Commando units and formations are part of the Afghan National Army and were formed from existing Infantry battalions. The program was established in early 2007 with the intent of taking one conventional battalion from each of the ANA corps, giving them special training and equipment and reorganizing based on a United States Army Rangers battalion. Each battalion is assigned to one of the seven military corps. The training is conducted at the Morehead Commando Training Center, a former Taliban training compound located six miles south of Kabul, Afghanistan. The training center is named after 5th Special Forces Group soldier MSG Kevin Morehead, who was killed in Iraq in September 2003. The training of supply, logistics and operations has been conducted by mentors from Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, United States Army Special Forces, French Special Forces, ANA cadre and Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI). The 12 week program has three concurrent training sections for the entire course. The primary and bulk of the training is geared for the Infantry line companies with a focus on individual skills and small unit tactics. To support the line companies, the Headquarters and Headquarters Company receives special training in specific skills such as mortars, medical care, and communications. The third section focuses on the Battalion staff, their core areas of responsibility and function as the Command and Control (C2). Upon graduation, each Commando Battalion returns to its designated Corps area along with an embedded Special Forces A-Team and begins using an 18 week training cycle that breaks down to six weeks each of train-up, missions and recovery. Of the five active duty Special Forces Groups, 3rd Group and 7th Group have been rotating responsibility as the main effort for continued training and advising in the Afghanistan theater. Afghanistan's "DELTA": APU
Less well known than ANSF “special forces commandos” are the soldiers of the APU. Apparently the APU is or has been operating with JSOC Special Mission Units in Afghanistan. The APU (Afghanistan Partner Unit) are not the same thing as the Afghan Special Forces, who are analagous to our Green Berets (grunts: analagous). Admiral McRaven described them as the “…Afghan commandos, which are trained by U.S. Army Special Forces personnel, and they are clearly some of the elite Afghan forces. They are magnificent soldiers.” The next step up, according to McRaven, are the APU. He says, Sometime in 2009, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense established the unit with help from members of the 75th Ranger Regiment to assist the Americans on kill or capture missions, according to Leigh Neville’s 2015 book Special Forces in the War on Terror. Army Rangers were among the forces assigned to JSOC task force in the country, known at least for a time as Task Force 3-10, which had the job of tracking and neutralizing specific terrorists and militants. Initially, U.S. commanders referred to the elite Afghan forces euphemistically as the “Afghan Partner Unit,” or APU. This generic terminology allowed them to talk about the unit without necessarily giving away details of its existence or the secretive American elements it was supporting. For instance, in 2010, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) released a statementabout an “Afghan-international security force,” which included an “Afghan partner unit” that had killed and wounded a number of insurgents while pursuing a Taliban sub-commander in Nimroz Province. This was likely the work of American special operators and the Ktah Khas. In 2011, more details about the force had begun to leak out.” Little has been publicly revealed about this unit, but in Senate testimony former JSOC commander [U.S. Navy] Admiral William McRaven described it as an Afghan special operations unit ‘…that went on target with the JSOC forces forward to ensure that we had an Afghan that was, if you will, going through the door first, that was making first contact with the locals, in order to make sure that we kind of protected the culturally sensitive issues or items that were on target,’” the November 2011 edition of West Point’s CTC Sentinel magazine explained. On March 21, 2012, more information emerged when U.S. Central Command released redacted copies of the documents associated with the investigation into the shootdown of a CH-47D Chinook known as Extortion 17. More than seven months earlier, Taliban fighters had knocked out the helicopter as it brought it a reaction force of U.S. Navy SEALs during a night Raid to kill or capture Qari Tahir, one of the group's leaders, in the Tangi Valley in Afghanistan's Wardak Province. Interviews and other records noted that "APU" members had been part of the mission, touching off conspiracy theories that they alerted the militants to the operation. By 2013, the battalion, by then known publicly as the Ktah Khas, had more than 1,200 personnel, including members of the Afghan National Police and the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s main intelligence service. These individuals “give it unique law enforcement and intelligence capabilities,” a Pentagon review of activities during that year noted. (2011 07).

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