Afghanistan: The call from the Afghan army captain came in around midnight -- he wanted American back-up at a police checkpoint under insurgent attack. But US troops refused.
"Tell him to kill some bad guys for me!" yelled Captain Michael Kolton, in charge at US Combat Outpost Monti in rural northeastern Afghanistan, to the interpreter on the phone to the Afghan captain.
It is not that Kolton could not help -- "We could end it a little faster," he said later -- but with foreign troops pulling out by the end of 2014, the US priority now is making sure Afghan forces can deal with the enemy alone.
"They have got to believe in themselves. They're physically capable," Kolton told AFP at his base in Kunar province. "The bottom line is: do it yourself."
Or, as he put it more bluntly to another Afghan officer, Major Moeenuddin, in COP Monti's tactical operations centre: "You don't need me to go down there like your mom. I'm not your mom!"
The Afghan army and police have been recruited and prepared rapidly, growing from around 190,000 in late 2009, when the current programme to train them up began, to 305,000 today.
The US-led training mission for the Afghan forces has an $11.6 billion budget for this year alone, and there are now 170,000 troops in the Afghan army with combined army and police numbers due to peak at 352,000 by November 2012.
But a decade into the war, US troops on the ground complain that Afghan forces are still over-reliant on them and fail to take initiative.
"After 10 years of us being here, they have grown too dependent on us to where they don't want to do the job themselves," said First Lieutenant Tyler Bell. "Everything they have done has been us pushing them to do it."
Afghan forces have also faced recurring questions over issues such as cronyism, attrition rates and chronic illiteracy.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force is trying to tackle the issues through the NATO Training Mission Afghanistan (NTM-A), whose key priorities include building leadership skills.
US troops at COP Monti are training up 650 or so Afghan soldiers in their area and have an Afghan National Army presence on all their patrols.
For their part, Afghan troops claim they are not getting the equipment they need to do the job from the international force.
Moeenuddin said he and his men could go it alone on one condition, repeated by several Afghan soldiers who spoke to AFP: "Only if the coalition forces give us better weapons, technology and all the stuff we need, like they have now.
"It's not enough right now. We are the army: we should have jets, helicopters and heavy weapons."
Another Afghan officer, First Lieutenant Nisar Ahmad, even threatened to defect to the Taliban in future unless more equipment was forthcoming.
"How can I protect myself when the bad guys are shooting at us?" he said.
"I want to stay in the army, but if the Taliban come in 2014 and we don't have good weapons, I will join the Taliban."
Afghan defence ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi declined to comment when contacted by AFP, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
Major General Michael Day, NTM-A's deputy commander responsible for Afghan army training, said Afghan forces were being provided with "state of the art" equipment suitable for waging a counter-insurgency rather than other types of warfare.
ISAF is giving $2.7 billion worth of vehicles, weapons, communications equipment and aircraft to Afghan security forces between August this year and March 2012, a huge surge in military equipment provision which is only part of the overall spending.
"In a counter-insurgency, you don't have that classic force-to-force lining up in a Wellingtonian manner, good guys on one side of the hill, bad guys on the other," Day told AFP.
"It (the equipment) is suitable to the ground that they're going to be operating in."
Day gave the example of the Afghan army needing, and receiving, equipment for clearing roads of improvised explosive devices, a key Taliban tactic.
"They're not second-rate, they're not hand-me-downs, they're what professional militaries around the world use today," he said.
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