Apparently yielding to the Taliban, American forces in Afghanistan have suspended training of Afghan Local Police recruits. The Afghan recruits, it appears, have become too heavily infiltrated by the Taliban leading to too many "green on blue" deaths of Western soldiers. The Americans have called time out in order to "re-vet" the ALP ranks to try to ferret out other infiltrators.
Despite the stated goal of having a 350,000 Afghan security force (police and army) trained and ready by the end of the year, it's obvious the whole business has turned into a shambles. Recent reports indicate of the 170,000 now notionally on the books, the actual number of effectives may be barely over 100,000 with desertion rates topping 30%. At this rate Afghanistan's own security personnel may be gone before we are.
A sad state of affairs after ten years of training efforts. Time to check on how this happened and how it can be improved. I have some ideas. Of course it is a lot easier to talk about improving police than doing it. For the most part, police throughout the world are the same. And the same insights and direction for improving them hold true. Police should be well-trained and led, restrained in their use of force, honest, and courteous to all. To take a look at how to improve police, see “Arrested Development: A Veteran Police Chief Sounds Off About Protest, Racism, Corruption and the Seven Steps Necessary to Improve Our Nation’s Police” (Amazon.com in US and EU). My blog is at http://improvingpolice.wordpress.com where I discuss these and other current police improvement issues. Good luck and may we all experience not just good but great policing throughout the world!
ReplyDeleteI guess the idea of the US being involved in the training was so that when the US left, they could be sure the Afghan police and army would be able to provide sufficient security in areas where the government had influence.
ReplyDeleteAlternatively, the US could have not provided any such training (or a lot less of it), with the idea that since the Afghan leadership certainly wanted and needed security to survive, that they would take on the training initiative themselves. But the problem with this second plan is that even though it would be in Afghanistan's best interests to have good security forces, they still could cock it up and have near anarchy. And the US would get the blame, as they did when the US disbanded Iraq's army: considered by many to be the biggest mistake made by the US in its occupation.
I find it hard to criticize what the US was trying to do here (leaving aside the other American stupidities, which needlessly infected and sickened all their efforts). The Afghans themselves are mostly to blame for this fiasco.