Did The Fat Lady Just Sing In Afghanistan?

By Steve Hynd

Remember that General McChrystal's entire plan for those extra troops is to hold the line until the Afghan security forces can stand up, so that we can stand down. There's a problem with that; the Afghan police haven't recruited anyone new for a month and a half.

American efforts to expand Afghanistan’s security forces are faltering, leaving the largest training centre in the country operating at only 25 per cent capacity.

Recruitment has been low in recent months amid rising Taleban violence and political instability after the unresolved election. Thousands of men are leaving the force every month, with about one police officer in three resigning over the course of a year, The Times learnt. Some have joined the Taleban.

“We simply can’t recruit enough police,” General Khudadad Agha, the officer in charge of training, said. “The salary is low and the job is very dangerous. If someone wants $120 (£72) a month then they join up. But 95 per cent of the new recruits are uneducated, unskilled and they can’t find food. That’s why they join the police.”

...A strong and competent police force is a central part of General Stanley McChrystal’s counter-insurgency strategy. The top US commander in Afghanistan has called for the force to be increased from about 93,000 to 160,000.

There is still a long way to go. Official figures show that only 1,000 recruits signed up in August. The problem is more severe in Wardak province where, earlier this month, a policeman shot and killed two American soldiers.

Recruits for the Afghan Public Protection Force are usually sent to Laghman to be trained by American Special Forces. “There hasn’t been a single recruit for more than a month and a half,” General Agha said. “More than a hundred people were rounded up and sent to the training centre, but the commander in charge told me they ran away. Iran opened the border [in the west] and they all thought it was better to go abroad.”

Official U.S. military reports have been fiddling the figures by counting 10,000 people who were already policemen, but were only now getting their first training. That training has been cut from eight to a ridiculous three weeks before recruits are given an AK-47 and sent out to battle hardened militants. The Afghan police force already has a very high death rate - 5% were killed or wounded last year. Those that survive are corrupt bribe-takers, mainly because they are uneducated men getting paid very little.

"We will stand up as they stand down" is a bad-taste joke which the White House and Pentagon must come clean about.

Comments

[Lex]

IIRC, Germany took the task of training the police originally and never did much about it, so the US took over and either gave them paramilitary training or had them listen to retired cops from the US for a few hours.

The police are the most immediate relationship between government and the population. Failure to build a working police force or its undermining by corruption means a failure of reconstruction/nation-building.

It seems like the Obama administration is attempting to pretend that the first eight years of this occupation never happened. Its apparent belief that it has a clean slate to work with is disturbing and will beget more failure.