President Obama waves to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. White House Flickr Stream.

Last month, Afghan media entrepreneur Saad Mohseni and US General Stanley McChrystal gave talks in Washington in which they both, separately, conveyed the same view of the US presence after 2014: it’s not about the numbers, it needs to be credible. Mohseni, only half-joking, remarked that it wouldn’t matter if there was only one US soldier left after 2014, as long as the Afghans viewed him as credible.

When NATO defence ministers met on February 22nd to discuss coalition troop levels in Afghanistan after 2014, it was clear that US President Barack Obama’s priority is to keep US forces there to a minimum. But is that what he should be focusing on? If the US is to pull out all conventional army units, they should focus on the credibility and the efficacy of the work they do in Afghanistan, not just how many men are left behind.

There are two aspects to credibility in Afghanistan: being trusted, and being accountable. The force that makes up the post-2014 US presence needs to win the trust of the Afghan people in their morals and methods, and they need to balance that with Afghan trust that they are going to win battles. The force will also need to be accountable, preferably to the Afghan elected head of state. With President Barack Obama wishing to keep US forces on the ground to a minimum, a mix of two strategies is being considered: maintaining a training mission for national Afghan forces, and fighting a covert war against the Taliban with US Special Operations Forces. Both strategies pose challenges to the credibility of US operations.

The first half of this plan is training the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF, which refers to the Afghan Army and the Afghan Police). There are advantages to putting Afghans at the forefront: retired US General Stanley McChrystal, former International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander in Afghanistan, said that he thought the Afghans should take the lead role in combat operations, because “if they felt emasculated [by the US], that’s bad”. Afghan forces as currently trained, however, have severe problems with credibility.

There have been accusations of inefficiency, corruption and negligence aimed at the ANSF before, but never quite like in the recent documentary: Mission Accomplished? Secrets of Helmand. During his stay in Sangin, Helmand Province, producer Ben Anderson witnessed ANSF personnel shooting dangerously into a crowd, high on marijuana while on duty and admitting that their subordinates molested young boys. These are not the actions of a “credible” security force, and the patience of their American trainers is running low. Anderson quoted US Major Bill Steuber saying: “Try working with child molesters, working with people who are robbing people, murdering them. It wears on you after a while.” Examples such as these may be an exception, but even so, the US troops in Sangin cannot trust the Afghan police to do their job properly when they leave.

The second half of this plan is pulling out all conventional army units, but leaving US Special Operations Forces (SOF) in country. SOF are the elite within the US military and within ISAF, regularly conducting night-time raids aimed at Taliban leaders. There have been both high and low-level indications that the US is leaning this way: Vice-President Joe Biden first floated the idea in 2009, and the lease on the SOF command base in Afghanistan runs until May 2015.

But recently SOF has lost moral ground – and thus Afghan trust. Afghan President Hamid Karzai singled US troops out for criticism out this week, banning black ops forces from Maidan Wardak province. The allegations were that SOF’s local allies, an irregular Afghan militia who call themselves “special forces” or “campaign forces”, were torturing and murdering innocent civilians. While NATO investigators have so far found no evidence for this, such allegations are easily believed by those who know how SOF operate. Sahr Muhammedally, a legal adviser for the Center for Civilians in Conflict, commented to the Washington Post that: “The U.S. has had a long history in Afghanistan of working with some of these irregular militias that are not accountable to anyone. A lot of villagers talk about these campaign forces […] But the U.S. Special Operations forces don’t confirm or deny anything.” A force that is not accountable to anyone should not be the lasting legacy of the US in Afghanistan.

There is a worrying lack of trust from the highest levels of the Afghan government. In comments made to the New York Times in March 2010, then Chief Spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defence, Maj. Gen. Zahir Azimi, lamented that, “Whenever there was some problem with the special forces we didn’t know who to go to, it was muddled and unclear who was in charge.” Comments such as these paint a picture of a force that lacks both the trust of the Afghan people and accountability to the highest levels of the Afghan government. Regaining both is necessary if the SOF are to be the sole US presence after 2014, and if they are to be a credible one.

Both halves of the plan laid out here lack credibility. There is no question that the US presence in Afghanistan will have to be reduced after 2014, but the focus should not be on numbers, or which of these two strategies should come first. It is the way that the US goes about its plan that is crucial: either the US changes and gains credibility, or it obsesses about numbers and Afghans lose out. President Obama and incoming US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will need to think on improving the credibility of their alternative before they pull the last conventional US soldier out of Afghanistan.