An 80 percent illiteracy rate, corruption and a lack of trained personnel are hampering Afghan police, the NATO commander overseeing the training of Afghan security forces said on Wednesday. NATO has stepped up training of Afghan police in an effort to reform a force that inspires little confidence among locals, struggles with high dropout rates and is frequently accused of incompetence and drug use.
But only 45 percent of Afghan police have had any formal preparation, said U.S. Lieutenant-General William Caldwell, who heads the training mission as the alliance prepares to boost the size of the Afghan army and police to over 300,000 by 2011. The training is also central to NATO's strategy to eventually transfer control of security to Afghan forces so that Western troops can start withdrawing next year. Professionalizing the police force will not happen overnight, Caldwell said...
More at The New York Times.
Comments
How about we let Afghans progress in their own way; in their own time frame. I have nothing against helping them, but small focused steps.
The only reason we think we must do any of this at all is to complete our ambitious nation building strategy in a short time frame. Abandon nation building and this stops being a problem.
I'm going with Schmedlap on this one, having spent a great deal of my time in AF interacting with the ANP and watching our efforts at "mentoring" and "training them."
Drug use? For whom is that really a problem? Our Western sensitivities, or the accomplishment of the ANP mission? No, the ANP has a much bigger problem -- being an institution dreamed up by Westerners and forced on a society who's gotten along quite well without them for some time, and likely prefered it that way.
What is the real purpose of the ANP? To deal with petty crime? There just isn't enough of it to keep them busy, so what are they doing the rest of the time (if they really deal with petty crime at all)? Victimizing the populace, or standing at checkpoints making nice targets for the local Taliban (or getting recruited to join).
The constant switching out of chiefs and other leadership presents another problem -- especially since many of them come from Kabul or non-Pashtu areas -- they are instantly outsiders, representatives of an unpopular government. How well are they going to be able to generate this intelligence that we think they should be giving us?
Training is nice, but none of the training I saw taught them to be better beat cops, how to interact professionally or helped them to define their role in rural Pashtun society. Room clearing, pat-downs and light infantry tactics aren't going to make the ANP a more effective force. But it makes us Americans feel like we accomplished something.
We've gone back and forth a couple of times, but seem to be talking past each other.
<blockquote><em>"... it would be nice for them to be able to communicate what they collect."</em></blockquote>
I'm not advocating that they not communicate. I'm simply curious if it is unreasonable to communicate orally in a society where most communication is oral and memories are better trained to function without written records. I understand they're dispersed. That hasn't hampered communication in the past. Obviously literacy would enhance certain functions. I'm wondering if Caldwell's statement assumes too much about what is necessary for adequate security operations, rather than ideal ones.
Schmedlap, it is certainly true that the communities policed themselves for hundreds of years--during which there was no central government. But there is an MOI now, and it is even setting up a training command to standardize training across the various flavors of AUP. And there are a variety of crimes--corruption, narcotrafficking, kidnapping--being conducted beyond any single community.
And if you are going to rely on the guys on the ground to collect information (and the ANA is only in certain locations in only 10 provinces), it would be nice for them to be able to communicate what they collect.
Anonymous:
Concur on the CID--and you can add other small organizations within the MOI/AUP to that list. But their numbers are small, transportation is difficult, and somebody needs to conduct the preliminary investigation to bring them in.
Everybody has pet rocks, and this is one of mine. The only focus within the MOI is to put out lots of poorly trained/equipped/led people for the COIN fight, while ignoring the LE aspects of police work. And I think we could deliver greater security to the people if there were more competent cops on the street.
The ANP who do those types of reports and investigations - the CID department - are, at least in the district I'm partnered with, literate and with at least a high school education. The uneducated, illiterate ANP are mostly relegated to static check points.
Drugs are a problem through all ranks and departments of the ANP, however.
<blockquote><em>"If you are not literate, how do you write reports--of interviews, investigations, contacts with sources, etc? And if you cannot write the reports. how can someone analyze the information? And if you cannot analyze the information, how do you solve the crime or turn the information into intelligence? And if you cannot do those, how do you increase the security of the civilians?"</em></blockquote>
Your question assumes that all of those things need to be written. I don't think that is a safe assumption in Afghanistan. Communities have policed themselves through highly developed customary practices for hundreds of years. They apparently did this without high literacy rates, which suggests that only the literate folks were doing the policing (not likely in a society where police powers are retained by the extended family, rather than a sovereign), or they simply did not require written reports.
For that reason, I suspect that all of those "how" questions that you raised have been answered by people in Afghanistan with means that do not require or involve writing. Reports may very well be oral (via face-to-face or cellphone).
We know that there are customary practices related to evidence gathering, witness interviews, separation of aggrieved parties and accused assailants, and holding of guarantees in surety by third parties in the event that a repayment or debt is to be paid. Given that those practices are derived from custom going back hundreds of years, I suspect those practices occur even when the participants are illiterate.
Less critical for those elements conducting kinetic COIN ops (like the ANCOP/Gendarmerie), but these are also the AUP (aka Afghan Civilian/Community Police), the LEOs.
If you are not literate, how do you write reports--of interviews, investigations, contacts with sources, etc? And if you cannot write the reports. how can someone analyze the information? And if you cannot analyze the information, how do you solve the crime or turn the information into intelligence? And if you cannot do those, how do you increase the security of the civilians?
Less critical for them conducting kinetic COIN ops (like the ANCOP/Gendarmerie), but these are the ANP, the LEOs.
If you are not literate, how do you write reports--of interviews, investigations, contacts with sources, etc? And if you cannot write the reports. how can someone analyze the information? And if you cannot analyze the information, how do you solve the crime or turn the information into intelligence?
Let's see. The ANP is comprised largely of undependable, incompetent, corrupt, ignorant and untrained folk who are sometimes high on drugs - things I have documented for two years on my web site and others have commented on as well. What's new here?
The real question is this? Did the current administration believe it would be any different? Were they waiting on the NYT to say this before they became aware of it? So now that the NYT has said so out loud, does this affect the time table for our soon-to-be sterling and remarkable success in Afghanistan?
Sarcasm off: Sorry, the NYT is about two or three years behind with this one.
Socrates must be rolling his grave. I'm curious if anyone can shed some light on how problematic it is for Afghan policemen to be illiterate. Caldwell points out that they need to "take notes." My understanding is that individuals who grow up in a society where most people do not know how to read or write tend to be much better at remembering details that we in America need to write down. But my memory might be failing me.