In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (25 page)

For Durbin, one of the most challenging aspects of the police program was the number of countries involved. The United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, and other nations working with Afghan police all wanted a say in how their money and resources were spent. This was understandable, but it also made coordination problematic and made it difficult to assign police resources in the places where Durbin assessed gaps. Most countries tended to have parochial visions of the program. After Afghan police graduated from the regional training centers, NATO countries had different—and sometimes entirely incompatible—programs for developing police in the field. One senior Pentagon official told me:

Policing Woes

The painfully slow progress in refashioning Afghanistan’s police force created a slew of challenges. General Durbin told Condoleezza Rice in June 2006 that there was no office in the United States government that could effectively build a foreign government’s police force; INL did not have experience in rebuilding a large country’s police force, nor did the Departments of Defense and Justice.
¹⁸

Consequently, government analysts began to express increasing alarm at the state of the Afghan police. The Offices of Inspector General of the Departments of State and Defense reported that the readiness of the Afghan police force “to carry out its internal security and conventional police responsibilities is far from adequate. The obsta
cles to establish a fully professional [Afghan National Police] are formidable.” It found major obstacles: “no effective field training officer (FTO) program, illiterate recruits, a history of low pay and pervasive corruption, and an insecure environment.”
¹⁹
Another assessment led by U.S. Colonel Rick Adams lambasted the Ministry of Interior as “ineffective,” “poorly led,” and “corrupt,” and the police forces as “poorly equipped.”
²⁰

A number of Afghan government officials agreed, at least in theory.
²¹
But the Afghan government was sometimes its own worst enemy. In 2003, Interior Minister Jalali had pushed for the implementation of what became known as the Afghan Stabilization Program. As envisioned by President Karzai’s cabinet, the program was intended to spread the central government’s authority to all provinces and districts. Working on the assumption that all politics in Afghanistan are local, the Afghan Stabilization Program included the construction of key infrastructure in each district, such as police barracks, a prison, a post office, and a mosque. Ideally, well-trained and well-paid Afghan police thus could be sent to a functioning district center. But the program became bogged down in interministerial turf battles, with several key ministers—from the Ministries of Finance, Rural Rehabilitation and Development, and Communications—fighting over a share of the money. There was also significant disagreement about which areas of the country the program should target. Some pushed for Balkh, a relatively quiet province in the north that was home to such strongmen as Abdul Rashid Dostum. But others argued that it should focus on the east and the south, where the Afghan government and NATO forces were fighting insurgents.
²²
In the end, the Afghanistan Stabilization Program floundered. In a moment of polite understatement, a private consulting firm reported that the plan fell “short of requirements.”
²³

The police were sorely needed to help establish order in urban and rural areas, but, as we’ve seen, they were poorly equipped, corrupt, and badly trained. Worst of all, they lacked any semblance of a national police infrastructure. This was especially true in southern Afghani
stan. In 2006, the U.S. military concluded that in the south, the Afghan National Police had only “87 percent of weapons with 71% of ammunition; 60% of vehicles; 24% of communications; and 0% of individual equipment such as body armor, batons, handcuffs, binoculars, jackets and first aid equipment.”
²⁴
They also lacked uniforms, police stations and jails, national command and control, and investigative training.
²⁵
The Ministry of Interior was in particularly bad shape. Another U.S. military report found that the “MoI Finance is broken at every level.” There was “no actual disbursement capability” to pay police officers, “no formal lines of accountability” which “perpetuates corruption at every level.”
²⁶

Afghan, U.S., and European officials involved in police training reported pervasive corruption throughout the force. An Afghan trucker put it succinctly: “Forget about the Taliban, our biggest problems are with the police.”
²⁷
Police regularly demanded bribes to allow drugs and other licit and illicit goods to pass along routes they controlled. Police chiefs were frequently involved in skimming money they received to pay their police officers.
²⁸
Some district-and provincial-level police chiefs were also involved in “ghost police” schemes. Since the international community paid law-enforcement salaries, some chiefs inflated the number of officers on their payrolls and pocketed the extra money.
²⁹
Colonel Rick Adams, who headed the Police Reform Directorate for the U.S.-led Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan, said the first challenge in reforming the police was “overcoming a culture of corruption.”
³⁰
An Afghan government report was even more frank, claiming that “allegations of nepotism and unethical recruitment practices are commonplace,” and “financial improprieties have been one of the most visible problems afflicting the Ministry and the police reform process.”
³¹
These findings led to a flurry of efforts within the U.S. military and the State Department to curb corruption in the police. Durbin and his staff began vetting top-level police officials, trying to audit cash flows for paying police officers. They also increased the number of police paid through electronic funds transfers at local
banks, rather than giving the money to police commanders, who inevitably would pocket some of it.

Nevertheless, U.S. State and Defense Department officials acknowledged that it was extremely difficult to vet Afghan police officers or units.
³²
There was little systematic information on the background of individuals or units, and documents frequently were destroyed by the Afghan Ministry of Interior—or never existed in the first place. The office in charge of training the Afghan police and army, Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan, focused largely on vetting top-level Ministry of Interior officials. There was comparatively little focus on mid-and lower-level police.
³³
As discouraging as it was, corruption appeared to be more pervasive in the police than in the other security forces.
³⁴

The result was that Afghan National Police were often overmatched in conducting counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations, as well as curbing cross-border infiltration. In some cases, including in southern Afghanistan, Afghan police actively collaborated with Taliban. A German assessment of the border police reported: “Neither the Afghan border police nor the customs authorities are currently in a position to meet the challenges presented by this long border.”
³⁵
Interior Minister Jalali argued that “because of the late start in comprehensive police development, the [Afghan National Police] continues to be ill-trained, poorly paid, under-equipped, and inadequately armed.”
³⁶
Afghan forces had a difficult time even against criminal organizations. In one incident in Balkh Province, police forces were attacked, captured, and disarmed by a drug cartel after an armed clash.
³⁷
And again, in the days following a police-led operation to capture Taliban fighters in Sangsar village in the southern province of Kandahar, an after-action report found that there was “no joint plan,” “no unity of command,” and “no intel sharing” between the police and Afghanistan’s intelligence service. The result was seven casualties and one friendly-fire incident. All Taliban escaped.
³⁸

In many ways, however, the police were an afterthought; the international training for law enforcement was simply not as good as it
was for the Afghan National Army. In the course of four years, control over the police was shifted among three agencies—from the German lead in 2002, to the U.S. State Department in 2003, and finally to the U.S. Defense Department in 2005. DynCorp International set the tone for this sorry state of affairs early on, and some of the blame can be assigned to them. The State Department and DynCorp focused largely on “outputs,” such as the number of police trained, rather than “outcome” measures such as police performance against insurgents or drug traffickers. They had too few people and too few resources.
³⁹
The quality of DynCorp police trainers varied widely. Some had significant international police training experience and were competent in dealing with police in a tribal society in the middle of an insurgency. But many other DynCorp trainers had little experience in such an environment.
⁴⁰

Senior Bush administration officials had more scathing criticism of DynCorp. Ambassador Ronald Neumann told me: “What DynCorp did was take a police officer out of a cesspool, train him for a few weeks, and throw him back into a cesspool. This,” he said pointedly, “did not result in a lot of cleanliness over the long run.”
⁴¹
Yet Neumann was quick to acknowledge that building competent and legitimate police has been a major problem in past counterinsurgency operations. “The early focus on low-level training was inadequate,” said Neumann. “DynCorp was executing the contract they were given and I do not think one can entirely hold them reponsible for how the contract was structured.”
⁴²
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage similarly told me that “DynCorp simply didn’t do a good job in training the police.”
⁴³
Afghan officials repeated this charge. Minister of Interior Jalali said, “The DynCorp police trainers were a mixed bag. I personally rejected a number of DynCorp contractors because they had little or no useful background for training police in Afghanistan.” He noted that DynCorp “checked boxes” they were more interested in completing a contract, not in creating a competent, viable police force.
⁴⁴

To help alleviate the police concerns, the Afghan government and the Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan came up
with a plan to build what became known as the Afghan National Auxiliary Police. “There were not enough guns and people to protect local villagers,” remarked Ambassador Neumann. “This is counterinsurgency 101: to protect the local population.”
⁴⁵

In February 2006, Ambassador Neumann and General Durbin were approached by senior officials from the Afghan Ministries of Interior and Finance while General Eikenberry was out of town. The Afghans wanted to hire an additional 200 to 400 police per district. The idea was to create a new force, to be called the Afghan National Auxiliary Police. Durbin and his deputy, Canadian Brigadier General Gary O’Brien, briefed Neumann on the initial concept in the spring of 2006, and Durbin then briefed President Karzai in May 2006. The plan was to establish a police force designed to fill the local gaps in Afghan security forces.
⁴⁶
The auxiliary-police program meant training a local force for ten days and equipping its members with guns. They were then sent to secure static checkpoints and to conduct operations with Coalition forces against insurgents in six unstable provinces: Helmand, Zabol, Kandahar, Farah, Oruzgan, and Ghazni.
⁴⁷
At the same time, Durbin moved to dissolve the Highway Police, who were interminably corrupt, regularly took bribes at checkpoints along major highways, and harassed local Afghans.

U.S. officials pointedly tried to avoid turning the auxiliary police into a village militia by recruiting them individually and paying and supervising them through the Ministry of Interior. “There were numerous efforts on the provincial level by local officials to recruit on a militia basis,” said Neumann. “We tried to fix those problems by sending out mixed teams from the U.S. Embassy, CSTC—A [Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan], and DynCorp to see what was happening on the local level. We fixed some of those problems.” But the auxiliary-police program still ran into additional snags. Ministry of Interior officials began recruiting without supervision in other provinces and then went to U.S. officials for reimbursement. “I refused to concur with this request and blocked it,” remarked Neumann, “on the grounds that the recruits had not been vetted.”
⁴⁸
Still, the auxiliary police were never well integrated into Pashtun tribes, subtribes, clans, and qawms in the south and east—and, consequently, were never accepted at the social level.

The program was opposed by some senior U.S. military leaders, such as General Eikenberry, who argued that it was only a stopgap measure—a tactical solution to a systemic problem with the police. But Eikenberry, who wanted to avoid a major fight with the State Department and the White House, ultimately did not pull out a “red card” and kill the program.
⁴⁹
In retrospect, he didn’t have to. The auxiliary-police program eventually lost steam. When I visited Kandahar and Helmand Provinces in September 2007, for example, most auxiliary police were being used intermittently. By 2008, when I went back again, they were essentially gone.