| | In Afghanistan, a push to burnish police's poor reputation The Washington Post
03/11/2010
By Greg Jaffe
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KABUL - U.S. and Afghan officials are beginning a major overhaul of the Afghan police with the goal of cleaning up a force whose recent history of corruption has undermined confidence in the Afghan government and fueled the insurgency.
The new program, which will likely include sending thousands of officers abroad for training, is designed to rebuild a force of about 100,000 Afghans that was dispatched to police stations with virtually no training and little supervision. After nearly nine years of war, senior U.S. and Afghan officials said they are essentially starting from scratch.
"We weren't doing it right," said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who oversees the NATO training effort in Afghanistan. "The most important thing is to recruit and then train police,'' he said, emphasizing the steps necessary before any deployment. "It is still beyond my comprehension that we weren't doing that."
The police stand in stark contrast to the Afghan Army, which U.S. officials said is well respected. Caldwell is expected to brief President Obama on the upcoming changes to improve the police on Friday via video teleconference, said senior U.S. officials.
The police are a critical and high-risk element of the Obama administration's new war strategy. As U.S. and Afghan forces drive Taliban fighters from their havens throughout the country, U.S. officials are counting on Afghan police to fill in behind them to prevent the return of insurgents and build support for the struggling Afghan government.
"If we don't get the police fixed, we'll never change the dynamics in the country," Caldwell said. "No matter how well we do clearing and holding, we will never build on that progress and sustain it without a police force. We have to get this right." He described the police training effort as "the greatest challenge" facing U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
A key element of the new training effort is a plan by Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmarto send as many as 3,000 police leaders each year to Jordan and Turkey for nine months of instruction. Those leaders could then be dispatched to bolster the force or replace corrupt or ineffective district and village police chiefs, U.S. officials said.
The new training program is designed to make up for a critical shortage of about 500 NATO police trainers and a shortage of training bases for police in Afghanistan. Afghan officials also hope that the prospect of a diploma from a foreign police-training center will lure higher quality recruits to the force and burnish the police's poor reputation among the Afghan people.
"Afghans are crazy about education abroad. I can say that with authority because I used to be the minister of education," Atmar said in an interview. Afghan and U.S. officials are currently in discussions with Jordanian officials to begin training Afghan police officers in that country as quickly as possible, he said.
Beginning next week, all newly recruited police patrolmen will get at least six weeks of training before they are sent out to police stations. U.S. and Afghan officials are also building the Interior Ministry's first training and recruiting offices. About three-quarters of the police serving in Afghanistan currently have received no formal training.
The interior minister also has pledged to purge the force of corrupt leaders.
"For a long time, corruption was considered a taboo subject," Atmar said. "It is no longer the case. We have to fight this curse."
In recent months the Afghan government has brought corruption charges against a handful of senior Afghan police chiefs. The arrests were seen as a step forward for the ministry, but U.S. and NATO officials said that much bolder action is needed to repair the force's reputation.
"It may take a Richter-scale-size event to win back the public's confidence in the police," said Maj. Gen. Michael J. Ward, a Canadian who oversees police development.
In Iraq, for example, virtually all of the battalion and brigade commanders within the Iraqi National Police were replaced in 2007 and early 2008 in what amounted to a purge of the mid-level leadership of that force. Although Atmar is considered an effective manager, he cannot replace large numbers of officers without jeopardizing his relationship with senior Afghan politicians, Western military officials said. The other primary focus of U.S. and Afghan officials is increasing the overall size of the police force to about 110,000 patrolmen this October, up from about 92,000 today. Because of widespread attrition and desertions, Afghan and NATO officials said they will have to bring in about 40,000 recruits over the next nine months to increase the overall force by 12,000 as called for in their current plan. In some of the best-trained Afghan police paramilitary units, which are the most heavily employed police forces in the country, the annual attrition rate has surged as high as 75 percent.
Another challenge is getting newly trained police leaders to southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the fighting is most intense and where they are most needed. Because police do not live on heavily fortified bases as Afghan Army troops do, they have suffered heavier casualties than the army has. The heavy losses have left some police leaders reluctant to serve in the toughest battle zones. In February, for example, the Afghan National Police Academy graduated its second class -- 568 students who had completed three years of courses and training. U.S. officials assumed that as many as half of those new graduates would be assigned to lead police units in the south and east where the insurgency is the strongest. Instead, only about 3 percent of the officers were assigned to those regions. About three-quarters of the new officers were kept in Kabul.
In Helmand Province, the site of a recent series of large-scale offensives to drive out the Taliban, the newly introduced police have generally performed well, with the exception of a district police chief said by Marines to have charged locals to return to their homes after Marines drove Taliban insurgents from the area in December.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited the area last week to examine the progress and tour a market in the area, the Now Zad district, once home to about 30,000 Afghans.
Prior to Gates's visit, the provincial governor removed the police chief from the city, and Afghan officials initiated an investigation into the alleged corruption. U.S. officials said the results of the probe would be an early bellwether of the Afghans' willingness to deal with graft in the force.
The incident also demonstrates the central role the police will play in ensuring that the Taliban do not return to districts where U.S. troops have fought and bled.
"I'd rather have no police than bad police, because bad police destroy local faith and confidence in their government and push [the locals] to the Taliban," Marine Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, the top Marine commander in the south, said in an e-mail.
"No matter how hard the Marines and Afghan Army work to earn the public trust, bad police can unhinge those efforts in a heartbeat."
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