Seated in an office, surrounded by pomegranate trees in full bloom, Lieutenant Colonel Khalil Nehmatullah, an Afghan army commander in the dusty desert province of Farah, sighed when he heard the news. Insurgents had struck a police checkpoint overnight, shot one policeman dead in the melee, captured four others, took them away and executed them.
Nehmatullah's US mentor, Captain Christopher Garvin, wondered if the police had fallen asleep on their watch, again. Nehmatullah said they might have been sold out to the Taliban by an officer mysteriously absent from his post. However it occured, the incident was all too familiar.
After years of focusing their training efforts on Afghanistan's army, US policy makers are realising they have neglected the police force, leaving ill-trained police an easy target on the frontline against Taliban insurgents. Some 1,500 Afghan police were killed in fighting between 2007 and 2009, three times as many deaths as suffered by the Afghan army.
"The enemy counts the police as the first barrier for them," said Interior Ministry spokesman Zamarai Bashary. "The police are not only doing law enforcement, right now the police are fighting the insurgency, in the front line, they are fighting drug lords and doing the poppy eradication."
Since 2002, Washington has operated a multi-billion dollar mentoring programme for the Afghan army, embedding thousands of US troops alongside Afghan soldiers in combat. Police training was left to Germany, which sent a few hundred civilian instructors and had spent just $80 million by 2007. That leaves the police exposed and overmatched in a war zone.
"The policeman should not be there for war. He's there for upholding the law," said Police Brigadier-General Ali Shah Ahmadzai, a former deputy police chief in Kabul. "Every day five or six police are killed in fighting. In some districts only police exist, there is no army." Since last year the US military has started diverting its army mentors to work alongside the police, a process that will intensify when 4,000 new trainers dispatched by President Barack Obama begin arriving in coming weeks.
Bashary, the Interior Ministry spokesman, estimates the police are four years behind the military in training. US mentors say it will take years to properly train the force. "Give them two more years and they will be legitimate," said Major Cedric Burden, who leads a team of US soldiers mentoring a police unit in Farah. "They won't be good but they will be a lot better, a lot better than they are now."
LOW PAY, LOCAL TIES:
Afghanistan's national police force numbers about 80,000, about the same size as its army. Plans have been announced to increase the size of both forces to fight insurgents, including recruiting 15,000 more police in time for elections in August.
Police recruits earn just $120 a month, the same as their army counterparts. Afghans universally complain that police supplement their pay by taking bribes at checkpoints. "One of the main problems is the salary is low. They need proper compensation," said Ahmadzai. Insurgents pay more - $200 or $300 - to fighters who join them, he added.
Unlike the army, whose soldiers are deployed across the country, police generally serve where they are recruited. Asking them to conduct operations such as eradicating drug crops in their home towns can divide their loyalties and attract revenge. "Police from a certain neighbourhood usually have problems with the people there and fear that pulling the opium poppy could affect their own families or the Taliban working in that area," Nehmatullah, the Afghan army commander, said.
Burden acknowledges the problem: "(The police) would rather go after somebody who's not a relative, so you will have problems like that with the police because they are local." "The recruiting to me is the Achilles heel," he said. "What they will do is go to the village and get a leader and he'll just get ten guys, he'll say 'come on Jim, come on Gerald' and it's like 'Boom! You're police. Throw on a uniform!'". Recruiting qualified people is the hardest part in a country where only about a third of the population can read. US troops are sending recruits to literacy classes before they can start.
"Most of the people are not educated so they are like 'what's the rule of law?'. So until you can get these people to be educated and do the right thing by training them you're not going to have a credible force," Burden said.