In the gathering clouds of gloom settling over the NATO mission to Afghanistan, I sense that it's not the Karzai government that's the chief concern, nor even the gathering strength of the Taliban.

What has really shaken NATO this year is the shockingly poor state of the Afghan National Army.

Despite eight years of training and mentoring by Western allies, the ANA is still a shaky, unreliable force incapable of operating on its own in reasonable size anywhere in the country, particularly in the most dangerous southern provinces.

This is about as ominous a development as NATO can imagine. For until a viable Afghan military can take over the counter-insurgency on its own, there is no clear exit point for Western armies in the foreseeable future.

Even vague hopes for a peace agreement with the Taliban are unlikely to make progress if the Afghan government has no confidence in its own defence forces. The Taliban is unlikely to want to make any concessions to so weak an opponent.

How bad is the situation?

The Order of Battle of the ANA shows that, on paper at least, it as having grown to 91,000 soldiers in 117 formations.

Sounds impressive, but the harder you probe for its real strength the more illusory it seems.

A young Afghan boy is questioned at a joint NATO-Afghan National Army checkpoint in the Surobi district, some 50 kilometres from Kabul in November 2009. (Jerome Delay/Associated Press)

Far fewer Afghan soldiers actually serve in the infantry-sized battalions called kandaks that are good enough to take part in a counter-insurgency.

In fact, only 53,000 Afghans are in kandaks rated as "operationally independent," and even this number is highly suspect.

With a normal desertion rate of 9 per cent, and a re-enlistment rate of less than half that, these battalions suffer very high turnover.

Many units are 30 per cent under strength and there is an alarming shortage of good young leaders, according to my sources.

What's more, the concerns are starting to get aired at the highest levels.

Last month, for example, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told his Parliament that he wouldn't send in any more reinforcements until he was guaranteed that the ANA could do better. (And this was before the incident last week in which an Afghan police trainee shot five British soldiers dead and then rode off on a motorbike to join the Taliban.)

Brown revealed that, in last summer's heavy fighting in Helmand province, British troops had to ask repeatedly for ANA reinforcements, but the few units sent were virtually useless.

"Although those units arrived, they were below strength and not yet fully ready for the task," the prime minister said. "In a province that faces 30 per cent of the violence in the country, we need more and better Afghan participation — and we need it now."

Obama's dilemma

On this side of the Atlantic, the White House is equally dismayed.

In fact, worry over ANA weakness is one of the main reasons for prolonging the internal debate within the Obama administration over whether to add up to 44,000 more U.S. soldiers.

There's a sense, even in the Pentagon, that these numbers can achieve little unless there's a complete NATO overhaul of Afghan army training and mentoring.

The commanding general in Afghanistan, the U.S.'s Stanley McChrystal wants the ANA jumped up to 134,000 by a year from now — an almost 50 per cent increase even assuming the current rosy numbers.

By 2014 the ANA is supposed to be 240,000 strong! Possible, perhaps, but nothing in the past eight years suggests that is really doable.

Even Canadian efforts at mentoring Afghan units in Kandahar have made grindingly slow progress.

By this time next year, we are supposed to have four out of five kandaks running "near autonomous operations." But so far only one unit is living up to even this limited status.

Ethnic suspicions

To be fair, all NATO partners seriously underestimated the challenge of building a new army in a nation fractured by decades of war and deep-seated ethnic hostilities.

Afghans make legendary guerrilla warriors, but given the country has 90 per cent illiteracy and often no experience in classroom instruction of any kind, recruits start out with severe disadvantages in a formal army setting, including the inability even to read maps.

A study by the Rand Corporation, which specializes in studying militaries around the world, recently concluded that the ANA is deeply divided by ethnic suspicions.

"Tensions run high among the groups" the report warned, "and their numbers have little first-hand experience associating with people from other groups. Adapting to such an intense cultural change takes time, and many do not make the transition."

Putting on 'an Afghan face'

There's no getting around the fact, however, that NATO itself has made a proper hash of mentoring the ANA.

Under its bizarre split-command (which I've written about before) Afghan units were generally modeled on the separate national units that trained them — ie. the Dutch, U.S., Canadian, Polish and Mongolian, to name a few.

The upshot is that few kandaks can now operate with those who were trained in other regions.

In a remarkably revealing essay in the Journal of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, a former Canadian mentor, Capt. G. B. Rolston writes that the few good kandaks in the south are overworked but can't be replaced because "we don't allow them (the Afghans) to move their units around."

"It's hard enough to bridge the cultural divide between the Afghans and the West," Rolston notes, "without also bringing in any potential element of friction between a battalion commander from one NATO country and a senior mentor from another."

Rolston also claims that some NATO countries exaggerate the competency of the kandaks they trained just to get the job over with.

This deception can also mean "putting the Afghan face" on combat missions just to hoodwink the media, which requires "grabbing a couple of Afghan soldiers a the last possible minute and throwing them on the helicopter so that it could be said in the press release that Afghan forces were involved in the operation."

At the moment NATO has been so shocked by the Afghan army weakness that it has finally, after eight years, decided to set up the first fully integrated NATO training scheme.

This will require thousands more NATO mentors in order to work and many billions of dollars in contributions.

It is, of course, an urgently needed reform if there's to be a viable Afghan army one day.

However the hour is late and it is very unclear how much of a new Afghan challenge the Western nations, including Canada, are prepared to take on.