I support whatever the hell we’re calling the war these days.  I support the troops.  I support the mission.  I served on active duty in my youth and I’ve actually been to Afghanistan.  I respect and admire and envy our Police Mentoring Teams. 

BUT

I respectfully disagree with COL McMahon.

We just added the responsibility for developing –
really building from scratch a police force about a year and a half ago.

If by “we” the good Colonel means ARSIC, that’s likely true, but building an Afghan Police Force should have been a fundamental element of Internal Defense and Development since November 13, 2001. Somebody screwed that pooch. My perception has been managed to blame Kamerad, but anybody who really thought he was up to the job overestimated his abilities and enthusiasm for the task.

We are also procuring for them and will train them on the up- armored
humvees. Actually, the state of the art of what we have is what we’ll field to
them.

The more we try to make them clones of American motorized infantry the wronger we are. Bernard Fall warned us about road-bound, over-motorized, hard-to-supply battle forces. Unarmored pickup trucks are what they can keep running. The more M1114’s and MRAP’s we bestow upon them the more dependent they are on Pakistani POL and the American military-industrial complex.

But real good story on the army. Let me turn to the police, because
they’re quite a bit farther behind at every level, from the ministry of interior
level all the way down to the police in the districts. The police have never
been very strong in Afghanistan. They’ve certainly been second fiddle to the
warlords’ armies. And in fact, the police force that exists right now is a
vestige of the warlord armies. The warlords, when they threw the Soviets out,
essentially occupied the area, had their militia, which they called the army,
and we’ve pretty much gotten rid of, and then they put other people into the
police. We have not gotten rid of that yet, and we’re working very hard to fix
that now.

So you have a police force that is very much local, and it’s also very
much tied to the power brokers in the local areas and subject to their whims,
not to the whims of the people or to the national government. Those are the
things that we’re trying to fix right now. There’s corruption, there is — it’s
just not a good story right now.

We’re working on really two levels to try to fix this. First level is
to try to reform the Ministry of Interior headquarters. It’s still designed
essentially in the Soviet style, a very, very centralized control, which doesn’t
work in a society where there is no centralized control. This is very much a
decentralized society, so they’ve got exactly the wrong organization.
It’s also been accused, in some cases rightfully so, of being extremely
corrupt itself. And in fact, some people have said they don’t want a good
police department because that will mess up their ability to accept graft and
that kind of thing.

So we’re working to reorganize and then — and fix the headquarters so
that they can be an effective management headquarters for a national police
force.

Then we’re also working at the low level, the grassroots level of the
police to reform them. The problem with the low-level policemen is exactly what
I mentioned earlier, that they are the vestige of the warlord society. So they
believe their allegiance is to whoever hired them, which includes going out and
collecting illegal taxes if that person tells them to out and collect illegal
taxes, which includes going into another district and bothering another tribe if
that’s what that boss tells them to do.

So those are the things that we’re dealing with, in addition to an
incredibly low literacy rate among them, which makes it harder for them to
really understand what they’re supposed to do. So we’re executing a program
called focused district development, which works at the district level, takes a
district at a time, totally revamps them, recruits new people, new policemen –
ideally nationally, we’re working on that as we speak — getting new leaders for
them, giving them new equipment, sending them all together to a training center
where they go through eight weeks of basic training and some advanced training
on policing techniques, then put them into their district and have a police
mentor team of coalition policemen and military folks as well to stay with them
and bring them up to speed and then make sure they continue to stay on the good
side.

We also are building a special police force called the Afghan National
Civil Order Police. We call them ANCOPs. The ANCOPs receive 16 weeks of
training, so they’re much better trained than the average policeman. They’re
all volunteers. They get paid a little bit more by virtue of being higher rank
than the average policemen and they have better equipment than the average
policemen. So those — we’re about — we built about 10 battalions of ANCOP and
extremely rave reviews so far of how they do out in the field.

Because they’re so good, we’re using them in conjunction with the
focused district development program by putting them into the districts while
the police are pulled out. So a couple weeks before you would send the new
district police to the training center, these ANCOP unit — an ANCOP unit goes
in, they establish what right policing is. And then eight weeks later when the
district police come back in, the people now have an expectation of what police
are supposed to do. Again, very, very good reviews on how ANCOP is doing and
how it’s setting the stage for the police to come back in.

We’re in the third cycle of the focused district development, so it’s
still early to guarantee that it’s the right way, but so far all indications are
that it is exactly the way to reform the police here. And we’re definitely going
to continue it.

There are 365 districts. And we are on number 23 now, so this has a
long way to go. But it’s going to take a very deliberate program to fix the
police here, by far the major problem.

23 down. 342 districts to go. I’m sorry, sir, but the clock will run out at this rate. If America and NATO is going to force Western-style notions of law, justice, good government and Westphalian nation-state monopolies on the legitimate use of force on people who have never bought-in to such concepts, they are going to have to quit asking and start telling.

How a Westphalian nation-state polices itself is a reflection of its dominant culture, history, traditions, and mores. Afghanistan has never really been a functioning Westphalian nation-state. We seem to be arrogant enough to try to turn them into one but not arrogant enough to impose a colonial administation and ex-pat officered constabulary upon them. The will to colonize Afghanistan and impose good government upon them isn’t there and likely never will be.

My gripes are all above COL McMahon’s echelon to resolve, and my beef is not with him personally. He is the strategic communicator designated to give me warm and fuzzies, which, supportive as I am, I’m not getting. This is due to deficiencies in the product that salesmanship can’t fix.

The way I see it,

Karzai has outlived his usefulness.

All the caveated contingents need to man up or leave, they’re a drain on the supply system.

The Taliban in Afghanistan is 95% ethnic Pashtun. Their auxiliaries and supporters and aiders and abettors are Pashtuns. Pashtun Irregulars, in many cases turned Taliban or former war lord types, are going to be more valuable in defeating the Taliban than politically correct, multicultural, ethnically
balanced MRAP-mounted motorized infantry.

Start a real Chieu Hoi program, to replace the half-vast PTS.

Pashto-fluent Human Terrain Teams are more important than PMT’s/ETT’s, who should have a higher priority than trigger-pullers.

Only so much sinews of war can come up from Karachi through Chaman and Torkham. Fewer non-indig trigger-pullers, more non-indig trainers and mentors.

Not much is going to change until after regimes change in Washington and Kabul.

More on the ANP:

Seconded to the Afghan Constabulary
“We don’t need to make these cops as good as the 82nd Airborne,”
The police in Shahjoy no longer resemble a “posse,”
No Sons of Afghanistan Need Apply
Maintiens le Droit
Abdul Hakim Jan — Cop, Alokozai Arbakai, Militia Chief
Focus District Development
CLC’s Good, Arbakai Bad
The Law in RC West
In a counterinsurgency environment the best force to use is generally taken to be indigenous security force
The Law West of the Hindu Kush

 

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