Policing Afghanistan
marLowe, ann
Policing Afghanistan Too few good men and too many bad ones make for a grueling, uphill struggle BY ANN MARLOWE Like most of the rest of Khost Province in eastern Afghanistan, Gorbuz...
...Everyone involved in police mentoring, from General Cone on down, is well aware that the program is not a quick fi x. Initial expectations were that the mentor teams would oversee districts for two to four months after their training, but the word is that it’s likely to take 10 to 12 months for many districts to reach Capability Milestone One...
...Gorbuz had three murders between March 21 and midNovember, two arising from land disputes, one from “wife stealing...
...He explained, “We train them at least three times a week on the top 20 skills they have to learn and do joint operations with them...
...It frustrates even some well-intentioned, seemingly blameless American reforms...
...Add to that an estimated 2,600 police wounded or missing in action so far this year...
...District Eight borders on being selfsustaining, but the challenge is to get the leadership to do the administrative work they are supposed to do...
...When you see their patriotism, it’s unreal...
...There’s a personnel offi cer in Terzayi who cannot read and write and a new police chief I have not met who is also illiterate,” Kelley says...
...But NCOs and below don’t...
...New rules mandate written placement exams to determine who is qualifi ed to be a police offi cer, an NCO, or a regular patrolman...
...If the United States were as dangerous for police as Afghanistan, we would have lost at least 12,000 cops this year...
...The police here are short of food as well as equipment...
...soldiers wear...
...Four cops were killed by IEDs in Arghandab between March and November, and 13 died in a mysterious incident where a “spy” befriended some of the cops and invited them to his home...
...On an annualized basis these Khost districts have a murder rate equivalent to that of New York City...
...Master Sergeant Richard Palasz says the police should have an EOD team in every district, given the magnitude of the threat from IEDs...
...ISAF, the NATO-led security and development mission in Afghanistan, is in charge of two districts whose police are currently going through the training program, and it will assume responsibility for another three in January...
...On October 17, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the district center’s front gate when he was challenged by a member of the Afghan Security Guard...
...That’s 10 murders in six months in districts totaling 310,000 people...
...Some of the cops at Subdistrict Nine are wearing black Chinese knock-off boots that are falling apart just fi ve months after issue...
...Military Police who mentor the police at Gorbuz District Center...
...Major Appel added that the police don’t have fl ashlights or eye protection (ballistic glasses are mandatory for U.S...
...It’s gone through four commanders...
...On November 20, a suicide bomber driving a truck packed with explosives detonated outside the Dowmanda District Center on the northern border of Khost with Paktia, killing two police doing guard duty and seven civilians, as well as wounding 16 and demolishing the district center complex and U.S...
...Police regularly transfer to the safer city districts after completing Focused District Development...
...Firm numbers are hard to come by in Afghanistan, but the best there are—those provided by U.S...
...The infrastructure projects are intended to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans and motivate them to rally behind their national government...
...Corrupt police are weeded out, illiterate police—nearly all the patrolmen and some of the NCOs—are offered basic reading classes, and all police (in theory) are issued body armor with plates, Kevlar helmets, up-to-date weapons, radios, and the same boots U.S...
...In Khost and the Pashtun belt generally there are almost no burglaries or robberies, perhaps because most people live in McFortresses...
...Food prices in Afghanistan have increased by 100-150 percent in the last six months, in step with world price levels...
...As of midNovember, only 88 U.S...
...Leigh’s 13 Americans train two other districts as well, and neither is a pretty picture...
...forces—suggest that Gorbuz had a population of 66,000 in 2007...
...This makes our job diffi cult, because they can’t do lists...
...I’ve only got 103 mentor teams...
...When Major Bill Appel arrived in April to head the Provincial Mentoring Team for Khost, most of the provincial capital’s police wore civilian clothes...
...It starts with land or money and then becomes a matter of saving face...
...Given a total Afghan National Police force of 77,000, that means 1 out of 20 cops was killed or wounded in 2008...
...This last murder might have been punishment for the man’s working for the Americans, or it could have refl ected resentment over business: Translators have infl uence—too much infl uence, most soldiers think—on the choice of contractors...
...Focused District Development is manpower-intensive...
...There have been fi ve murders in three weeks just in the little village right outside Forward Operating Base Salerno,” one of Appel’s colleagues said...
...But we have a lot of police in areas that need clearing...
...The men on my team chipped in, and we bought the 20 police on our mission sunglasses to protect their eyes against the dust that the helicopters stir up...
...mentors...
...Mandozai has just 19 cops to patrol 72 villages with a total of 120,000 people...
...The Khost police are too few to patrol effectively, even in districts where they feel safe driving the Rangers and wearing their uniforms...
...The police in this district are police during the day and Taliban at night,” commented the commander from the elite Afghan National Civil Order Police, the best-equipped and trained police force in the country, who was about to bring his men to replace Arghandab’s cops during their two month classroom training phase...
...Bismallah’s the most active, and he cares about his soldiers...
...But as a staff sergeant on Appel’s team notes, “the further you get out from Khost City, the fewer men are wearing uniforms...
...Before U.S...
...Kelley explains, “When you count out the guys on leave, most of my district centers have 26 police...
...There, they were drugged—or took drugs—and their throats were slit...
...Until this year, Gorbuz had no schools...
...So in many cases, NCOs who are barely literate in Pashtu have to struggle to fi ll out paperwork in a grammatically distinct language...
...Again, the casualty numbers tell the story...
...Regional Command South is the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, and it was an early priority to have police from four of its six provinces—Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul, and Uruzgan—go through the Focused District Development program...
...Security guard supervisors make $400 a month—as much as Colonel Abdul Qayoum, who commands the 1,200-man police force for all of Khost Province...
...It should be one-on-one for the logistics, operations, and personnel offi cers...
...training are a notch ahead of those in Khost, but nothing is easy in Afghanistan, and programs that should function smoothly rarely do...
...He didn’t have high expectations for the training program, saying, “The donkey is the same but the clothes are changed...
...The ones who have are very good about taking care of the new guys,” Leigh explained...
...We think the problem is in Provincial Headquarters...
...Oravsky continued, “There are rumors the sub-governor up there has been handing out Afghan National Police trucks to the Taliban...
...We left, and that night the Taliban came in and captured 10 or 15 people and killed 5 or 10...
...Cone would like to see NATO contribute more to the effort...
...It’s a valid concern,” says Appel, “but it’s not a reason not to equip them properly...
...Ten of the 13 police substations in the city of Kandahar have gone through the program, as have three of the province’s other 13 districts...
...Well actually, the only guy in uniform was a midget...
...Leigh and his men are unanimous in their praise for Subdistrict Nine...
...Qalander has no Afghan National Police at all, “because they’d get killed if they went up there,” as one U.S...
...Lieutenant Kelley says, “I’ve seen my second-best chief fi ght to retain his job...
...As Colonel Qayoum told me, the death benefi t for police killed in the line of duty is just 75,000 afghanis, or $1,500...
...Terzayi has 38 cops responsible for the security of 110,000 people living in 131 villages, some of them far off the paved road...
...Though the police are supposed to receive supplies through the Ministry of the Interior, there are always many slips twixt the cup and the lip...
...The higher leadership of the Afghan National Police ranges from excellent to frightening...
...Otherwise they borrow civilian cars and wear civilian clothes...
...In rural Kandahar Province, the situation is more diffi cult, with Taliban attacks frequent...
...Germany has given us one team,” he says...
...As a result, it has become a magnet for IEDs...
...On a recent mission, Major Appel’s team outfi tted the police with kids’ backpacks intended for army humanitarian assistance to schools, jury-rigging body bags to carry food and water...
...Recently a direct fi re rocket attack from 900 yards away missed the entrance control point to the Terzayi District Center complex—home to the district’s 38 police—by only 35 yards...
...Here, too, Afghan National Police casualties have been high this year: 664 killed and 1,017 wounded from January through mid-November...
...A U.S.-designed reform of the police is slowly percolating through the country, too slowly to save the cops in frontline provinces like Khost...
...Luckily, many nouns, especially those dealing with abstract concepts, are common to both tongues, and they are written in the same script...
...Army, which is attempting to bring Gorbuz and the rest of Khost from the Middle Ages to modernity...
...A professor at Khost’s new university and his 11-year-old son were gunned down in their car, two 14-year-old high school boys were strangled and left with a note stating that they were killed in retaliation for a relative’s working at Salerno, and one of Appel’s translators was shot on his way home from work...
...Nearly all of these are the work of the U.S...
...Because the Afghan National Police are the only force legally authorized to search Afghan homes, they must accompany the Afghan Army and coalition forces on any mission that involves entering qalats...
...The police didn’t even know the name of their chief or sub-governor...
...In addition to the obvious hazards of the job, the police are paid a pittance...
...Afghan cops do little that resembles police work in the United States...
...soldier who has been helicoptered in to fi ght in the area comments...
...And the new system slots people according to literacy, but makes no provision for promotion from within the ranks...
...No uniforms, nothing...
...I’d really like to get back up there...
...forces...
...A similar sum is budgeted for 2009, to be spent in 2010...
...Now, people are starting to fi nd conditions here better than in Pakistan’s neighboring Federally Administered Tribal Areas...
...If you don’t have a list of what’s supposed to be there, they’re going to sell it...
...One mentor, himself a New York City detective, commented, “There are probably precincts in New York that aren’t CM1-capable...
...Colonel Qayoum insisted to me that all 12 are fully staffed, against all evidence to the contrary...
...Administering the police mentoring program is harder in the Pashtun belt than it needs to be because all the forms that come down from the Ministry of the Interior in Kabul are written in Dari, while the language of Kandaharis is Pashtu...
...They do have two EOD “experts,” but they are working as regular cops because of the manpower shortage...
...The United States designated $1 billion in 2006 and $2.5 billion in 2007 for training and equipping the police, much of which is being disbursed this year...
...The team is a remarkably dedicated and compassionate mix of career U.S...
...The Canadians and British contributed fi ve teams each...
...Stone or mudbrick-walled qalats—fortifi ed family compounds of half an acre or an acre—dot the countryside, often built on elevated ground...
...New York City alone has almost 38,000 police offi cers serving a densely packed population of 8.3 million...
...Some improvements are underway...
...He reeled off the issues: “We have no EOD [Explosive Ordnance Detonation] experts, no medics, not even any fi rst aid kits, and no provision for maintenance of our equipment...
...Bismallah, a compact, wizened man, said, “There is no improvement in my police quality, because they are quitting...
...One cop out of the subdistrict’s 63 has been killed and two wounded in the last couple of months...
...Terzayi men have a tradition of going to work in the Gulf states, where they earn three or more times police salaries...
...troops...
...The chief instrument of reform is a program called Focused District Development, which pulls a district’s police out and sends them to a regional center for eight weeks of training by Afghan instructors alongside U.S...
...all jumped the porous border and disappeared into Pakistan...
...The policemen I saw at the Kandahar Police Mentoring Center looked robust and fi t. One American mentor pointed out that the men are fed better at the center than before or after, and that they are “scared s—less” of General Zarifi , a stern disciplinarian...
...Major Kevin J. Reilly of the New York State National Guard—in civilian life a Garden City, Long Island, cop— heads the team training the police in one hotspot about two hours from Kandahar city, Maiwand District...
...Kandahar Province is running $6,000 a day in the red on food alone,” says Lieutenant Engle...
...This isn’t unusual in Khost...
...Last year 3,500 boots were sent from Kabul for the city, and 1,500 arrived...
...The accomplishments of the training program should be measured against the unpromising starting material...
...Nor are the police equipped for the sorts of extended missions they fi nd themselves undertaking with American forces...
...Asked whether the training has improved the performance of his force, the police chief smiled...
...In 2007, 69 IEDs exploded in the province and 59 were turned in...
...soldiers can go home, Afghans have to be able to manage their own security...
...About 1,600 offi cers from this region have completed the training, out of about 10,000...
...This district would be at Capability Milestone One in three months or so if we could get the other half of the police” into the training program, said Leigh...
...A former Khost chief, General Ayoub, was viewed by Americans who worked with him as a useless bureaucrat who rarely left his offi ce...
...We are focusing on getting them their winter gear,” Leigh continued...
...Unless they get a good new commander, they are 9 to 12 months from Capability Milestone One...
...General Nasarullah Zarifi is the Afghan police general heading the Provincial Training Center where cops from the four southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan, and Zabul go for eight weeks of formal instruction at the beginning of the Focused District Development process...
...Leigh’s team (one lieutenant, a master sergeant, four lower-ranked sergeants, and six enlisted men who mentor Afghans in guard duty, weapons cleaning, and vehicle maintenance) is responsible for three police chiefs, three deputies, three logistics, operations, and personnel offi - cers, and about 150 ordinary cops...
...trainers call Capability Milestone One, meaning that they are “capable of independent planning, execution, and sustainment of counterinsurgency operations at the battalion level,” and of those, 21 have also reached Capability Milestone Two, and thus can lead such operations...
...Even the replacement boots came mainly in size 12, while most of the men were size 8 or 9. Subdistrict Nine was issued a grand total of 50 pairs of winter socks, though the rule is supposedly two pairs per cop, not exactly a lavish number in a place without running water...
...Their district center is in neighboring Musa Khel, where First Lieutenant Shane Oravsky, a recent West Point graduate, led a mission...
...In districts where the problems are worst, the tiny size of the mentor teams makes progress slow...
...soldiers said by way of explaining their superior caliber...
...General Cone has an answer: “In order for me to give them the equipment, we need an end user agreement...
...The police are the most vulnerable of the security forces...
...Their basic pay has been $100 a month, and some of Bismallah’s men have quit to join the Afghan Border Police, which pays $150, or one of two privately contracted security forces manning towers on U.S...
...he was fi nally sent to a desk job in Kabul...
...None of the culprits was caught...
...But it’s hard to blame cops like Chief Bismallah for not pushing their men’s luck...
...What we train them in is 10 percent police work and 90 percent light infantry combat...
...Currently 41 of its 69 battalions (of 600 men) have met what U.S...
...Shape, clear, hold, build—that’s the doctrine,” Cone says...
...The 110 police under his supervision are responsible for the security of 50,000 Afghans living in a sprawling agricultural district roughly 40 kilometers by 50...
...I’m building a $60 million training center in Maidan Wardak that will be capable of training 2,000 men at a time,” he said, “but I don’t have enough training teams to do the job as quickly as it needs to be done...
...Captain Knightly’s superior, Captain Terry Hilt, is a calm, classic midwesterner who commands Gorbuz and nearby Terzayi District...
...Out of the 110, maybe three or four can read and write,” says Reilly...
...There’s a family of midget cops in Musa Khel...
...commanders and Afghan offi cials have a say in selecting districts to participate, but selection is heavily weighted toward the most dangerous areas...
...But there is no magic cure for IEDs...
...In the only burglary I heard about in Gorbuz, a tractor was taken from the yard of a property that had high boundary walls on only three sides—laughable negligence, in the view of locals...
...troops anywhere...
...The Afghan National Army has not lost an engagement with insurgents since April 2007...
...But at least Bismallah insists that his men patrol their district...
...Typically, even in Pashtun provinces like Kandahar and Khost, the top brass and some district police chiefs speak Dari...
...None of the other fi ve chiefs I deal with go out on patrol with their men...
...The situation in Gorbuz and Terzayi is good compared with that in two extremely rugged districts of Khost, Qalandar and Musa Khel...
...But in Kandahar city’s most dangerous subdistrict, the police who have gone through Focused District Development still have no plates for their body armor, no helmets, and woefully inadequate equipment and clothing...
...And we’re going to do it in an eight week academy and a year of mentoring here...
...Some missions involve trekking up steep mountains with 130 pounds of gear, food, and water—but the police in Khost have no backpacks...
...it’s an AK-47, and they don’t have the armored plates which would protect them...
...Sergeant David McNeil of the 101st Airborne, who works out of the Mandozai District Center, comments, “The guys that are in their Rangers and out there doing stuff, it’s not a question of if something will happen to them, but when...
...The ANP here aren’t issued helmets or body armor,” says Hilt...
...Appel explains, “The individual body armor vests they have will stop a 9mm, but that is not the weapon of choice in this country...
...One of them is illiterate...
...By way of comparison, just 181 cops were killed in the line of duty in the United States in 2007, and our population is 10 to 12 times larger than Afghanistan’s...
...Just half of the 62 police here graduated from Focused District Development in June...
...Between March 21, when the Afghan year began, and mid-November, fi ve IEDs exploded in Gorbuz, two of them close calls for their target, the chief of police, Bismallah, whose car was destroyed in one attack...
...There are rumors that Qayoum has tried to thwart the career of Khost’s most outstanding police offi cer...
...Bismallah is the best of the six police chiefs I mentor,” says First Lieutenant Jeffrey Kelley, chief of the Provincial Mentorship Team for half of Khost’s 12 districts...
...Both U.S...
...In Mandozai, a small district of 120,000 people, October’s crime roster included fi ve murders over land disputes, two carjackings, and a fi eld-burning...
...In reality, the Terzayi police only do independent patrols up to a few kilometers away from the district center, though they will accompany U.S...
...We did a deal with the Dutch and they came up with two teams...
...Over the course of the last two years, a few jarring notes have intruded into this timeless landscape: a smoothly paved road, a huge solar-powered street light in the bazaar, a satellite dish on the district center complex...
...bases, the Afghan Security Guards and the Khost Protection Force...
...Forty of the fi rst 42 districts to go through the program were among the country’s worst...
...That last is an increase of 47 percent over the 2007 total...
...Not surprisingly, six police in Terzayi have quit recently to go overseas...
...The Afghan National Police have a much sadder story, which is changing only slowly...
...The death benefi t for soldiers is 250,000 afghanis, or $5,000...
...Policing Afghanistan Too few good men and too many bad ones make for a grueling, uphill struggle BY ANN MARLOWE Like most of the rest of Khost Province in eastern Afghanistan, Gorbuz District is a fl oodplain where wheat, corn, and other crops are grown by ancient methods in small plots running up to the base of 9,000-foot mountains...
...That’s hard to explain to the family of a slain cop...
...The IED threat is increasing all over Khost...
...Army and National Guardsmen, and like Major Appel’s team in Khost, they are protective of the miserably paid and equipped men they mentor...
...All of the men he has on the job have been shifted from training the Afghan Army or picked up nearly one by one from various maneuver units...
...Major General Robert W. Cone, the head of U.S...
...This doesn’t seem to concern the local mullahs, who are preoccupied with building as many mosques as possible in their villages...
...And of course if the police in Khost were better paid, they wouldn’t have an incentive to sell equipment...
...This year between April and October, just six months, 110 exploded and 104 were turned in...
...The Afghan National Army, which we’ve been training since 2002, has made good progress...
...But it’s widely known that many men have to pay bribes to get their results...
...A pay raise has just been announced for December 22: $20 for every cop in the country, plus combat pay of $2 a day for those in dangerous districts (which soldiers already receive...
...Of Khost’s approximately 1,200 cops, 89 have been killed by IEDs so far this year...
...Our soldiers have a year and a half of training to become an EOD expert...
...unlike the U.S...
...Some qalats have a de Chirico aspect, precise brown rectangles against a big, brilliant blue sky...
...The police in Gorbuz are so intimidated by insurgent IED attacks that they use their Ford Ranger trucks and wear their uniforms only when accompanying U.S...
...Captain Rick Knightly, quietly competent, leads the 27 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division and U.S...
...They may not get meat for a month, but they still want to be ANP,” says Engle, a New York State National Guardsman who in civilian life is a seventh-grade teacher in Old Forge, New York...
...Since Colonel Qayoum took over as police chief for the province in mid-August, more and more have followed his order to wear their uniforms, and Appel estimates that only 5-10 percent of the city cops are in civvies...
...Mentoring teams of 12 to 18 trainers stay with units of around 100 to 120 police after they return home, following their progress more and more loosely as time goes on until the cops reach Capability Milestone One...
...Gorbuz District is authorized to pay 64 cops, and 45 were on active duty when I visited in March, but by late October only 30 were working...
...Six of the 62 cops are literate, and one speaks some English, which makes this one of the most educated police teams in the city of 600,000...
...Two of our ANP who got shot might still be alive if they’d had body armor...
...There are also strong suggestions that some high scores stem from bribes...
...People are voting with their feet, as refugees return from Pakistan...
...Others cluster in villages that, like Italian hill towns, take on the appearance of a single walled compound...
...But his replacement, after two and a half months on the job, had only managed to visit four of the province’s districts...
...Both are offi cial national languages, but historically the Ministry of the Interior has been a Dari-speaking stronghold staffed by Tajiks...
...Police have only one uniform each, which they wash weekly...
...And they live in unheated quarters in an area where temperatures dip into the 40s or below at night for four or fi ve months of the year...
...The elders told us there are never any Taliban up there...
...But there is an astonishing number of murders for a small, homogenous rural population...
...Some of the men who are demoted from offi cer to NCO are so ashamed that they quit the force...
...Kandahar’s Police Subdistrict Nine covers a new community of around 89,000—a result of the building boom taking place all over Afghanistan—where neighbors don’t know or trust each other...
...In the Afghan Security Guards, squad leaders make $300 a month—as much as Chief Bismallah, a 26-year veteran of the police force who speaks not only his native Pashtu but also Dari and English...
...It’s the most prosperous district we mentor, and morale is high...
...In the same period, Terzai had two murders, prompted by land disputes...
...But when they return to their districts, no drug testing is done...
...The boots they’d been issued during training were shot by the end of the eight-week program, according to Major Ryan Leigh, who commands the 13man team training Kandahar’s Subdistricts Six, Eight, and Nine...
...Cone acknowledges that the police are doing the job of an army at war, while equipped for keeping a peace that has yet to arrive...
...troops’ quarters (with two Americans wounded...
...The police chief showed up in civilian clothes for the meeting between the American team and the district elders and admitted that all of his 200 cops were illiterate with the exception of three NCOs...
...But 90 to 95 percent of the resources for police reform have come from the United States...
...A lot of them can’t count...
...Murders in Khost used to occur between tribes, but now they occur within families, with brothers killing brothers, and cousins cousins...
...So the police don’t get the rations of meat or heating oil they are supposed to receive...
...But they’re six to eight months from Capability Milestone One...
...This also explains why there are no police medics for Kandahar Province: The only instructional course is given in Dari, which few cops understand...
...troops had been killed in action in all of Afghanistan this year, but 464 Afghan soldiers had been slain and a whopping 1,215 police...
...But while most Afghans embrace at least the tangible benefi ts of modernization, the small opposition remains violent...
...He notes that on intake into the classes, 39 out of 372 cops tested positive for opiates, 98 for marijuana, and 16 failed their physicals...
...Obviously this doesn’t increase local respect for the police, and it makes police more vulnerable to friendly fi re...
...Five Afghan Border Police were killed and two injured in Terzayi District on June 18, and four IEDs have exploded since April, when the 101st Airborne began its deployment here...
...They’re not allowed to smoke hash,” one of the U.S...
...Afghanistan’s 77,000 cops serve a nation of 25 to 31 million people, most of them in villages scattered across one of the most mountainous countries in the world...
...It’s hard to blame them...
...Ninety percent of the IEDs found or detonated in Kandahar are here, 23 of them logged between March 21 and mid-November...
...Some of the police his unit encountered were wearing badges on their hats denoting allegiance to Haqqani, a terrorist leader operating from Pakistan...
...We go to police academy for six months, and after that it takes three to fi ve years for a New York cop to know what he’s doing...
...training for the Afghan National Police, explained the big picture to me on November 8, our second interview this year...
...Without the results, you can’t get paid...
...None of the districts that have been through the program has yet been certifi ed at Capability Milestone One, though a few are expected to reach that level in the coming months...
...The cops aren’t issued fl ashlights—this is a country where there’s no electrical grid, so most areas are pitch black at night—but Leigh’s team found the money to buy one big Maglite for every six cops in their districts...
...Afghan corruption is pervasive...
...And as the steward of the American taxpayer’s money, I won’t accept that...
...Ann Marlowe is a New York writer who just fi nished her fourth embed in Khost Province and her eleventh trip to Afghanistan...
...And even in relatively safe districts, the threat of sudden death is never far...
...Just two were killed in 2007...
...Even fewer men are available at any given time...
...District Six has no leadership...
...now its 80,000 people have 14...
...The slow progress of the Afghan National Police is not for want of money...
...It’s being investigated by a prosecutor,” said Major Leigh...
...First, Afghanistan doesn’t have enough cops to do the job...
...Says Palasz, “If you are illiterate and you join as a patrolman, you retire as a patrolman 20 years later...
...But Qayoum is an intelligent man, and his litany of complaints about the resources provided to the police is mostly well founded...
...If this does not change, I will be alone here with Captain Knightly...
...It’s reactive mentoring,“ Leigh explains...
...Two policemen, an uncle and his nephew, were shot in broad daylight in the bazaar on September 26, and another was killed while on leave...
...and Afghan armies, the police have no uparmored Humvees...
...Perhaps the pay raise will do the trick...
...Technically, Cone is short 2,300 trainers...
...Smoking hashish and marijuana is legal in Afghanistan and tolerated in the police...
...The police forces in Kandahar that have been through U.S...
...the Afghans have three weeks...
...Especially in the south, drug use is a problem among police...
...In some districts, the police stay alive by shirking active patrolling...
...The American Army gives us armor for a reason...
...It’s so great working with them, it’s why I extended my tour by three months...
...While the insurgents cannot directly engage either the American Army or the Afghan Army and increasingly keeps its distance from the police, they kill with IEDs...
...They work 12-hour shifts, so there are 13 men on duty...
...This has reached only 42 of a planned 172 districts to date...
...In Arghandab District, an agricultural area just over a mountain from Kandahar, a team from the New York National Guard was about to begin shepherding the cops through the Focused District Development program...
...In 2008, Congress budgeted $800 million for the police, which will be spent mainly in 2009...
...And for the Afghan National Police (ANP) in Gorbuz and much of the rest of Khost, this apparently tranquil, age-old landscape is a minefi eld...
...They drive around in U.S.-issued Ford Ranger pickup trucks that aren’t even bulletproof...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 14
