This is the second blog I’m writing on insights gained during my participation in a series of three bloggers roundtables sponsored by the Department of Defense. On July 21, 2010, I had the opportunity to interview Capt A. Heather Coyne the Community and NGO liaison officer for NATO Training Mission Afghanistan. The job is a new position which Capt Coyne states was developed “to ensure that civil society can play a role in shaping the training and reform of the security forces, especially the police”. The groups she’s focusing on include “human rights organizations, business and professional organizations, even student unions and religious groups”.
Capt Coyne indicates one of her highest priorities is creating public confidence in the Afghan police force. She indicates: “in Afghanistan, the police have always been about protecting the state, not the people. They just don’t have a history or a mindset of protect and serve…The NATO training mission has been working to improve that professionalization and training so that we’re putting better police on the street, but we’re also now looking at this from the other side, how the public interacts with their police and how citizens can play a role in making police accountable and responsive to communities”.
Capt Coyne was encouraged when she arrived to find that Afghan civil organizations had already begun work in these areas training police on issues such as domestic violence and human rights. International NGOs were helping improve community relations with the police. Capt Coyne says there are several hundred international NGOs and a couple of thousand Afghan NGOs. She sees NATO’s role as strengthening and expanding those efforts. She’s focusing her efforts on three areas: increasing NGO involvement in police training on human and civil rights, importance of consulting with the community members, and show people police are there to serve and protect. This would involve having police conduct training on issues like safety in schools, first aid, fire prevention, etc.
Capt Coyne says, “ My usual advance to NGOs is to find out…what is it that you’re doing, what are your goals and are we doing anything that’s getting in your way, so that we can get out of your way and let you do your missions”. Ultimately one of her goals is to get them to the point where they might start making suggestions on improving NATO training of Afghan forces.
When asked about reports of corruption in the Afghan police force, she indicated it was not that the people in the Afghan communities were not aware of and concerned about corruption, they believe its morally wrong; but were more concerned about things that affected their daily lives and “how police relate to them in their day-to-day lives”. One NATO effort involved training Afghan police on how to present IED awareness safety training for children. The first day the police gave the training 100 children showed up, the second time 500 children showed up; a small step but a vital one in a long journey to build public trust.
Another effort involves bringing more women into the Afghan police force. There are currently about 1,000 women on the force serving primarily in family response units which deal primarily with domestic abuse, rape and other crimes committed against women. The target goal is to have 5,000 women police and to eventually have them also working in areas like election security.
The bottom line on all of this according to Capt Coyne is: “When people trust their police, they’ll be more willing to share intelligence about the bad guys, and when people feel that their security forces and their government are there to protect and serve, not to extort and abuse, they’ll be less likely to turn to insurgency in the first place”.
I think for the sake of time, I’ll save the third interview I participated in for my next blog. I think this is an important topic and the roundtables were an excellent forum to provide better insight into an area of the COIN strategy that has been thus far poorly covered in the media. I still have major concerns over what will happen after the NATO troops leave. I am much encouraged that the majority of NGOs working the issues are Afghan and not international. Lasting change has to come from the Afghan people. Long lasting change must come from within.
I use an example from our own past as an example. In the aftermath of the Civil War, as long as the Union troops remained in the south, reconstruction of institutions designed to enslave a large segment of the southern population were not allowed to flourish. After the troops left, southern states used Jim Crow laws and repressive social norms to basically develop a form of legalized slavery and oppressive discrimination. The problem was not resolved until the modern day civil rights movement. The government’s reconstruction policy could not change the attitudes of the majority of the population. As I mentioned in my last blog on this topic, I wonder how deeply rooted are the changes? As I said before, we won’t know until after the NATO forces leave but they are certainly giving it their all.
Again my views are my own. Think I’ll try to get a bike ride in before it rains.
