These Are Afghanistan's Best Troops

Members of the Crisis Response Unit, also known as the 222, get a reconditioning training at the Special Police Training Center in Camp Lion, Afghanistan. Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times

L.A. Times: These are Afghanistan's best troops. The U.S. is backing a plan to create many more of them

His knees swaying and his smooth face shadowed by an oversized helmet, Amir Khan Mohammad Naim did not look like an elite law enforcement officer.

But when a call went out in his rural hometown for recruits to join Afghanistan’s police commandos, the 21-year-old farmer’s son from the quiet province of Daykundi did not hesitate.

“My duty is to secure Afghanistan, meter by meter,” Naim said recently between drills at a police training center north of Kabul, where NATO advisors are overseeing part of a major transformation in Afghan security forces.

While conventional Afghan soldiers and police struggle to hold their ground against insurgents, the country’s special forces have been a rare success story, routinely responding first to attacks and leading the majority of offensive operations. Now the U.S.-led coalition is backing a plan to nearly double the size of the elite units in an effort to take back territory from the militants.

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WNU Editor: This was the U.S. strategy deployed against the Islamic State in Iraq (i.e. training Iraqi special forces and elite Iraqi army units that targeted enemy strongholds) .... and is now being deployed in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is going to need more than just a few thousand elite soldiers to beat back the Taliban and the Islamic State.

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