The reform of the Afghan National Police has, since 2001, been politically led by the German Government. In 2005 however the US stepped in and the reforms were going no where. Today, the US State department is running and funding the Reforms and the Germans are slowlt stepping away. Sadly the much trumpted annoucements by the Eurpoean Union in Feburary 2007 appears, to be political and too little too late. The actual funds and numbers on the ground are insignificant when compared to what the US already has in place and the institutional knowledge that it has now obtained in recent years. 

The ongoing role and commitment of the Germans, originally leading the Pillar of Reform, was questionable and publicly criticized by NATO at an international, regional and local level.  As at November 06, Germany had 41 German police officers involved in training the Afghan police. Since 2002, it has spent $89.7 million training 16,000 afghan police, most of them officers and noncommissioned officers, but had very little to publicly show for it on the ground. In comparison, the United States has, spent $862.2 million since 2005, training 40,000 police, mostly highway and border personnel but like the Germans they too have been severely critiziced on the quality of the training and the outputs.

It is proposed that the ANP will total 82,000 personnel by 2010. This followed an announcement in May 2007 to increase in numbers, on top of an earlier revisions set out in the Afghan Compact in 2007. Ishaq Nadiri, the senior economic adviser to President Hamid Karzai and co-chairman of the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board announced that an additional 19,000 police officers would be recruited on top of the earlier 8,000 additional police officers already announced but excluding the additional 20,000 auxillary police officers announced separately.  The police force currently stands at about 63,000 officers, according to the U.S. Defense Department.

Publicly it is stated that the reforms will create a modern respected police force.  The aim is to ensure that they will have the capacity to enforce law and order but until there is a respected justice system they will, until then, both in and outside Kabul, act as a paramilitary force predominantly focusing on maintaining security.

Auxiliary Police

The Auxiliary Police was created at the original suggestion of the President, are recruited locally and employed to boost numbers in areas where security is particularly weak, predominately in the in six southern provinces.  In Kandahar, Canadian Colonel Gary Stafford was quoted as saying that the auxiliaries reluctance to obey police commanders might be related to their loyalty to more powerful figures in Kandahar: the governor and the President's brother. "Unfortunately, what's happening throughout the region is that the initial influx of candidates that we're receiving for this training, the majority of them are militias from governors," It is feared that the new hastily created program could place ill-trained and poorly vetted officers in the field and allow militias and criminals to infiltrate the force. Furthermore, in areas where it is difficult to directly recruit for the ANP it is odd that it has been so easy to recruit for the Auxiliary Forces whose command and control is questionable. 

The contradiction and cost in training the ANP to empower central government but at the same time recruiting and training Auxiliaries, nominated, by local elders, openly reported to belong to the Militias, many of whom were stood down earlier under $142m DDR program, is openly known but conveniently overlooked by the international community. 

Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, sacked as Helmand's governor last year, reportedly at the insistence of the international community, said that he was recruiting 500 local men for a force that will fight the Taleban.  This however conflicts with the thrust of the DIAG programme tasked to disarm the irregular armed groups that surround local strongmen that continue to exercise power on the ground. An unnamed official at the Japanese embassy, told IWPR that Japan, as lead nation on the DDR Program, has pledged over 60 million US dollars to DIAG programme, after earlier giving more than 91 million dollars for its predecessor. The embassy official noted that there was some confusion about whether the proposed community police would actually be paramilitaries who had gone through these disarmaments schemes, only to be given weapons again.

 Until now, the effectiveness of the force has been questioned and it has not had the capacity to retrain. It was hoped that the much talked of reforms would address these issues and create a force that would meet the modern demands required of it. As it is the initial concerns raised by those in the know, although flaty denied by the Ministry of Interior have proved to be correct.  As part of the wider deal, the district has been allowed to choose its own officials and police officers, something one member of Parliament warned would open a Pandora’s box as more districts clamored for the right to do the same[1].

The role of the Auxiliary police force remains marginal and questioned by academics and those with institutional knowledge. The funding, arming, command and control of these local militia appears an ad hoc process open to abuse by mainipulative nationals taking advantage of naïve internationals.  For ISAF and the Coalition it provides a quick fix on their Watch, by putting numbers on the ground.  The cost effectives and naivety was however demonstrated in 2006 when the Taliban reentered Qala Musa and the Auxillary police force nominated by the local elders – were no where to be seen. Will these young men honestly serve their country and resist the influence of tribes, warlords and drug money? Are their units strong enough, after between 2 - 10 days' training? [2]

Sergeant Mark Davidson, a senior police trainer spoke about the relationship between the Afghan National Police force and the national auxiliary police. "It's very important that these (auxiliary) A.N.A.P. get trained to an adequate level as soon as possible, so that we can put them out with the (regular) A.N.P. in a support position, doing the jobs that A.N.P. would normally be doing, so they [the police regulars] can be free to do other tasks.". After just two weeks training, the question is, will the new policemen be more loyal to their former bosses or to the Afghan government, based hundreds of kilometers away in Kabul?

The cost and effectiveness and command and control of the auxiliary force in the short to medium term must seriously be reconsidered and its mid to long term role and accountability be resolved to empower the Afghan National Police. Zemarai Bashary, the auxiliary police stated that the ANAP will comprise an additional force of 20,000 for the next two years in the six southern provinces of Uruzgan, Kandahar, Helmand, Farah, Zabul and Ghazni. Critics say that only time will tell but many feel that the force could create yet another source of long-term instability in the country because re-arming of local communities has always proved counter-productive in the past.

Prior to the Auxiliaries, the three areas of reform comprised revisiting the training modernizing the command structure and increasing the pay and benefits,. Up to 70% of ANP personnel are illiterate, the literate and illiterate respectively are budgeted to receive between 12 – 90 days training but on the ground this could in reality be as little as 2 days if you are an auxiliary. A joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department stated that after several years and a $1.1-billion investment, a highly touted police training effort has not produced the promised results. U.S. officials allowed the Afghan Ministry of Interior, to shirk its responsibilities. The agency could not account for the number of police officers on duty or the whereabouts of thousands of vehicles and other equipment. The field training program, the backbone of the entire effort, is greatly understaffed, and many U.S. trainers are unqualified to train Afghan recruits who are mostly illiterate.

Instead of the standard eight weeks of training, the recruits receive only two weeks. Police experts who read the report agreed that most of the blame for the failure lies with the U.S. government for relying on private contractors, especially the giant DynCorp International.

Despite this, the EU has now decided to give it a go and allow the German program to merge in to its own. By May 2007, it said that it will have set up a 230-strong police training mission to build up "an Afghan police force in local ownership” that respects human rights and operates within the framework of the rule of law." Under the EU plan 160 police officers and up to 70 additional legal and judicial experts will be deployed in Kabul and five regional commands to focus on mentoring top officers and commanders in such areas as criminal investigations, border policing and in the training and education of police recruits. The mission is to cost the EU $52m in 2007/8, however it is unclear how long the program is budgeted for.  

The remaining reforms focused on modernizing the Police command structure and increasing the pay and benefits, to match the ANA, to enable the ANP to attract and retain the best.  Funding is provided through the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan (LOTFA) in the short to medium term, due to the GoA’s current budget deficit, but it is not clear when the Government could sustain the expense in the long term and as a result, every thing could ultimately be in vain.  The saving grace may however, be the international political fall out back home and the growing calls to bring troops back home. The alternative may be to use the funds saved in deploying troops to fund the Afghan security sectors and private sector security sub contractors.

Outside of Kabul, the UN’s SRSG reported in March 2006 noted that the ANP had little capacity in terms of leadership, equipment and facilities compounded further by the absence of a functioning judicial and penal system. This was reconfirmed three months later in a subsequent American Government report [3] where the ANP’s current capabilities, were noted in the 12 point recommendations and summarized as "far from adequate," This was an understatement having spent over $1bn, to date, on reforms with little visible results evident to the general public forever asking where has all of the money gone.

The report noted that “obstacles to establishing a fully professional ANP were "formidable" and included pervasive corruption, illiterate recruits, a history of low pay, an insecure environment, problematic management of the police training contract and calls to be more effective. This suggested that coordination between State Department contract managers and the Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan (CFC-A), responsible for executing ANP training programs on the ground through private contractors such as the recently replaced private Dyn Corp company had been lacking.

Among the report's principal recommendations, taken on by the EU, were the expansion and better management of a mentoring program, "a key component to effect institutional change and build a capable, self-sustaining national police force."

Staffing

A key component of the Reform was to update the historic command and control structure. This is necessary to create a modern force with a defined chain of command. The structure was top heavy with three officers employed for every two sergeants.  

Senior appointments in the ANP were reviewed in 2005 in a three phase process to ensure that those personnel retained were the most professional, competent and respected.  The restructuring of the ANP’s senior management took place and was completed almost as originally timetabled.  The SRSG stated in January 07 “Strengthening the rule of law across Afghanistan needs to be a priority for all our efforts in 2007, reform of the Afghanistan National Police is central to this if we are to build a police force able to serve the people of Afghanistan with professionalism and integrity.

 On 8th February 2007, the provincial police chief of Kabul made it clear in his comments to the internal security commission of the lower house that some members of the police force were involved in committing crimes, destructive activities and sabotaging security and that they commit these crimes whilst in police uniform. The Kabul provincial police chief stated that the police force inside Kabul’s four main gates have separate allegiances to different groups and do not obey the orders coming from the Ministry of Interior affairs and the Kabul police department.  The Police would set up various security checkpoints at the time in different parts of Kabul to “ensure security and protect people's life and property”. Unfortunately, in establishing the security checkpoints, the ANP not only failed to prove useful but instead used the security checkpoints to charge for all goods to pass in and out of Kabul.

“The forty senior appointments made represented the culmination of the work of a joint Ministry of Interior and international community probationary board that was established to review appointments[4].”     

The final appointments completed the reforms which initially selected the thirty one most senior and competent officers in the force – 12 Pashtun, 16 Tajik, 2 Hazaras and 1 Uzbeck. And then identified a further second and third rounds of 86 and 1,014 officers respectively, to fill the scheme of compliment.
 
Those chosen had successfully submitted applications that were reviewed by a panel, passed background checks, a written exam and an oral selection Board and obtained the President’s personal approval.  As a result 86, 3,700 and 1,800 officers were to be made redundant in three phases.  Proposals for a redundancy package were discussed at the Doha conference in Feb 2006 but despite the reforms proceeding lessons from the recent pass of paying to keep the influential guys on your side, had not been learnt. Twleve months on, the report "Creating Stability and Prosperity in Afghanistan and the Region", by Liechtenstein Institute of Self-Determination at Princeton University, continued to call for the replacement of corrupt officials and recommended exerting sustained international pressure on the Karzai government if it failed to remove the 12 police chiefs, who were recommended for dismissal by the Police Probation Board. "Those identified for dismissal by the board should not be recycled elsewhere by the government.  "Arresting known leaders of criminal groups, especially those involved in narcotics smuggling, closely linked to the government, will assist in establishing the integrity of the central government, and continuing to reform the Interior Ministry to reduce corruption and replace corrupt "mullahs and judges" whose presence in government compromise public confidence.

"Without effective and honest administrators, police or judges, the state can do little to provide internal security," Mr. Rubin stated when asked about the subject.  He said that commanders who had been demobilized by the Defense Ministry had subsequently found positions in the Interior Ministry. "The latter became the main body providing protection to drug traffickers. "Positions such as police chief in poppy-producing districts are sold to the highest bidder. The going rate was reported to be $100,000 for a six-month appointment to a position, with a salary of $60 per month." [5]

The future for the Police currently looks bleak if the current program devised by the internationals continues to train, mentor and supervise the Force, fail to apply lessons learnt to the format used over the last two years and over look implementing some quality control.  Training is inadequate and the public now completely mistrusts the Police. This is further compounded because the community auxiliary policing offers little advantage and could on its own ultimately undermine all of the reforms in the mid to long term. One police man interviewed after he quit, did so because he was commissioned to serve in his own area where everyone in the community knew he was a policeman. He lived in Panjwayi district - control of which regularly changes hands between the government and insurgents – “so it is difficult and dangerous for me to serve in such an area, moreover, for a salary of just US$70 a month, my family thought the risks were not worth it. 

The Taliban, however, is not the only ones terrorizing the locals, so are the police. "They are thieves," said Sgt Din of the ANA in Gereshk through a translator. "They stop the vehicles at checkpoints and take money. One day we tried to stop them. They cocked their weapons. So did we. The ANA commander told us not to get involved."

It will take time and results to turn the ANA around but the issues are compounded further by recent reports of Taliban dressing up as Police to carry out acts, specifially to discredit the ANP.  Simply making every police officer accountable by providing them with a named, publicly displayed, photo id card and a personal number on their epaulettes would enable the public to make direct complaints against officers acting inappropriately, to an independent international third party organization. This simple act would, go some way to improving transparency and winning back the support of the population.  Those training the Police need to harness whatever motivates a traffic officer, paid $70 a month, to stand in the street every day directing the traffic, come rain or shine, when every motorist ignores him. There are thousands of good ANP but they will need to be led, mentored and gain the public’s respect for the job that they are being asked to do before the ANP can ever move forward – regardless of the funds or number of international trainers on the ground.