KABUL, Afghanistan — The NATO general in charge of training the Afghan police has some tongue-in-cheek career advice for the country’s recruits.
Recruits at a riot control class. The high death rate in the field, poor pay and lack of equipment cause many officers to quit.
Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era. Go to the Blog »
Living Story
The War in Afghanistan
Recent developments on the war in Afghanistan with background, analysis, timelines and earlier events from NYTimes.com and Google.
Italian paramilitary Carabinieri officers train Afghan police recruits. On average, 5 percent of recruits cannot pass firearms tests.
Afghan police officers took part last month in a class on civil disturbances and riot control in Kabul. Fewer than one in ten recruits can read and write.
“It’s better to join the Taliban; they pay more money,” said Brig. Gen. Carmelo Burgio, from Italy’s paramilitary Carabinieri force.
That sardonic view reflects a sobering reality. The attempts to build a credible Afghan police force are faltering badly even as officials acknowledge that the force will be a crucial piece of the effort to have Afghans manage their own security so American forces can begin leaving next year.
Though they have revamped the program recently and put it under new leadership, Afghan, NATO and American officials involved in the training effort list a daunting array of challenges, as familiar as they are intractable.
One in five recruits tests positive for drugs, while fewer than one in 10 can read and write — a rate even lower than the Afghan norm of 15 percent literacy. Many cannot even read a license plate number. Taliban infiltration is a constant worry; incompetence an even bigger one.
After eight weeks of training, an average of 5 percent of recruits cannot pass firearms tests — but are given a gun and sent out to duty. Unsurprisingly, the Afghan National Police have the highest casualty rates of all the security forces fighting the Taliban; 646 died last year, compared with 282 Afghan Army soldiers and 388 NATO troops, according to NATO figures.
The death rate, poor pay and lack of equipment are among the reasons that a fourth of the officers quit every year, making the Afghan government’s lofty goals of substantially building up the police force even harder to achieve.
“They say the numbers prove ‘the Afghan National Police are in the fight,’ ” said General Burgio, quoting a frequently heard mantra from NATO officials. “This is not true. Usually the police are killed in ambushes, not because they were sent out to fight, but because they have no armored vehicles, for instance.”
The list of reasons for the failures is almost as lengthy as the list of problems officials cite with the police force.
General Burgio said the countries that were supposed to be building up Afghanistan’s security had not followed through on their promises to send enough qualified instructors. But even when the instructors arrive, he said, the countries involved seem unable to agree on a uniform training protocol.
The United States has recognized the problems and has begun making significant changes.
Under orders from the American military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, control of police training is being shifted from the State Department to the military.
DynCorp, the American company that provided retired police officers to do much of the training, has been told its contract will not be renewed. But it has appealed that decision, holding up the changeover until the appeal is decided, by March 24.
That has left NATO struggling to augment the police trainers with active-duty police officers from European countries.
“As of Jan. 12, we require 4,245 trainers to meet our goal of training 134,000 police by 2011,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, during a visit here on Jan. 13. “I think it’s inexcusable.”
General Burgio declined to say which countries had yet to contribute. He contended that one of the biggest failings of the training program was the State Department’s overreliance on private contractors, whom he described as often over age and undermotivated, and expensive.
“For the cost of 10 DynCorp, I can put 30 Carabinieri trainers in and save money,” he said. He warned that if DynCorp won its challenge, it would “set us back six to nine months.
A spokesman for DynCorp, Douglas Ebner, said, “DynCorp is proud of its work in Afghanistan training and mentoring the Afghan National Police.”
The international nature of the NATO-led training program has resulted in a welter of 20 different programs run by half a dozen countries and agencies with widely varying methodologies and standards. Officials are now trying to write a nationwide instruction program that will be more standardized.
“We’ve lost so much time,” General Burgio said.
There have been some positive changes recently. Police pay is increasing to $165 a month, and police officers assigned to hostile areas can make as much as $240 a month, according to Brig. Gen. Anne F. Macdonald, the American in charge of police training and program development at the ministerial level.
That is better than the pay for Taliban insurgents, who typically make $200 a month. But even the new pay is lower than the cost of living for a typical Afghan family, encouraging corruption among many officers, NATO officials say.
In the new program of mandatory drug screening, General Macdonald said, 15 percent of police recruits test positive — a figure that may be low because recruits know in advance about the testing.
Divided loyalties are another problem. Most of the recruits are first hired locally, and then sent to regional or national training centers for their eight-week course.
“I don’t agree with the word ‘national’ in Afghan National Police,” the head of the Central Training Center, Brig. Gen. Khudadad Agah, said. “They’re all local police, and the problem with that is, one has a brother who is with the Taliban, another has an uncle. We go on an operation and one brother calls another and they know we’re coming.”
By comparison, army troops are recruited nationally. Their units are mixed ethnically and geographically so soldiers are not posted in their own communities.
Taliban infiltration of the Afghan National Police has had tragic consequences even for NATO soldiers: five British soldiers who were training a police unit in Helmand Province were killed by one of their trainees last November. The Taliban claimed credit for the attack. It was one of at least two instances in which police officers or recruits turned on their trainers or other NATO soldiers.
That explains why when recruits from the last class of 560 at the Central Training Center go to the firing range, as they did last month, they are allowed to put only 10 rounds at a time in the magazines of their automatic rifles, Hungarian-made variants of the AK-47. A team of Gurkha private security guards are on duty, too, watching the recruits carefully, as well as their own backs.
The recruits’ visit to the range comes during the seventh week of their eight-week course, and they have three days to qualify by managing to hit a man-size target 42 times out of 60 shots, a bit more than two-thirds of the time. If they cannot, they still graduate — with a certificate that says they are not competent to shoot — but are issued a weapon anyway.
“They’ll be out there on a checkpoint with an automatic weapon in a couple weeks,” said one of the trainers, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “I wouldn’t want to be an innocent civilian downrange of them.”
A few of the recruits were crack shots, hitting their targets 60 times out of 60. One scored 62 out of 60, apparently thanks to a neighbor’s errant fire. Because so few of the recruits can read, the target numbers are written on their hands by the instructors, so the recruits can compare them and figure out which targets to shoot at.
Their Afghan firearms instructor, Lt. Ahmed Zay Mirweis, was contemptuous. “These guys wear the uniform of a policeman,” he said, “but that is all that is police about them.”
Saudi Terms for Role in Talks
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Saudi Arabian officials said Tuesday during a visit by President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan that they would not get involved in peacemaking in his country unless the Taliban severed all ties with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Mr. Karzai is hoping that the Saudis will agree to play an active role in his plan to persuade Taliban militants to switch sides. He is to meet with Saudi officials on Wednesday after performing the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.
The Saudi conditions for participating in talks with the Taliban are not new, but Saudi leaders are making them clear amid a new international push to work with the Afghan militants.
