As promised, here’s some more information on Afghanistan I received while participating in recent Department of Defense sponsored Blogger’s roundtables. At the end of April, Major General Stuart Beare spoke on the topic Growth and Professionalization of the Afghan National Police Force. According to General Beare, the Afghan police don’t yet have the capacity to effectively take over security nationwide but considerable progress has been and continues to be made.
General Beare began by reminding the Bloggers what the overall mission was for NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan (NTM-A): “…the NTM-A mission is about assisting the ministry to build itself. It’s about creating the national institutions that connect the ministry to the fielded forces…and it’s about providing the support to the training effort that brings in the new recruits, officer and patrolman, gives them the basic skills they need to join the forces, and provide the professional training inside that training system, so that the patrolmen can become leaders and the officers can become senior leaders in the national police force.”
The General stated, “Kabul has been effectively…secured by and solely by Afghan security forces…The Afghan national election was completely secured by Afghan security forces. The Kabul Conference was completely secured by Afghan national security forces. And it wasn’t just the cop on the street that was doing its job. It was also their command and control systems, up to the national level, where the police and the army work together in their coordination centers.”
The General didn’t sugar coat his remarks and pointed out, “…there’s places which are still significantly challenged by the Taliban and others, which prohibits them from taking full responsibility for security on their own.” General Beare said there was still a lot of work that remained to be done but seemed confident that the Afghan forces were on track to eventually take over security of the country.
I don’t disagree but still have in my mind the U.S. example of reconstruction efforts in the south after the Civil War and what happened after the Union troops left…major ugly ops that were not solved until 100 years later. Some would say when many Americans still refuse to believe the slavery issue had a major role in the cause of the Civil War and current and key U.S. officials publically state the Jim Crow era wasn’t so bad, that the U.S. still hasn’t solved the problem…but that’s another blog. I will say this, much of the world looked away from the atrocities that were the norm in the U.S. south in the late 19th and 20th centuries, I don’t believe the world will cease watching what happens in Afghanistan after the coalition forces depart…at least not right away. Additionally, as I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs on this topic, the coalition trainers are doing a lot of training in literacy, ethics, and leadership in an effort to get rid of the corruption problems and other issues.
General Beare provided some metrics to illustrate some of the positive changes. He said during the same period of the surge of 30,000 coalition troops, “…the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police together grew by about 85,000…in the same time frame…And in this country of 34 provinces and 30 million people, that’s making a huge difference, and so those quantities are having a hugely positive impact.”
I asked how the effort to train women for the police force was going. General Beare indicated the Ministry of the Interior had a goal of 5,000 women and currently numbered about 1,200. Out of that total 182 were officers and there were an additional 260 civilian women working for the police in the ministry.
When asked if the Afghans were now able to train their own forces, General Beare said this was another area where vast improvements had been made. “I’ll just flip the clock back very quickly to the situation back in ’09, when we stood up the command. Back then there was about 35 training centers around this country, all of them being run as a bilateral effort with the government of Afghanistan, not necessarily connected as one training system…one of the common denominators…was that the majority of the instruction…was being done by a contractor…working through an interpreter…we’ve now codified what it means to be qualified to be an instructor. And that standard…is five weeks of very high end training…that…program has already delivered about 450 (Afghan) what we call ‘train the trainers’ who are now – have deployed in the last month to those 37 training centers. And by the end of the year, there will be 900. And by the end of 2012, there will be over 1,600.”
The General also indicated they continued to solve the problem of police personnel getting paid. About 85% receive their pay electronically ensuring the money gets to them and not someone else. Think I’ll end here. Will finish up this series of blogs tomorrow. As always my views are my own.
