GALA-I-FAIZ, Afghanistan — To serve his country in the new Afghan National Army, Saifullah Jan first had to find himself an assault rifle.
The weapon was required for admittance to the Kabul Military Training Center, where Americans and other Westerners have been struggling to build an army for a year and a half.
By accepting only those volunteers who were already armed, the U.S.-led coalition hoped to solve two problems at once: Each recruit would be another Afghan soldier in the fight against the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their allies, and each rifle delivered to Kabul would be one less gun in the service of warlords undermining the central government.
As often happens in Afghanistan, things haven't worked out quite as planned. Army recruits -- including Jan -- have quit by the hundreds, in many cases because they don't think the pay is worth the risk.
The large number of dropouts -- and the griping soldiers who say they're going to follow them out the door -- has slowed the effort to replace ethnically based militias with a cohesive force that answers to President Hamid Karzai.
The rifles many handed in were worthless, so the army eventually dropped the requirement. But it was still in effect in March when Jan left his village north of Kabul, the capital, and reported for training.
In a transaction that illustrates Afghanistan's uneasy transition from war to peace, he picked up an AK-47 from a local warlord eager to please his commander, Mohammed Qassim Fahim. Fahim is Karzai's defense minister, but he is also commander of Northern Alliance militia forces that are one of Karzai's main rivals for power.
In Kabul, the army recorded the serial number of Jan's weapon, impounded it, and welcomed him into the ranks of the 7th Battalion. Six weeks later, he was gone.
Jan's departure was part of an exodus of trainees, many of them Pushtun -- Afghanistan's largest ethnic group -- from the country's east, where the fundamentalist Taliban and the Al Qaeda terrorist network are waging a guerrilla war.
"When I first joined the battalion, there were 300 soldiers," he said. "There were people from Kandahar and Zabol, and they said that they were told, 'You'll be given $150 a month.' "
But the pay for raw recruits last spring turned out to be much less.
"When they found out it was only $30, those who had enough money for the bus fare back home left as soon as they heard," Jan said. "Those who didn't have money waited until they received their salary and then they left."
