>>64127352
>You'd need more of the Afghans to be like these guys first and foremost
That's certainly true. But I think there was a secondary issue is that you also needed more of the motivated (and less comically corrupt) Afghans like that spread out into leadership roles throughout the security forces. Not all concentrated into the Commando Battalions. It insulated them from the incompetence of the regular army, but it also exacerbated the issue of the regular army being useless. Meaning the Commandos had to do most of the fighting, which meant most of their specialized commando training and organization around special operations was kind of pointless. They just ended up being used as a conventional (if elite) line unit that got the "Ramirez do everything!" treatment until they got ground down by attrition.

I think a bit of this was SOCOM buying into their own hype about being the be all and end all of everything. Rather than specialists who work best supporting a highly capable regular army. So I think there were a lot of guys advocating that what the ANA needed were units of super badass operators, with the considerably less sexy (and much harder) job of getting the baseline level of proficiency of the regular ANA units up to a semi-acceptable level getting less attention.