Afghan Army Attracts Few Where Fear Reigns

 KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Every morning, jobless young men gather by the hundreds at the busy central square here in this southern city, desperate for whatever work they can find. In other places, this would be an army recruiter’s dream. Not so in Kandahar.

Many of the men here have brothers and cousins in the insurgency, or are former fighters themselves. Others fear what would happen to them or their families if they joined the Afghan Army. “I don’t want to be killed by the Taliban,” Janan, 30, who like many Afghans goes by one name, said on a recent day as he jostled with the crowd under a scorching sun.

Afghan and NATO officials have long struggled to entice young men in the heavily Pashtun south — the Taliban heartland — to join the Afghan Army. Despite years of efforts to increase the enlistment of southern Pashtuns, an analysis of recruitment patterns by The New York Times shows that the number of them joining the army remains relatively minuscule, reflecting a deep and lingering fear of the insurgents, or sympathy for them, as well as doubts about the stability and integrity of the central government in Kabul, the capital.

The influx of tens of thousands of American troops, who have pushed the Taliban back in much of the south, has done little to ease those concerns or to lift recruitment. In some places, the numbers of southern Pashtun recruits are actually shrinking, causing an overall decline of nearly 30 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period a year ago.

With the deadline for the withdrawal of most foreign forces in 2014, the need to enlist more southern Pashtuns is pressing if Afghanistan is to have a national army that resembles the ethnic and geographic makeup of the country. It is no small concern. The absence of southern Pashtuns reinforces the impression here that the army is largely a northern institution — to be used against them — and what Afghan and Western officials worry is a dangerous division of the country.

“If you go and talk to ordinary Afghans in Kandahar, they believe the government will collapse in a week or two,” said Dr. Mahmood Khan, a member of Parliament from Kandahar. “People are still kind of under the spell of the Taliban. They believe it is not only stronger than the government, but that their intelligence is stronger. They can find out very soon if your son or brother is serving in the army.”

The predominantly Pashtun southern and southeastern provinces — Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan, Zabul, Paktika and Ghazni — make up about 17 percent of Afghanistan’s total population, yet they contributed just 1.5 percent of the soldiers recruited since 2009.

Some progress has been made, but merely in percentage terms; Kandahar and Helmand more than doubled their number of recruits last year from the previous year. The raw numbers, however, are discouraging, and Afghan officials worry that the recent erosion of security in Kandahar City could reverse the few gains they have made.

The two provinces are home to nearly two million people. Yet since 2009 they have contributed fewer than 1,200 soldiers to the army, less than 1 percent of the nearly 173,000 enlistees in that period. By comparison, Kunduz, a northern province of about 900,000 people, enlisted more than 16,500 recruits.

Oruzgan, a province of more than 300,000 residents, had 14 recruits all of last year.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of recruits come from provinces in the north and northeast, where the insurgency is weaker. While the overall representation of Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, in the army is equitable — they make up about 42 percent of the population and roughly the same percentage of the army — the vast majority come from a few northeastern provinces. More than a third come from Nangarhar Province alone.

Trying to lure more southern Pashtuns, Ministry of Defense officials have made it easier for them to qualify for officer candidate school and have assigned two southern Pashtun generals to the region to focus on recruiting.

“Their job is to reach out to their communities and explain why it’s not only honorable, but it’s the right thing to do to join the army and to send your sons to join the army,” said Maj. Gen. D. Michael Day, the Canadian Army officer in charge of military training for NATO. “Because unless the elders, unless some recognized authority figure says this is what we should be doing, it doesn’t get done.”

An assassination campaign in the south has hampered those efforts. In the past two years, suicide bombers and armed men on motorcycles have struck down dozens of tribal elders sympathetic to the government, high-level officials and even civil servants.

“People are afraid,” said Abdul Ghani, deputy director of the Kandahar army recruiting center. “When we have assassinations and bombings every day like we have now, it really affects recruiting.”

The center, operating out of a lonely cinder-block compound guarded by a machine-gun tower, sends teams of recruiters into the city and outlying districts every day armed with leaflets and posters. The increase in American troops has made it easier for the teams to expand into more villages. Still, about half of the province’s 16 districts remain cut off, Mr. Ghani said.

The recruiters themselves live under constant threat. Last year a group of men beat a recruiter after he spoke to a group of young people in a city bazaar. So far, though, most have been lucky. They have not had the kind of attack like the suicide bombing in March that killed 36 people at recruiting center in Kunduz.

Recruiters must also compete with drug lords: Kandahar and Helmand Provinces are the country’s largest producers of opium, and recruiting, desertion and even violence fluctuate with the poppy harvest.

Where the recruiters have had the most difficulty is in persuading local mullahs, Muslim religious leaders, to join in the effort.

“One word from a mullah is worth a thousand words from me,” Mr. Ghani said. But, he added, the mullahs “are not helping us right now, because they are afraid.”

“They know if they preach for two or three days advocating for us, their heads will be cut off.”

In interviews with several mullahs in and around Kandahar, fear was evident in their voices. Many simply refused to discuss recruiting.

“If I start telling people to send your sons to the Afghan Army, I am sure I’ll be asking for death,” said Mullah Ramazan, who is from Loya Wala north of Kandahar city. “If someone seeks my suggestion whether he should join the army or abandon it, I will not encourage him or discourage him. I will simply say, ‘Do what your heart tells you.’ ”

In Oruzgan, where recruiting has sharply fallen, to 14 last year from 60 enlistments two years ago, plenty of young men have promised to enlist, if only they could do so without anyone in their village knowing about it, said Col. Karimullah Qurbani, director of the army recruiting center there. Unfortunately, he said, recruitment screening rules make that impossible, requiring two village elders to vouch for each recruit.

Until recently, more than 60 percent of the army’s southern Pashtuns came from Nimruz and Farah, two of the most stable provinces in the south. But since March, recruiting in both areas has sharply fallen — by more than 50 percent in Nimruz alone — a symptom, local recruiters say, of the westward movement of insurgents who have been pushed out of Helmand and begun intimidation campaigns against potential recruits in the two provinces.

Last month, insurgents beheaded three villagers in Farah whom they accused of joining the army, said Col. Sayed Mohammed, director of the army recruitment center there. “In fact they had no link with the army,” he said. “They weren’t even with the army. They were ordinary villagers.”

As the numbers have fallen, some top Ministry of Defense officials have begun playing down the importance of strong southern Pashtun representation in the army, while at the same time maintaining that it is a priority.

For now, NATO and Afghan officials have set the goal for the army’s southern Pashtun representation at a modest 4 percent, a reflection of the challenges that lie ahead. Even without them, the army is on pace to meet its goal of 195,000 soldiers by October 2012, NATO officials said.

Still, General Day is hopeful that the security improvements gained in the past eight months will gradually begin paying more dividends in the months ahead as the southern population becomes more tolerant of NATO and Afghan forces.

“One thing our analysis has shown us is no matter how good our recruiting is, the southern Pashtun nation will wait and see,” he said. “They are survivalists.”

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, and Sangar Rahimi and Abdul Waheed Wafa from Kabul, Afghanistan.