Ahmad Masood/Reuters

This blog has recently been examining poor Afghan marksmanship, focusing on remarkably bad Taliban performance with rifles in combat and some of the probable reasons behind it. We’ll shift now to a discussion of Afghan government units, which regularly provide an opportunity to assess outgoing fire.

Puncturing some of the legends of Afghan fighting prowess has value for at least two reasons.

First, when assessing the Taliban and other insurgent organizations — which few people dispute form a resolved and adaptive force – it is important to be wary of exaggerating their traditional fighting skills, as opposed to their social and political skills, their effectiveness as criminal organizations, and their shift in recent years toward improvised explosives. The Taliban’s shoddy marksmanship also raises questions about how fighting in Afghanistan has evolved. Is the Taliban’s shift toward using improvised explosives an indication that they have learned from the insurgents’ experience in Iraq? Or is it an indication that the Taliban realized that their rifle fire was usually ineffective? Both?

Second, when the discussion turns to deficiencies in the marksmanship of government troops, the conversation has another use. It provides insights into the overall state of the government security forces. And it leads to a natural question: What return has the United States received in Afghanistan on its extraordinary investment in the Afghan National Army? More on that in a moment.

First, let’s look quickly at behaviors that Tyler Hicks and I have observed of Afghan government troops and their rifle skills; the first two views are made possible by two of Tyler’s pictures from operations in different provinces. In them, behaviors that guarantee errant shooting are obvious.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The first is of an Afghan soldier fighting out of an ambush in Oruzgan Province in early 2007. He is firing his Romanian-made Kalashnikov assault rifle while pointing it from his shoulder without putting his eye to the sights. This was a complex ambush, with Taliban fighters firing on a joint Afghan-Dutch patrol from multiple shooting positions that all but surrounded the patrol. The initial ranges were not long – a little more than 150 meters. But the ranges were much too long for this kind of shooting style to have more than a suppressive effect, especially because the Taliban fighters were behind walls or firing from within vegetation, and presenting very small targets. Pointing is not aiming. American trainers in Afghanistan endlessly tell their Afghan trainees not to fight this way, but this kind of shooting remains on regular display. During one brief firefight in Marja, we watched three Afghan soldiers lean their rifles on a wall and pull the triggers one-handed, sending rounds off into the sky at about a 20-degree angle. That’s not aiming, either. It’s barely even pointing.

(As an aside, if you noticed the mud clinging to the bottom of this soldier’s muzzle and the rifle-cleaning rod, it’s there not because the man had poor rifle-cleaning habits. Like most everyone on that patrol, at the start of the ambush he had dropped in a wet poppy field, and he had been crawling and dashing and fighting for his life in the minutes afterward. You can see the same mud on his knee, elbow, shoulder and magazine pouches. Many Afghans do pay attention to a weapon’s cleanliness. This is one matter that is often tended to.)

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The next picture is of another Afghan soldier, this time in an overwatch position in Korangal Valley in 2009, above the village of Donga. Look closely at the soldier’s olive-green rifle sling – it is wrapped tightly around the front sight post of his assault rifle, blocking his sight picture. This rendered the sights useless. The range in this case was at least 400 meters, arguably beyond the outer limit at which a soldier could be expected to hit a man-size target with a Kalashnikov and iron sights. This is pointing-not-aiming writ large.

(Another aside to the observant: Yes, there is one encouraging sign on this picture. The position of the rifle’s selector lever — visible just above the soldier’s extended right index finger — shows that the soldier had set his rifle to fire semiautomatically, and not on automatic. That was the right choice for the range at hand. Hand-held automatic fire does have its uses. This was not a situation for it.)

The third example was in the mountains of Nuristan Province in 2008, during a very dark night, so we have no pictures. An American unit worked from a tiny outpost with an Afghan platoon. As part of their duties, the Afghans manned an observation and listening post in a spur of high ground nearby. Taliban attacks were common, though most attacks were small-scale. On this night, the Afghan soldiers on the listening post panicked, and opened fire. For several minutes they emptied their magazines into the darkness. It developed into a roaring crescendo of fire. What they were shooting at, no one could say. The Americans with night-vision equipment saw nothing. It took several minutes of shouting to get the firing to stop, and then it might have stopped because the Afghans needed to reload. (Not all of the ill-discipline was Afghan; one American private first class leapt from his bunk, stepped out from his sleeping bunker and fired a magazine from his M-4 carbine into one of the steep hill faces directly in front. Poor discipline can be contagious.)

What do these three examples suggest? The wild shooting, and position of the soldier’s sling, speak not just to a poor appreciation of the fundamentals of marksmanship, but also to the low state of small-unit leadership. In any self-respecting Western unit, a noncommissioned officer or lieutenant would not permit a soldier to wrap a sling around a rifle in this way. In Afghan units, a soldier can patrol like this for hours. No one says a thing. And the free-for-all on the hilltop was the sort of display that makes well-trained soldiers cringe — not to mention the way it rattles local villagers and serves to undermine efforts at securing local trust.

And this is perhaps, in the eyes of one senior American trainer, what is most worrisome about the marksmanship habits of Afghan soldiers — what they indicate. Unlike the Taliban, the Afghan Army has the backing of a large and well-off conventional military force. It cannot blame poor performance on the poor condition of its rifles, or to mismatched ammunition, or to an absence of entry-level training and professional supervision. American taxpayers provide functioning equipment and underwrite formal training, along with mentoring in the field. But it is not unusual to see Afghan troops who seem, on patrol and in firefights, to have a very limited sense of basic fighting skills.

One senior American trainer, with several years of experience with Afghan recruits and their training program, sent several e-mail messages last year discussing institutional shortfalls in preparing Afghan soldiers for war. (The officer asked not to be named in print, because he has continued to work alongside Afghan and American trainers; identifying him might endanger his job.) The officer said that the way training has been conducted almost guarantees poor marksmanship skills.

Soldiers are not required to qualify on their assigned weapon (M-16) prior to graduation. A fitness test is not required either. The list goes on and on. Soldiers “graduate” from basic and advanced training simply because they did not go AWOL. If they are present on graduation day then off they go to their units.

Since this trainer wrote that paragraph, the Obama administration has emphasized preparing Afghan security forces to assume a greater role in the war. This week, the same trainer said that the problems remain, and that after years of working with Afghan soldiers, and an extraordinary investment of American money and soldiers’ time, “two fundamentals are missing from that army. The first is discipline. There really is none. And the second is accountability.”

Next week we will close our series on this theme with a post about the Taliban’s recent use of snipers, which will be accompanied by a video.