Building up Afghanistan's police with zero resources (Feature)

By Can Merey Apr 1, 2010, 4:06 GMT

Kabul - When Kabul police investigate a crime, the officers take crime-scene shots with their private mobile phones. To print them, they go to the Afghan capital's bazar.

They have neither cameras for work nor copying machines in their office. For a long time, their pay has been lower than that of Taliban fighters, their equipment not even sufficient to defend themselves.

Developing Afghanistan's police force, for years a German project, is no success story.

Andreas Ladwig, a trainer with EUPOL, the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan, is driving along the checkpoints of the Ring of Steel, the control posts aimed at preventing insurgents from entering Kabul.

Compared with two or three years ago, the police's situation has improved a lot, the 49-year-old said. But the shortcomings remain obvious.

'There is not enough equipment, not enough proper offices or police stations. There are not enough weapons,' he says. 'There is a shortage of almost everything.'

At the first checkpoint, the policemen complain that they did not receive the promised bulletproof vests.

'Of course, one has to take such complaints with a grain of salt,' Ladwig says. Much equipment has been delivered, but 'it then vanishes. People simply sell certain things.'

That was also true for weapons, which, according to EUPOL, are NATO's responsibility to deliver.

How long until Afghanistan's police will be able to provide security without outside help? 'I think, not within the next 10 years,' Ladwig says.

Strengthening the police force is still not a top priority for the international community, but it is the local security forces that are to aid the withdrawal of foreign soldiers from the country.

By 2014, the country should have 134,000 policemen, but today their number is between 96,000 and 98,000, according to the Interior Ministry.

The ministry is conducting a survey to ascertain how many of them really report for duty. Again and again, policemen desert and take their weapons with them.

But that is not the force's only problem. According to ministry figures, 16 per cent of policemen test positive for drugs countrywide. More than half are illiterate.

Corruption is by far the biggest problem. In order to make police wages competitive with Taliban salaries, policemen got a raise in December. From a meagre 80 dollars a month to 200 dollars and an additional 40 dollars bonus for high-risk work.

However, even in Afghanistan, that won't get you very far.

In the past, those salaries often never reached the intended recipients. Now policemen get a text message with a code sent to their phones. They can then pick up their salary with that code at a telephone shop.

But even with that system, glitches occur. One police commander collected 53 phones from his subordinates and went to collect the money himself, EUPOL spokesman Harald Haendel said. When the shop owner refused, the commander threatened to set the shop on fire.

EUPOL's anti-corruption unit tried to arrest the commander, so far without success, as there is no replacement for him due to a personnel shortage.

Little wonder that Afghanistan's police - unlike the army - have a lousy reputation.

When President Hamid Karzai's security adviser Rangin Dafar Spanta visited the southern district of Marjah, where NATO launched a major offensive earlier this year, local residents made it clear why they put up with Taliban rule.

'Because they were bullied by the police, by authorities and officials, because they were harassed [by foreign troops] with searches and arrests,' Spanta said

'What was neglected in the last eight years was strengthening and building Afghan institutions,' Spanta said, not sparing the Europeans criticism.

'We waited more than two years in vain for them to send enough trainers. They did not put together what was promised.'

Three years ago, EUPOL took over the project from Germany, and the mission still has only 290 of the planned 400 policemen and trainers. Independent German and NATO police training projects - where the US has the biggest contingent with 2,000 men - also work with less manpower than planned. The US also runs an independent training project outside NATO.

While some critics complain that some European states don't contribute to EUPOL, Germany took heat for allegedly botching the mission before EUPOL took over.

Germany did important groundwork, Haendel counters. But, an annual budget of 16 million dollars and less than 40 police trainers were not adequate for the task.

'Those shoes were much too big for Germany,' he says. dpa cy im se