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| Afghanistan |
| Unreliable Afghan police vex U.S. trainers |
| 2009-11-30 |
| KOLK, Afghanistan When the improvised bomb exploded in a mud-walled compound about 300 yards from a new traffic checkpoint, the six Afghan police officers at the post just looked at one another. Another violent day on Afghanistan's Highway 1 had begun. "Tell them to send three guys and go check it out to make sure no locals were hurt," U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Hans Beutel told a translator. "Tell them not to get too close, but go take a look." Then Beutel, a 23-year-old from Huntersville, and the rest of his team from the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division drove off to a half-finished nearby base to grab a quick lunch. When they returned to the police checkpoint in the early afternoon, they found it deserted. It was another lost afternoon in the frustrating effort to train Afghanistan's ill-paid police, who have a well-deserved reputation for stealing and extorting bribes. Staff Sgt. Tony Locklear, 44, from Robeson County, who had spent the morning coaching the officers on running a checkpoint, cursed when he saw they were gone. Training the Afghan national and local police, who function as a paramilitary force, is essential to the Obama administration's efforts to find an exit from Afghanistan. If the Afghan government is ever to take control of the country, it will need a less corrupt and more professional police force. I suggest a page from the British, "divide and conquer". Invite a bunch of big Sikhs from India to run the show! An added bonus is that would put the Paki's panties in a twist, big time. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander, has called for boosting the police force to 160,000 from its strength of 84,000; McChrystal also wants the Afghan army to double in size, to 240,000. Eight years after the U.S.-led invasion, the police appear to be years away from functioning independently. U.S. trainers say they must tell the Afghans repeatedly to do the simplest things, such as separating passengers they've searched from ones they haven't when they stop a vehicle. The police suffer from a range of problems besides corruption, their U.S. trainers say. Illiteracy is the norm - Beutel thinks that only about 10 percent of the police officers he works with can read - and drug abuse is common. Fuel is often in short supply. The central police headquarters in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, provides the district police with whom Beutel works one tank of diesel fuel a month per truck. That often means that when Beutel wants to mount a mission, he has to carry American fuel in jerrycans for the Afghan vehicles. Still, the police staffing vulnerable traffic checkpoints routinely suffer casualties at a rate two or three times that of any other force on the coalition side, and American trainers say that many are fearless under fire. This area along Highway 1 about 25 miles west of Kandahar illustrates the challenge the police face. Down a dusty side road about 700 yards from the police checkpoint, two white flags flapped in the breeze one recent morning. "A few days after we started showing up here, the Taliban put up those flags," said Beutel. "Pretty much everything past that is theirs." After nearly two dozen assaults into Taliban turf in the past three months, Beutel and the soldiers he commands describe a nightmarish place in which the Taliban control the villages even in daylight, and the roads and paths are larded with bombs and mines. Explosive booby traps are set into walls, and the insurgents have dug fighting positions with "spider holes," bunkers, camouflaged trenches and even tunnels reminiscent of the Vietnam War. Beutel said he'd like to clean it all out and set up checkpoints outside the villages to prevent the Taliban from slipping back. That, however, would take perhaps twice as many police and a police district commander who could persuade village elders into a working relationship. For now, all the local police and Afghan National Army units can do is try to keep the highway safe along the 12 miles that Beutel's police are supposed to patrol. Beutel's soldiers work with the officers on a range of skills, from how to patrol to how to act professionally. He talks with the police battalion commander, Bismullah Jan, almost daily, the young American officer sitting with the grizzled policeman on a rug in the district offices on the Canadian military base where Beutel's troops live. They sip tea and discuss what went well that day and what could improve. Before the police disappeared from the checkpoint, Beutel had been feeling good about the last 25 days. His soldiers had worked with the police to beef up several checkpoints. The plan had been to monitor who was entering and leaving villages and to keep the Taliban away from the highway. The operation had been a success: The number of bombs planted on the road had fallen by 70 to 80 percent, Beutel said. The mission couldn't last indefinitely, however, because it required too many police officers, and its last day would underscore the security challenges. The explosion at the nearby compound was only the first of a series of incidents. Next, a U.S. Army truck filled with soldiers from another unit hit a mine, which blew off one wheel. Then the attack that many had been expecting came just after Beutel's paratroopers drove off for lunch at the U.S. base. This time, the insurgents struck an Afghan army convoy about 1,000 yards east with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms. Beutel's troops, hearing the attack just as they were beginning to eat, jumped in their armored trucks and raced out through the gate. Beutel got on the radio with the pilots of two U.S. helicopters overhead. The pilots fired rockets at yet another taunting white flag south of the highway, near where Beutel told them the insurgents had been seen last, but they didn't flush any. Locklear's men have found networks of trenches near the villages. "We've even seen them shoot at helicopters, slide down awhile when the choppers fire rockets at them, then pop up and shoot again," he said. Beutel asked through a translator why the six policemen had abandoned the checkpoint. "Did the Taliban shoot at them?" he asked Hamayun, a battalion officer. Hamayun drew himself up. "We wouldn't put on these uniforms if we were afraid of the Taliban," he said. "They left because the Americans never came back." Most of the police are brave, Beutel said, and others aren't much good. Regardless, making them into a force that can fight the Taliban is a long haul. "Somehow we've got to empower the locals to trust" the police, Beutel said. "Right now, though, the guys with legitimacy in those villages are the ones who can bust through your door with an AK-47." |
| Posted by:GolfBravoUSMC |
| #14 Pick a local tribe, any tribe. Go with that tribe and put the rest to the sword, declare victory, and GET THE HELL OUTTA THERE! Hear, hear. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-11-30 14:54 |
| #13 Yes there are a lot of illiterates in the Afghan police. Yes there are a lot of slackers and thieves in the Afghan police. But that doesn't mean the solution is education. There is a good chance that the crooks are, on the average, actually more educated than the non crooks. One solution, would be to take some crooks and execute them publicly, however, all we are able to do is put them in temp custody. This is better than no punishment but not by enough to act as a deterrent. |
| Posted by: lord garth 2009-11-30 13:45 |
| #12 That's why the Afghans built East Point, flash91, on the West Point model... and initially staffed mostly by West Pointers on sabbatical. The first class should graduate this year, I think. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-11-30 12:27 |
| #11 "We wouldn't put on these uniforms if we were afraid of the Taliban," he said. "They left because the Americans never came back." This is the lynchpin of the failure. None of the afganistani's felt they were in control of the the situation. This points to training a native officer core - a large one so that command can be distributed. |
| Posted by: flash91 2009-11-30 12:10 |
| #10 People get the government they deserve. Then the French should have stayed out of the American War of Independence. Which means we would have most likely remained British subjects. Civilization is not based upon a balance sheet. In its original condition, much of the trans-Appalachian region wasn't worth the lives that it took to bring it from what it was to what it is, if you didn't have an idea of what it could be. You could never accurately define what that was till you were there. Ever wonder what the world today would look like if the resources and population of that region beyond Appalachia had never materialized in time to face the threats of the 20th century. It certainly wouldn't be a kinder gentler world. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2009-11-30 11:19 |
| #9 Training the locals |
| Posted by: GolfBravoUSMC 2009-11-30 11:16 |
| #8 The Somalis are not worth the blood and treasure of America. Posted by Pliny Uneang2768 2009-11-30 09:26 Few outside our borders are. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2009-11-30 09:43 |
| #7 People get the government they deserve. If the people of Somalia live in a Hobbesian state, it's not the responsibility of the US government to change that, it's primarily the responsibility of the Somalian people. If the NGOs and missionaries can't operate in Somalia the DOD, CIA and AID won't be able to either without being in a war. The Somalis are not worth the blood and treasure of America. If they threaten the US, we should act to remove the threat. And once we've removed it, we should let them return to whatever state of nature they wish. Just as we should have left Afghanistan as soon after Tora Bora as possible. |
| Posted by: Pliny Uneang2768 2009-11-30 09:26 |
| #6 They're much better at it than DOD, CIA, or AID. As they demonstrate daily in Somalia. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2009-11-30 09:11 |
| #5 'Moose, I like your thinking, but you're presupposing language & cultural competence on the US side. The remedy also smacks of colonialism. It's probably the only thing that would have worked. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2009-11-30 09:10 |
| #4 What you're talking about is really colonization. Afghanistan is a mess as is most of the world. The US government cannot change that except by example. And conquering countries to impose our culture is not the example we should be setting. We should protect those who have served us, by asylum if necessary, then get out and leave civilizing and nation building to NGOs and missionaries if the Afghans want them. They're much better at it than DOD, CIA, or AID. |
| Posted by: Pliny Uneang2768 2009-11-30 09:09 |
| #3 A lot of the children of Afghanistan are raised as almost brutal animals. Long ago, the communists realized that if you want to completely change the character of society, you have to start with its children. Unfortunately, they took children and raised them to be thugs and brutes, which accomplished little. What American should have done at the outset was to create a very large system of military protected western style orphanage and boarding schools. To take the unwanted orphans of Afghanistan and raise them to western standards, while they were critically observing, but not participating in, Afghan culture. After just a few years, when these kids started to graduate, they would be given preferential treatment by being moved into positions of authority and high pay. Then, when the prosperous Afghans saw this, there would be a rush to get their children into those schools as well, they being a "proven" path to success. The final stage would be to extend that school system slowly outward, eventually making public school mandatory in the other cities, and even busing students from rural areas to attend school away from their parents and villages for most of the year. The US and NATO have been in Afghanistan since 2001. Had we begun with this program then, the 10 year olds by now would be graduating as sophisticated, 18 year olds capable of rapidly ascending the corridors of power and business. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2009-11-30 08:47 |
| #2 Pick a local tribe, any tribe. Go with that tribe and put the rest to the sword, declare victory, and GET THE HELL OUTTA THERE! It's the only language they understand. If you've got three or four hundred years to work with them, hundreds of thousands of trainers, and gazillions of dollars...., well that may prove to be yet another solution. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2009-11-30 07:56 |
| #1 It appears there are few good options in Afghanistan. 'Twould have been nice if the US had launched a major campaign after 9/11 to promote (and reward) competence in the languages spoken there, but that didn't happen, and is still not happening. Empowering the locals to trust anyone is a lot more difficult when you can't even speak to them. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2009-11-30 06:47 |