most of Kunduz a few days after it fell to the Taliban in late September.
“They are tough fighters”:
Events surrounding the first capitulation of a provincial capital to the Taliban since they were ousted from power in 2001 underlined the weakness of Afghanistan’s regular army and police and the relative strength of its special forces.
Worryingly for Kabul and the United States, which has spent around $65 billion training local forces to allow the rest of its troops to withdraw, Afghan special forces are feeling the strain.
Numbering about 18,000 of a total Afghan National Security Force of up to 350,000 and divided between the army, police and Interior Ministry, Afghan special forces units and commandos undertook 2,800 independent operations in the year to May 2015, according to a report from the US Department of Defense.
“Our forces shoulder a lot of responsibility and sometimes they have to respond to attacks as often as twice a day,” said Abdullah Guard, head of police special forces in Kunduz.
‘We will lose everything’:
With better equipment, training and pay, as well as more prestige than regular troops, special forces are the first units turned to in a crisis.
That burden was bothering Afghan special forces commanders even before the dramatic events in Kunduz.
Since then, heavy fighting has flared near Ghazni, a city 130 km southwest of Kabul, and, in the last few days, around Lashkar Gah in the south, Herat in the west and in the northern Faryab province bordering Turkmenistan.