A F G H A N I S T A N

ACKNOWLEDGING LIMITS

P O L I C E A D V I S O R S A N D C O U N T E R I N S U R G E N C Y I N

W I L L I A M R O S E N A U
A F G H A N I S T A N

ACKNOWLEDGING LIMITS

P o l i c e A d v i s o r s a n d C o u n t e r i n s u r g e n c y i n

W I L L I A M R O S E N A U

A joint publication of CNA and Marine Corps University Press

iii

Contents

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Map of Vignette Locations

Introduction

Vignette 1: Police Mentoring Team, Qalat District, 2008

Vignette 2: Police Training Mission, Khost-Gardez Pass, 2007–2008

Vignette 3: British Police Mentors, Helmand Province, 2008–2009

Vignette 4: Afghan National Civil Order Police Advisor, 2007–2008

Vignette 5: Police Mentoring, Ghazni and Paktika Provinces, 2008–2009

Vignette 6: U.S. Marine Corps Police Mentoring Team Commander, Garmsir District, 2009

Vignette 7: British Police Mentor, Helmand Province, 2009

Vignette 8: Regional Police Mentoring Team Commander, Northern

Afghanistan, 2007–2008

Vignette 9: U.S. Marine Corps Police Mentoring Team Commander, Nawa-I-Barakzayi District, 2009

Vignette 10: U.S. Marine Corps Police Mentor, Now Zad District, 2009

Conclusion

v

vii

viii

1

13

21

29

35

41

53

61

71

81

89

95
Acronyms

and Abbreviations

ABP Afghan Border Police

ALP Afghan Local Police

ANA Afghan National Army

ANCOP Afghan National Civil Order Police

ANP Afghan National Police

BDD Border District Development

CDI Civilian Defense Initiative

CJTF-Phoenix Combined Joint Task Force–Phoenix

CSTC-A Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan

DOD U.S. Department of Defense

EUPOL European Union Police Mission

FDD Focused District Development

FOB Forward Operating Base

GAO U.S. Government Accountability Office

v
IED Improvised explosive device

ISAF International Security Assistance Force

ISCI Interim Security for Critical Infrastructure

MoI Ministry of Interior

MP Military Police

NATO/ISAF North Atlantic Treaty Organization/

International Security Assistance Force

NTM-A NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan

OPTEMPO Operational tempo

PMT Police Mentoring Team

PRT Provincial Reconstruction Team

QRF Quick-Reaction Force

RGR Royal Gurkha Rifles

RTC Regional Training Center

SWAT Special Weapons and Tactics

vi
This monograph explores police mentoring in Afghanistan by U.S. and UK military forces

during the 2007–2009 period. In a series of 10 vignettes, this study examines efforts

to advise, train, and support elements of the Afghan National Police (ANP) in northern,

eastern, and southern Afghanistan. These vignettes explore the mentoring of ANP units,

as well as the advising of individual chiefs of police at the district and province levels.

This study would not have been possible without the generous assistance of American

and British soldiers and Marines who gave many hours of their time in interviews and

follow-on communications with the author. The author would also like to acknowledge

Lieutenant Colonel Troy Wright, USMC, of the Joint Center for International Security Force

Assistance, who facilitated key interviews, and the Irregular Warfare Community of Interest, whose members helped identify and locate interview subjects.

The author would also like to thank CNA’s Connie Custer, Karin Duggan, Megan Katt,

Jerry Meyerle, Rebecca Martin, Eric Thompson, and Lee Woodard. Finally, the author

thanks the Marine Corps University Press, in particular Jim Caiella, Andrea Connell,

Steve Evans, Robert Kocher, Shawn Vreeland, and Ken Williams.

Preface and

Acknowledgments

vii
1. Police Mentoring Team, Qalat District, 2008

2. Police Training Mission, Khost-Gardez Pass, 2007–2008

3. British Police Mentors, Helmand Province, 2008–2009

4. Afghan National Civil Order Police Advisor, 2007–2008

5. Police Mentoring, Ghazni and Paktika Provinces, 2008–2009

6. U.S. Marine Corps Police Mentoring Team Commander, Garmsir District, 2009

7. British Police Mentor, Helmand Province, 2009

8. Regional Police Mentoring Team Commander, Northern Afghanistan, 2007–2008

9. U.S. Marine Corps Police Mentoring Team Commander, Nawa-I-Barakzayi District, 2009

10. U.S. Marine Corps Police Mentor, Now Zad District, 2009

Map of

Vignette Locations

PAKISTAN

ISLAMABAD

INDIA

TURKMENISTAN

IRAN

CHINA

TAJIKISTAN UZBEKISTAN DUSHANBE

Zaranj

Farah

Herat

Lashkar Gah Kandahar

Qalat

Tarin Kot

Chaghcharan

Qala-l-Naw

Nili

Maimanah Sari Pul

Sheberghan

Mazari

Sharif

Aibak

Kunduz

Puli Khumri

Taluqan

Fayzabad

Charikar

Bamyan

Maidan Shahr

Ghazni

Sharan

Khost

Gardez

Puli Alam Jalalabad

Mehtar lam

Asadabad

Parun

KABUL

Mahmud Raqi

Bazarak

NIMROZ

HELMAND KANDAHAR

ZABUL

PAKTIKA

GHAZNI

URUZGAN

FARAH

HERAT

BADGHIS

FARYAB

GHOR

DAYKUNDI

SARI PUL

JOWZJAN

BALKH

SAMANGAN

KUNDUZ

TAKHAR BADAKHSHAN

BAGHLAN

BAMYAN

KHOST

NANGARHAR

KUNAR

NURISTAN

PARWAN

WARDAK

LOGAR PAKTIA

LAGHMAN

PANJSHIR

KAPISA

KABUL

10 1

2

3

4

5

8

7 6 9

5

INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY

NATIONAL CAPITAL

PROVINCE (WELAYAT) CAPITAL

Afghanistan has 34 provinces (welayats)

0 50

0 50 100

100 150 Kilometers

150 Miles

N
1 An important recent exception is David H. Bayley and Robert M. Perito, The Police in War: Fighting

Insurgency, Terrorism, and Violent Crime (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010).

2 James S. Corum, “Training Indigenous Forces in Counterinsurgency: A Tale of Two Insurgencies,”

U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute, March 2006, www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.

mil/pubs/summary.cfm?q=648, accessed 15 June 2010. U.S. Army Field Manual 3-24,

Counterinsurgency, widely considered the military’s most important doctrinal statement on

counterinsurgency, devotes fewer than seven pages to the subject of police and counterinsurgency.

“Network analysis and other analytical tools,” on the other hand, receives 28 pages.

The role of the police is an important but largely overlooked aspect of contemporary

counterinsurgency and stability operations. Although academic and policy specialists

have examined the role of police in postconflict environments, the question of how police should be organized, trained, and equipped for counterinsurgency campaigns has

received little systematic attention.

1 Similarly, U.S. military doctrine and the professional

military literature, while not ignoring the subject entirely, do not consider it in any systematic way.

2 This gap is particularly ironic, given the prominent role that soldiers and

Marines have played in training indigenous police and other security forces in counterinsurgency campaigns from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

If the broader topic of police and counterinsurgency is underexamined, the subject of

mentoring—that is, advising, training, and partnering with—foreign police forces is even

more neglected. American Marines, soldiers, and other military personnel preparing to

deploy to Afghanistan for the police mentoring mission have few sources of information

and analysis available to them. This monograph addresses that gap. Using a series of

10 vignettes, this report examines in depth the experiences of individual American and

British soldiers and Marines who served as mentors in Afghanistan during the 2007–

2009 period.

Approach

It should be noted that this study is not an assessment of the Afghan police. Nor is it

an evaluation of the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization/International Security

Introduction
3 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in this study are taken from the author’s interviews with

U.S. and UK police mentors.

4 In addition to ANCOP and the border police, the ANP is composed of the Afghan Uniformed Police,

who make up the vast majority of the country’s officers. The ANP also includes the Counternarcotics

Police of Afghanistan and smaller, specialized forces responsible for counterterrorism, customs, and

criminal investigations. Mentors typically used “ANP” as a generic term for all Afghan police.

5 A more comprehensive study could have included interviews with mentors from other Coalition

countries, particularly Canada and Germany, as well as police advisors employed by contractors

such as DynCorp International.

Assistance Force (NATO/ISAF) assistance programs to the Afghan National Police (ANP).

Instead, by focusing intensively on the experiences of individual mentors, this study provides a set of high-resolution pictures that illustrate the challenges, frustrations, and demands associated with mentoring the ANP. Although focused on mentoring the police

in Afghanistan, this work is likely to be relevant to advisory missions in other austere and

unstable environments—particularly those in which local internal security forces lack

basic skills, equipment, organization, and legitimacy.

Drawing on long-form interviews supplemented with primary- and secondary-source

materials, these vignettes explore how mentors worked to build the ANP at the district

level.

3 A number of the vignettes also describe the mentoring of specialized units within

the ANP, including the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) and the Afghan Border Police (ABP).

4 In addition, several of them consider the mentoring of provincial and

district chiefs of police.

However, these vignettes do not purport to present a complete picture. They focus on

one period of time, albeit one in which mentoring activities had expanded considerably.

Some provinces such as Helmand are more represented than others. As with any research project, time and resource constraints limited the number and variety of interview subjects.

5 Interviewing—or even locating—more than a relative handful of police

mentors proved to be impossible. Written records were unavailable to confirm or enhance the information generated through interviews. Ideally, this study would have been

rounded out by interviewing Afghan policemen, government officials, and ordinary citizens who came in contact with the police who had received U.S. or British mentoring.

Nevertheless, these snippets are of value for anyone seeking an understanding of ANP

mentoring, despite the fact that they do not offer a complete picture of the people, cir2 | Acknowledging Limits
6 For stylistic reasons, the vignettes are written in the past tense.

7 Captured insurgents often “mention the police as the reason for joining in the first place,”

according to a senior British army commander. Richard Norton-Taylor, “Afghan Police Failings

Fuelling Taliban Recruitment,” Guardian (London), 3 June 2010,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/03/afghanistan-police-fuel-taliban-recruitment,

accessed 16 June 2010. For more on police malfeasance as an insurgent recruiting theme, see

Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 62.

cumstances, and events. In essence, these should be viewed as individual but structured perspectives. This focus on individuals offers advantages. In Afghanistan, counterinsurgency is waged village by village, district by district—and man by man. By looking

intensely at individual Marines and soldiers who mentored the ANP, it is possible to create a richly textured set of narratives that will resonate with the members of the armed

forces who are preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.

6

Mentoring the Afghan National Police

As shown throughout the vignettes, soldiers and Marines were faced with police units

riddled with corruption, drug use, incompetence, and poor leadership. Recruits, drawn

from the lowest rungs of village life, were hobbled by illiteracy and, in some cases, physical and mental shortcomings. Senior police leaders routinely robbed their men of their

pay and equipment.

Preyed on by their superiors, policemen in turn preyed on the populations they were

meant to protect and serve. In many districts, the ANP’s predatory behavior turned the

public against the police and cut off the flow of information from the population that is

essential for effective counterinsurgency. Police abuses also served as a major recruiting

tool for the Taliban.

7 Alienated from the public, poorly led and motivated, and often

thrust into combat conditions, the ANP were easy and ripe targets for the insurgents.

Such circumstances placed considerable demands on the American and British mentors. Looking back on their experiences, most could point to at least a few successes.

Accomplishments were typically small, and often short-lived: an apparent drop in police

corruption and drug use, for example, or evidence of growing pride and improved morale

within the ANP. Given the high motivation and problem-solving attitude prevalent

throughout the U.S. and UK officer and senior noncommissioned officer corps, it is perhaps not surprising that these individuals were eager to highlight perceived successes.

Introduction | 3
4 | Acknowledging Limits

8 The definition is from Transparency International, “Frequently Asked Questions About Corruption,”

www.transparency.org/news_room/faq/corruption_faq, accessed 22 June 2010.

However, the subjects of these interviews were just as willing to identify shortfalls, deficiencies, and outright failures. As a number of mentors freely admitted, the seemingly

modest goal of establishing what one British army officer called a “disciplined, professional force” proved to be elusive. Among other things, these vignettes illustrate the

limits to what any individual mentor can expect to accomplish during his relatively short

tour in Afghanistan.

Key Themes

Given the country’s fractious nature, and the highly localized requirements of any successful campaign against insurgents, general observations concerning any aspects

about counterinsurgency should be offered (and taken) with caution. That said, five important themes stand out in looking across the 10 vignettes.

Learning to Live with Police Corruption

By all accounts, nearly every institution associated with the Afghan state, including the

Afghan National Army (ANA), was riddled with what in Western terms is considered corruption—that is, “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.”8 As made clear in nearly

every vignette, corruption among the Afghan police was effectively universal.

But there were degrees of corruption. Some illicit practices could be considered a survival mechanism. With salaries low even by Afghan standards, many policemen engaged

in petty theft and pilfering (such as selling gasoline intended for police vehicles) to provide for their families. While hardly desirable, such behavior is understandable.

Less defensible was the widespread predatory behavior by the police. In some districts,

policemen were victims of their own superior officers who stole their salaries or demanded a portion of their pay. Even more troubling was the ANP’s abuse of the public.

In many districts it preyed openly on the local population—stealing food from bazaars,

robbing houses during police raids, and shaking down drivers and passengers along

roadways. In Paktia Province, for example, a U.S. Army mentor noted that the police frequently ambushed the colorfully decorated multipurpose jingha (jingle) trucks along

the Khost-Gardez Pass and stole their cargo. Such criminality was obviously inimical to
Introduction | 5

good order and discipline. Moreover, it antagonized the very people the ANP were meant

to protect.

Most mentors came to realize that creating a corruption-free force was simply unachievable. The challenge for police advisors was to determine what level of corruption

was acceptable. In the judgment of most, petty pilfering of police supplies was tolerable, but stealing from the public, peddling drugs, and selling weapons to the Taliban

represented “red lines.”

As shown in several of the vignettes, mentors believed that measures such as holding

the Afghan police to high standards, demonstrating to the Afghans the importance of

professional conduct, and reducing the opportunities for police thievery (paying salaries

through cell phones, for example) seemed to mitigate corruption.

But as a number of the vignettes also illustrated, apparent improvements were often

short-lived, with the ANP quickly reverting to their old, corrupt ways. Moreover, as the Police Mentoring Team (PMT) commander in Now Zad discovered, corruption could reach

levels that made it impossible for mentors to develop the trust and respect for the

Afghan police necessary for effective mentoring.

Acknowledging Limits

Nearly all of the mentors detected at least some indications of progress among the

Afghan police. An advisor in northern Afghanistan considered the ANCOP personnel he

mentored to be professional and disciplined. In Garmsir District, a U.S. Marine mentor

observed improved relations between the ANP and district residents. And in Nawa-IBarakzayi District, the Marine PMT commander saw a growing esprit de corps and lower

levels of corruption and drug abuse among the police.

But in many cases, progress appeared to be fleeting. As mentioned above, the police

frequently slipped back into their old patterns. The nature of the environment in which

they operated was part of the problem. In areas with particularly high levels of insurgent

activity, such as southern and southeastern Afghanistan, policing was a high-risk profession, with ANP casualty rates far surpassing those of the ANA.
6 | Acknowledging Limits

Given these perilous circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the police were reluctant to go out on patrol and perform operations that placed their lives at risk. Drugs

were readily available to relieve boredom and alleviate despair. Opportunities to augment their salaries through crime and corruption were plentiful.

Mentors could make improvements at the margins, but there were clear limits to what

they could reasonably expect to change during a 7- or 12-month tour. Some enduring

problems, such as low police pay, dangerous working conditions, and a culture in which

drug use was widely tolerated, were beyond the power of individual mentors to solve.

Perhaps the most formidable problem was the lack of human capital. The quality of police recruits was poor, which was a reflection of the village-level destitution, and the

Afghan belief that the ANP was a reasonable career path for physically and mentally

feeble young men.

For the mentors, frustration was a natural by-product of such circumstances. But as a

British police advisor in Helmand concluded, it was important to overcome an

understandable desire to accomplish as much as possible during a relatively short tour.

A police mentor, he said, should focus “not on what I can do, but what I can do for the

next guy.”

Looking Beyond the Official Police

In Afghanistan, as in other counterinsurgency campaigns, the American approach has

emphasized the importance of “winning” local populations over to the side of the government by building the legitimacy of the state. According to this line of reasoning, legitimacy increases as the state is increasingly able to deliver essential public goods,

such as education, transportation, and security.

Establishing a uniformed, government police presence across Afghanistan is a pillar of

this approach. But as a number of the mentors discovered, the goal of building the ANP

was sometimes in conflict with the more immediate task of establishing local security.

With the Afghan police unable to provide security, mentors looked beyond the ANP to unofficial security forces. Acting on their own initiative, these mentors adopted unortho-
Introduction | 7

dox approaches that could have been drawn from the U.S. Army Special Forces’ unconventional warfare repertoire.

In Ghazni Province, a U.S. Army mentor, faced with chronic violence and lawlessness

along the main highway, engaged an ethnic leader to restore order. In exchange for fuel

from the Americans, Hazara militiamen manned checkpoints and succeeded in keeping both insurgents and ordinary bandits off the roadway.

In an area around the Khost-Gardez Pass, another U.S. Army mentor learned that a

number of elders were eager to defend their villages from insurgents. He began providing them with AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition on a limited basis and with the

understanding that any misuse of these weapons would result in swift retribution from

U.S. forces. The effort came under criticism by some senior American officials, although

ironically a similar initiative later became U.S. policy.

The rural areas of Afghanistan have a long history of providing for their own security

and administration of justice. Throughout the countryside, law enforcement was usually

the responsibility of local, traditional authorities rather than the Afghan government.

Given the depredations of militias during the 1980s and 1990s, it is understandable

that U.S. officials were reluctant to support unofficial armed groups. This concern was

shared by a British police mentor in Helmand who feared that the U.S. special operations forces’ attempts to build local self-defense forces could result in the creation of

new and potentially destabilizing militias. Ultimately, he was able to persuade U.S. military commanders to integrate the village forces into the ANP and make them part of the

country’s formal justice structure.

Supporting informal security forces will not be appropriate in every circumstance in

Afghanistan. Their legitimacy, capacity, and potential contribution must be considered

on a case-by-case basis. At the very least, mentors should be alert to the possibility that

security and justice can sometimes be provided by institutions that are outside the formal Afghan state. It is clear, however, that local, village-based security forces in

Afghanistan—as in many other conflict zones—have become a significant part of counterinsurgency. Under the Afghan Local Police (ALP) program, NATO/ISAF expects to en-
8 | Acknowledging Limits

9 Kate Clark, “For a Handful of Dollars: Taleban Allowed to Join ALP,” Afghan Analysts Network,

http://aan-afghansistan.com/index.asp?id=1419, accessed 5 March 2011.

10 NATO/ISAF, “Afghan National Security Forces,” Media Backgrounder,

www.isaf.nato.int/images/stories/File/factsheets/1667-10_ANSF_LR_en2.pdf, accessed 5 March

2011.

11 Alissa J. Rubin, “Afghans to Form Local Forces to Fight Taliban,” New York Times, 15 July 2010.

The U.S. Marines have launched their own community-based security program in Marjah District,

Helmand Province. Under the Interim Security for Critical Infrastructure (ISCI) program, the Marines

have raised and financed a force of some 800 men designed to prevent the Taliban from

reinfiltrating the district. For more on ISCI, see Saeed Shah, “New Militia Bring Security, and

Worries, to Marjah, Afghanistan,” McClatchy Newspapers, 2 March 2011,

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/01/109644/new-militia-brings-security-and.html#,

accessed 10 March 2011; and “More Please, Sir,” Economist (London), 24 February 2011,

www.economist.com/node/18233390, accessed 10 March 2011.

list tens of thousands of rural residents in community-based security forces—a development General David H. Petraeus has reportedly characterized as a counterinsurgency

“game changer.”9 Members of the ALP, who receive uniforms, weapons, and a stipend

from the Afghan MoI (Ministry of Interior), are intended to “compensate for shortfalls in

the ANP,”10 according to NATO/ISAF, and serve as a first line of defense against insurgents by “keep[ing an] eye out for bad guys—in their neighborhoods, in their communities,” in the words of a Pentagon spokesman.

11

Understanding Police Roles and Missions

The vignettes illustrate the fact that the ANP was often mentored to engage in activities

that few Westerners would recognize as policing. In Qalat District, for example, the high

levels of insurgent violence, combined with the very limited capabilities of the Afghan

personnel, required the PMT to focus on developing the ANP’s basic organizational,

leadership, and tactical skills. To the PMT commander, it seemed apparent that what

the district needed—and what was achievable, at least in the near term—was a paramilitary force rather than a Western-style crime-fighting agency.

Indeed, across southern and eastern Afghanistan, the ANP was employed as light infantry—equipped with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades—and engaged in

firefights with the Taliban. In such circumstances, the ANP were police in name only. As

a former police chief in southern Afghanistan explained in 2007, his officers were ex-
Introduction | 9

12 Quoted in International Crisis Group, “Reforming Afghanistan’s Police,” Asia Report No. 138, 30

August 2007, 15.

13 Bayley and Perito, The Police in War, 73–74. By deterring disorder, controlling violence, and

providing “instant response,” the police, according to Bayley and Perito, can win “hearts and minds”

and in so doing enhance the legitimacy of the state, a key objective of contemporary Western

counterinsurgency doctrine. A variation on this concept is “democratic policing,” that is, “policing

that uses minimal force, is relatively incorrupt, and provides reasonably impartial assistance and

redress within an accountable and known Western-style criminal justice framework.” Alice Hills,

Policing Post-Conflict Cities (London: Zed Books, 2009), 66.

pected to perform like “little soldiers . . . .We do extra work that is not police work. Firing rockets is not the job of police.”12

Some mentors saw police roles and missions differently. As a military policeman in the

U.S. Marines, the PMT commander in Garmsir brought a law enforcement perspective

to mentoring. While accepting that the ANP needed skills for surviving violent encounters with the Taliban, the PMT leader believed that the Garmsir police should serve and

protect the population—in other words, they should conduct what scholars have termed

“core policing.”13

The question of police roles and missions should be considered carefully by every mentor serving in Afghanistan. For the PMT commander in Qalat, focusing on the development of ANP “survival” skills made sense, given the extent of insurgent activity and the

extensive level of security and justice services provided by informal, customary, and

tribal institutions. In other areas of the country, however, such structures were less robust—or were suborned, infiltrated, or replaced by the Taliban. In such circumstances,

a heavy emphasis on paramilitary training and operations led to a policing vacuum or,

more ominously, the conceding of security and justice to the Taliban.

Among other things, mentors should consider the potential consequences of emphasizing one form of policing—paramilitary or “core”—over the other. In some circumstances, it may be possible to bridge this divide by pressing the ANA and the ANP to

function together in contested or unstable districts, with the army providing the security “shell” necessary for the police to carry out more conventional law enforcement

responsibilities.

The contradictions between paramilitary and core policing—or, to put it another way,

between the police as a force versus the police as a service—is likely to become more
10 | Acknowledging Limits

apparent as NATO/ISAF expands the ALP across the country. Although technically under

the control of the MoI and ANP chain of command, the ALP has no powers of arrest.

Moreover, the ALP is being trained by U.S. special forces personnel.

14 Taken together,

this suggests that the ALP is likely to have a paramilitary rather than core policing

orientation.

Mentoring’s Human Dimension

For individuals preparing to deploy to Afghanistan, the final theme is perhaps of the

greatest relevance and importance. The following vignettes illustrate the central role

that personal relationships played in effective police mentoring. To be successful, advisors had to do more than impart technical skills—empathy (if not sympathy) and sensitivity were also essential. In the words of a British police advisor in Helmand, “It was

about personal relationships, mutual respect, and not being arrogant. It was really about

good manners.”

Building such relationships began with showing an interest in the life stories and family histories of Afghan policemen. According to the U.S. Army mentor in Mazar-e Sharif,

three or four long visits with a counterpart were the minimum required to begin building a relationship. Only after a relationship was established would the Afghans be willing to accept and act on the advice their mentors provided.

This personal interest, according to several advisors, helped mentors gain influence

among the police. It also fostered self-confidence among the Afghan police—men who

were typically from impoverished rural backgrounds and often burdened with physical

and mental shortcomings.

Teaching by personal example was an important part of mentoring, particularly for U.S.

Marines. Maintaining strict professionalism, respect, and discipline among advisory

team members helped improve the outlook and performance of the ANP, according to

the PMT commander in Nawa-I-Barakzayi District. For this advisor, successful

mentoring meant instilling in the Afghans what was in essence a moral commitment to

14 Brian Wagner, “ALP program starting in Shah Joy ,” U.S. Air Forces Central,

www.afcent.af.mil/news/story_print.asp?id=123240227, accessed 6 March 2011.
policing—that is, the belief that protecting and serving the public was an honorable

profession.

Mentoring also required firmness. While showing that they cared about ANP officers on

a personal level, the PMT also expected the police to live up to the standards that were

set for them. In the words of the Nawa PMT leader, “We wouldn’t accept excuses like

‘my foot hurts.’ At first we were worried about offending them, but then we learned that

if you’re soft, they won’t respond.”

Finally, mentors stressed the importance of allowing the Afghans to fail. Aware that

there would come a time when the ANP would have to stand on its own—and without the

“stiffening” effect of having the mentors present—mentors encouraged the police to

make their own decisions, even if those choices were clearly wrong in the eyes of

the advisors.

These themes—and the vignettes that follow—are not intended to be prescriptive. None

will be relevant in all of Afghanistan’s districts and provinces. Marines and other personnel deploying to Afghanistan should view them simply as a means for gaining insights into, and preparing for, the demands associated with training and advising the

Afghan police.

Introduction | 11
15 This vignette draws on the author’s interviews, New York, 20 December 2009, and 23 February

2010, and subsequent e-mail communications.

16 Bayley and Perito, The Police in War.

Police mentoring team (PMT) Swampfox arrived in Zabul Province in southwestern

Afghanistan in April 2008.

15 Commanded by a major in the New York State National

Guard, the team would spend the next six months mentoring the Afghan National Police (ANP) at stations and checkpoints in Qalat District, seat of the provincial capital.

Mentoring in Qalat

Swampfox was assigned to Qalat District, the seat of the provincial capital. Like many

other PMTs in Afghanistan, the team was somewhat understrength, with 12 officers

and noncommissioned officers instead of the 16 that were authorized. Also, like most

PMTs operating in a less-than-permissive environment, most of Swampfox’s personnel

were part of the team’s security force, although the PMT’s commander repeatedly

stressed that everyone was expected to perform a mentoring role as well.

The commander of PMT Swampfox had originally expected to mentor an Afghan National Army (ANA) unit, and his predeployment course for mentors at Fort Riley, Kansas,

stressed combat skills, including advanced weapons training. “We spent more time on

the machine-gun range than on cultural skills,” he recalled.

16 He received a smattering

of language training in Dari, the most widely spoken language in western and central

Afghanistan. Shortly before the end of the course, he learned that he would be deploying to Zabul and began what he termed a “crash course” in Pashto, the principal language of the country’s southwestern and southeastern provinces.

Although some of the PMT members had served previously in Afghanistan, none had experience as mentors. However, the team brought with it a set of skills that proved relevant in the context of police mentoring in Afghanistan. Swampfox was made up of

reservists, who in civilian life worked as corrections officers, state policemen, lawyers,

and other law-enforcement professionals.

Vignette 1

Police Mentoring Team

Qalat District, 2008
14 | Acknowledging Limits

More broadly, the commander believed that his civilian position as a businessman gave

him a degree of patience that was particularly useful in dealing with the Afghan police.

“Everything’s a negotiation with the Afghans,” he recalled, “and I think my skills as a

businessman in civilian life made me a better advisor.”

Members of PMT Swampfox lived on a forward operating base in Qalat City that was located next door to one of the two police stations for which the team was responsible.

The police also manned a checkpoint outside the city. In total, the mentors were responsible for about 115 to 200 police officers.

Chronically short of vehicles

and fuel, the ANP used checkpoints as a means to monitor

and control traffic flow along

major roads. In theory, checkpoints, as population-control

instruments, contributed to

law enforcement and counterinsurgency. In practice,

checkpoints were more often

sources of income for the ANP,

who used them to extract

goods and revenue from vehicles and their passengers.

Such predation helped reinforce the public’s perception of

the police as a corrupt and sinister force—a perception

obviously inimical to the population-centric counterinsurgency strategy advanced by

U.S. and Coalition leaders. Police Mentoring Team Swampfox was responsible for about

115 to 200 police officers in the Qalat District.

(Photo courtesy of PMT Swampfox)
Qalat District | 15

Moreover, isolated and poorly defended checkpoints were highly vulnerable to insurgent attacks, and, given the ANP’s lack of mobility, it was almost certain that reinforcements would be slow to arrive.

As the team discovered upon its arrival in Qalat, the district had no chief of police. An

ANP colonel, who was the province’s deputy police chief, served as the district’s de

facto chief. According to the PMT leader, the ANP colonel displayed remarkable professionalism and leadership by Afghan police standards:

He showed up in a shirt and a tie, and the men were terrified of him. Lots of

Afghans said the colonel was crooked, but he could accomplish things no

one else could. He had been trained by the Soviets in Siberia, and he had

been in the province for 30 years.

The men under the ANP colonel’s command had recently been through the first cycle

of Focused District Development, a police training program launched across Afghanistan

in November 2007 by the Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan. In

essence, the program sought to improve the effectiveness of the uniformed ANP by reThe Swampfox team mentoring included classroom training, but the police lacked patience to sit

through such formal instruction. (Photo courtesy of PMT Swampfox)
16 | Acknowledging Limits

17 For more on FDD, see Robert M. Perito, “Afghanistan’s Police: The Weak Link in Security Sector

Reform,” United States Institute of Peace, Special Report 227, August 2009, 5–6.

moving a district’s entire police force and sending it for training at a provincial or regional

facility. During the ANP’s absence from the district, a unit of the Afghan National Civil

Order Police, a relatively highly trained and disciplined national force, provided security

and, ideally, demonstrated to the local population how a professional police force performed its duties.

17 After the local police returned to their district, PMTs would provide

follow-on mentoring.

To reinforce the lessons learned at the training facility, this mentoring included classroom training. But like the personnel of many other PMTs, Swampfox members found

that the Afghan police lacked the patience to sit through formal classes. The ANP was

far more amenable to practical instruction, exercises, and patrolling under the watchful eyes of their mentors. Although some patrols were carried out in the bazaar and

elsewhere in Qalat City, the PMT and the police spent far more time in the district’s outThe National Guardsmen found that the police were better taught through practical exercises and

instruction, and patrolling under the mentors' guidance. (Photo courtesy of PMT Swampfox)
Qalat District | 17

18 In 2009, Afghan policemen were killed in the line of duty at roughly twice the rate of Afghan

soldiers. Sean D. Naylor, “Forces in Discord: Distrust Between Afghan Army and Police Hampers U.S.

Efforts,” Armed Forces Journal International, July 2009, www.afji.com/2009/07/4231017,

accessed 20 December 2010. For more on police casualties, see “Highlights: Afghan Police Issues

16–31 Dec 09: Interior Minister Outlines Police Priorities,” Open Source Center, 13 January 2010.

19 For more information on informal justice and security in Afghanistan, see Susanne Schmeidl and

Masood Karokhail, “The Role of Non-State Actors in ‘Community Based Policing’: An Exploration of

the Arbakai (Tribal Police) in South Eastern Afghanistan,” Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 30, No.

2 (August 2009); and The Liaison Office, “Linkages Between State and Non-State Justice Systems in

Eastern Afghanistan: Evidence from Jalalabad, Nangarhar and Ahmad Aba, Paktia,” May 2009,

http://www.tlo-afghanistan.org/publications/working-paper-series/linkages-between-state-and-nonstate-justice-systems-eastern-afgha, accessed 21 August 2010.

lying villages. Patrolling with the ANP generated some positive results, in the team

leader’s judgment. “The police got confidence by our going out with them, even if it was

only 2 of us and 13 of them,” he said.

Through this mentoring, PMT Swampfox sought to reinforce basic military skills and discipline within the ANP. Given the level of insurgent violence in Qalat Province, “It was all

about helping the police stay alive at that point,” recalled the PMT commander.

18 Moreover, given the fact that the administration of justice in Qalat, as in much of the country, was provided by village jirgas (decision-making assemblies), the role of the police

and other formal agencies was necessarily minor.

19 Jirgas, which typically comprised

tribal elders, religious leaders, and other local notables, adjudicated civil disputes and

minor offenses. Only when the most serious violent crimes had taken place—or in instances where the jirga’s judgment was not accepted by the relevant parties—were the

police called in. Western concepts of policing, in the PMT leader’s view, were irrelevant

in such circumstances. What was needed, he believed, was a paramilitary rather than

a police force.

Fostering Popular Support

Although training the ANP in community policing and other Western forms of law enforcement was ruled out, the PMT did not neglect the central issue of improving police

interaction with the local population. Effective counterinsurgency required the population to provide information to the security forces. But first, the ANP had to be trained to

interact properly with local residents. Improving the ANP’s relationship with the public

was the thread running throughout much of the PMT’s mentoring.
18 | Acknowledging Limits

Swampfox personnel instructed the ANP on how to enter a village, treat the population

and its property with respect, and engage with the appropriate elders. They also addressed the nagging problem of police checkpoints, a source of popular grievance with

the ANP. The PMT that Swampfox replaced had recommended reducing the number of

checkpoints in the district, and the commander enthusiastically agreed that what he

termed the “toll booths and targets” should be consolidated. “I wanted to turn my checkpoint into a provincial training center for the ANP,” the PMT commander said. “I tried to

set up a firing range and do other things, but it was simply too hard to find qualified ANP

instructors.”

The commander also eliminated cordon and search operations, which he believed were

“a complete waste of time.” These intrusive searches failed to locate weapons or suspected insurgents, and, more important, they further alienated local residents.

To improve public perceptions of the ANP, the mentors initiated their own information

operations. A supply of hand-cranked radios delivered to villages and access to local FM

radio facilitated by U.S. Army Special Forces allowed the PMT to reach significant segments of the population. The team found an imam (leader of a mosque) willing to speak

out against the Taliban, and the police colonel recorded messages for local radio. As the

PMT commander recalled, the ANP colonel “told the audience: ‘Any of my men do anything wrong, I want you to call me. Here’s my number.’” Swampfox devised other psychological operations as well. Adopting one of the Taliban’s signature techniques, the

team helped the police create “night letters” to warn insurgents living in villages that the

ANP was aware of their presence.

Finally, the mentors attempted to foster a public image of ANP competence and professionalism. The belief in “winning hearts and minds” has become something of a

counterinsurgency cliché in recent years. Nonetheless, it is true that building a civilian

population’s belief that security forces have at least a chance of prevailing can be a

powerful tool against insurgents.

Keeping the U.S. presence to a minimum and giving the Afghans credit for any successful police-related activities was crucial, in the PMT commander’s judgment. “We
Qalat District | 19

20 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Afghanistan Security: U.S. Efforts to Develop

Capable Afghan Police Forces Face Challenges and Need Coordinated, Detailed Plan to Help Ensure

Accountability, GAO-08-883T (Washington, DC: GAO, 18 June 2008), 6.

always tried to stay in the background,” he said. “You have to dedicate yourself to working in the background. I wouldn’t join in meetings with elders. I would only sit down if

they asked me specifically.” Also, humanitarian assistance was delivered by ANP trucks

rather than U.S. vehicles. Moreover, the team leader made certain that the police got

credit in the local media. As he recalled, “There was no mention of the U.S., even though

we killed a lot of bad guys after a night ambush that killed a Taliban commander.”

Conclusion

PMT Swampfox’s mission in Qalat ended in October 2008. In the view of its commander,

the team, which trained approximately 250 policemen during its six months in the district, had improved the ANP’s capabilities. For example, the ANP was able to carry out

a number of targeted night raids against suspected Taliban compounds. “We’d get the

guy before anyone was up,” he explained. Such raids suggested not only a measure of

ANP competence, but also an increased flow of information from the local population

to the police—among other things, an indicator of greater public willingness to interact

with the ANP.

Ultimately, however, the team’s experiences highlight the clear limits to what a PMT

could reasonably expect to achieve. The team demonstrated initiative and creative approaches to the profound challenges of mentoring the ANP. In helping the police learn

how to survive in a dangerous environment and, more important, by working to improve

the ANP’s relationship with the local population, the PMT’s mentoring reflected an understanding of what was required of the police in counterinsurgency. Yet the ANP in

Qalat District remained hobbled by corruption, lack of leadership, and incompetence.

Grave police shortcomings were hardly confined to Qalat, however—as of mid-2008, no

ANP unit anywhere in Afghanistan was rated as “fully capable.”20
21 Quotations in this vignette, unless otherwise noted, are from the author’s interview, Alexandria,

VA, 20 November 2009, and subsequent e-mail communications.

22 Affiliated with the Taliban, the Haqqani network, whose origins can be traced to the anti-Soviet

Afghan resistance movement, has been described as America’s most lethal adversary in

Afghanistan. For more on the network, see Commander NATO International Security Assistance

Force, Afghanistan, and U.S. Forces, Afghanistan, “Commander’s Initial Assessment,” 30 August

2009, 2–6, www.media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/Assessment_Red

acted_092109.pdf, accessed 25 November 2009; and Anand Gopal, “The Most Deadly U.S. Foe in

Afghanistan,” Christian Science Monitor, 1 June 2009, www.csmonitor.com/World/AsiaSouthCentral/2009/0601/p10s01-wosc.html, accessed 8 March 2010.

During 2007 and 2008, a U.S. Army captain led a team of mentors in southeastern

Afghanistan along the Khost-Gardez Pass, a key entryway through the Hindu Kush mountains.

21 The team had two missions. The first was to interdict the Taliban and secure the

pass; the second was to partner with the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP)—“train with them, work with them, and build their capacity,” according to the team leader.

Mentoring the Afghan National Army

The Khost-Gardez Pass is the central link between Khost Province and the city of Gardez,

Paktia’s provincial capital, and it functions as a main artery from the region into northcentral Afghanistan. As the team discovered, the Taliban were not the only violent actors operating in and around the pass, but the identity of the fighters was not always

clear. “We didn’t know a lot about ‘red’ [adversary forces],” the team’s commander recalled. “We knew they were not just Taliban. There were members of the Haqqani network.

22 And there were foreign fighters—it was difficult to tell their nationality, although

our terps [interpreters] could tell they were outsiders.”

U.S. infantry, cavalry, and artillery platoons partnered with the ANA, while a military police (MP) squad partnered with the ANP. The ANA quickly earned the respect of the mentoring team’s commander. “We trusted and respected the ANA,” he recalled. Living on

Vignette 2

Police Training Mission

Khost-Gardez Pass, 2007–2008
22 | Acknowledging Limits

23 The distances involved are considerable. It is roughly 225 kilometers (140 miles) from Khost to

Kabul.

the forward operating base (FOB) with the Americans, and receiving the bulk of United

States’ attention and resources, the ANA was carefully nurtured. Afghan soldiers, he

said, were highly motivated and eager to operate with their American counterparts.

Afghan soldiers would wake up the commander in the middle of the night, or seek him

out on the FOB, and propose their own ideas about missions. By the time the mentors left in 2008, the ANA was

capable of carrying out successful operations on its own.

Glaring Police Shortfalls

The Afghan police were another matter. Unlike the ANA,

they showed little initiative. Corruption within the force

was endemic. The local population feared and hated the

ANP, which routinely extracted “taxes” from travelers

along the highway. “Jingle” (or jingha) trucks, the colorfully decorated multipurpose vehicles found across

Central Asia, were favored targets for ANP predation. The

police frequently ambushed the trucks at night and stole

their cargo. One local police chief was notorious for

hijacking the vehicles, according to the mentoring team

commander. “In one instance, after the police chief

claimed that the Haqqani network had burned a jingle

truck, we found it parked behind the police station,” he

said. “There were times when I wanted to arrest

the ANP.”

The relatively strong performance of the ANA, and the continued shortcomings of the

ANP, led the team leader to shift his focus from the army to the police halfway through

his tour. The police faced a chronic shortage of supplies and equipment, and remained

undertrained. “They had no budget, and after marksmanship training they’d be out of

ammo,” he recalled. Fuel was always in short supply, partly because the police had to

drive to Kabul to refuel.

23 The team commander supplied them with fuel, but they typiThe so-called "jingle" trucks

moving through the KhostGardez Pass were frequent targets of the Afghan National

Police. (U.S. Air Force photo)
Khost-Gardez Pass | 23

cally sold it in the bazaar. “I didn’t like it,” he said, “but I understood that they had

survival needs.”

ANP morale was equally poor. One district police chief, nicknamed “Abe Lincoln,” was

aggressive, but proved to be atypical. “Occasionally we’d have the individual Afghan policeman who cared about the security of his district,” the team chief recalled, “but unless he could muster sufficient cooperation by his comrades—and they never

could—effective policing didn’t happen.” Also, the team chief remembered that “you

never saw the same police twice” because of frequent desertions. “Many times,” he

recollected, “the police were simply afraid to leave their stations. They knew that if they

did a good policing job, they would get a night letter [from the insurgents] threatening

to cut their heads off.” Moreover, the terrain was very isolating, which meant that police under attack would have a long time to wait for reinforcements.

Building the Afghan National Police

Rampant desertion and high casualties among the ANP meant that recruitment was

an urgent priority, and the mentoring team leader met frequently with shuras (Islamic

councils) to help fill police ranks. But poor pay, danger, and the level of contempt with

which most villagers regarded the police were powerful disincentives to joining the force.

One district subgovernor, rather than use his budget to fund his district’s ANP, would instead hire villagers to be his personal bodyguards and drivers. These informal forces

would drive ANP vehicles and carry weapons, and when stopped by Coalition forces

would present permits from the subgovernor. Inducements and bargaining were therefore essential components of the team leader’s interactions with the shuras. As he recalled, “We’d say: ‘You owe the district subgovernor five people for the security forces.

Give him five names of males to receive training and we’ll dig a well.’” But more often

than not, the elders would return to the village and come back with just two men who

had never fired weapons before.

It was obvious to the mentors that building the most basic skills and creating a reasonably disciplined armed force was the critical first step. Toward that end, instruction

focused on patrolling and other fundamental tactical skills, weapons handling and
24 | Acknowledging Limits

safety, and equipment maintenance. To alleviate ammunition shortages, policemen

were brought into the FOB for marksmanship training. First-aid instruction provided by

the Americans was intended to build confidence. Acquiring more advanced, police-specific skills, such as fingerprinting and criminal investigation, was well beyond the ANP’s

capabilities. In some cases, just getting the police to wear their uniforms was a

challenge.

Rather, the stress was on building capabilities that the team leader believed would have

an immediate impact on the insurgents and build the ANP’s confidence and ability to

survive in what were very dangerous circumstances. “We trained the police to get out

in villages, talk to the locals, and gather intelligence,” he said. However, the ANP, unlike

the ANA, never reached the point where it could patrol on its own and would venture off

the main road only when accompanied by Coalition forces.

The training provided to the ANP had an important psychological dimension. “I wanted

to understand the human terrain,” the team’s commander said. “I found out where the

police were from, where their loyalties were. Once you spent a lot of time with them, built

personal relationships, and got to know them, you could get them to perform.” Training,

he related, made the ANP more confident and aggressive, but “they atrophied quickly.

They made lots of excuses and didn’t show up at their stations.”

Village Self-Defense

The commander’s continuing frustration with the ANP led him to consider new approaches to ensuring local security. Elders had been extremely reluctant to provide manpower for the ANA and ANP, but they often volunteered to secure their villages. The

team’s second-in-command, convinced that villagers were ready to defend themselves,

suggested providing weapons on a selective basis. During late 2007, the mentors began

providing a group of village elders with captured AK-47 rifles and ammunition. “The idea

was to create a homegrown force with allegiance to the village,” the team chief explained. He realized that it was impossible to guarantee the loyalty of every Afghan involved and that weapons might be used against Coalition or Afghan security forces.

Therefore, he decided to hold the elders accountable:
We would let them select the people who received weapons. We would record

the serial numbers and made it clear that if any weapons ended up in insurgent hands, or if my men took any fire from them, they’d suffer serious

consequences. We told them we’d be back to check on them. This threat

was meant to keep them honest.

These villages were not meant to operate in isolation. The mentors expected them to

work through district subgovernors and to share information with the ANA, the ANP, and

U.S. forces. Indeed, they were intended to generate “actionable” intelligence for counterinsurgency at the village level. “As we told the elders, ‘You tell us where the bad guys

are, and we’ll help you protect your village,’” the team’s commander recalled.

As far as some Americans were concerned, the mentors were engaged in militia building—a highly sensitive subject in Afghanistan. “This was a very touchy subject at the

time,” the team leader remembered, “and the idea was not well received.” Although he

ANP recruits stand in formation near Gardez in March 2007. (U.S. Air Force photo)
26 | Acknowledging Limits

24 Jon Boone, “U.S. Pours Millions into Anti-Taliban Militias in Afghanistan,” Guardian (London), 22

November 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/22/us-anti-taliban-militias-afghanistan,

accessed 9 March 2010.

25 Dexter Filkins, “Afghan Militias Battle Taliban With Aid of U.S.,” New York Times, 21 November

2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/world/asia/22militias.html, accessed 10 March 2010. The

Afghan Local Police is the latest in a series of initiatives since 2008 to build local security forces to

augment the Afghan security forces. For more on local security initiatives, see Mathieu Lefèvre,

“Local Defense in Afghanistan: A Review of Government-Backed Initiatives,” Afghanistan Analysts

Network, AAN Thematic Report 03/2010,

www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/AAN_LocalDefenceAfghanistan.pdf, accessed 10 May

2010; Jon Boone, “U.S. Keeps Secret Anti-Taliban Militia on a Bright Leash,” Guardian (London), 8

March 2010, www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2010/mar/08/us-afghanistan-local-defence-militia,

accessed 12 March 2010; and Jason Motlagh, “Afghan Militias: The Perils of Trying to Duplicate

Iraq,” Time (online edition), 27 October 2010,

www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2027695,00.html, accessed 10 November 2010.

came under sharp criticism, he left Afghanistan convinced that the village self-defense

initiative held great promise.

By 2009, opinion had shifted, at least among the senior U.S. military leadership, who

came to embrace the notion of supporting “homegrown” militias as a counterinsurgency tool. Under the Community Defense Initiative (CDI), the United States is reportedly spending $1.3 billion to assist indigenous self-defense forces in 14 parts of

Afghanistan.

24 Echoing the approach made by mentors in 2007 and 2008, an unnamed

senior U.S. military officer said that the goal of CDI “is to get people to take responsibility for their own security. In many places they are already doing that.”25

Conclusion

The mentors operating along the Khost-Gardez Pass experienced many of the same

frustrations that other police mentors have encountered across Afghanistan. Clearly

neglected relative to the ANA, the Afghan police required moral and psychological as well

as material support. Recognizing the ANP’s profound shortcomings, mentors focused

on the human dimension of mentoring—namely, the importance of establishing personal relationships with the ANP, and, through those ties, fostering a sense of confidence, self-worth, and aggression among the police.

Yet none of these efforts appeared to make any real impact on the ANP, whose performance, integrity, and professionalism continued to remain far below those of the

ANA. The ANP was not necessarily a lost cause, but it was evident that prospects for es-
Khost-Gardez Pass | 27

tablishing an even modestly capable force were dim. Faced with an urgent requirement

to establish security along the Khost-Gardez Pass, the mentoring team commander

sought alternatives to the police.

Certain that villagers were willing to defend themselves, he decided to provide captured

enemy weapons to selected village elders. His initiative was unorthodox. Indeed, it could

have been drawn from the U.S. Army Special Forces’ unconventional warfare repertoire.

Establishing indigenous, village-based security had long been recognized as an important counterinsurgency tool. Yet in 2007, anything that smacked of “militia-building” in

Afghanistan was frowned

upon by some Americans,

and his initiative had an unfavorable reception. Today,

building local self-defense

forces remains controversial;

however, it now has powerful

advocates in the upper

reaches of the U.S. military

command who are eager to

generate additional Afghan

forces as quickly as possible.

A U.S. soldier supervises a checkpoint run by a local defense

force in Kandahar Province in April 2010. (U.S. Army photo)
26 Unless noted otherwise, quotations in this vignette are from the author’s interviews, Ministry of

Defence, London, 3 February 2010, and subsequent e-mail communications. For more on British

counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, see Theo Farrell and Stuart Gordon, “COIN Machine: The

British Military in Afghanistan,” Orbis, Fall 2009, 665–83.

27 A battle group is the British army term for a battalion-sized formation that brings together armor,

infantry, artillery, and other assets into a combined arms team.

Since October 2007, the British counterinsurgency campaign in Helmand Province had

emphasized a “population-centric” approach that mixed kinetic and nonkinetic means

as required.

26 Security-sector reform—which included support to the Afghan National

Police (ANP)—was an important priority in British policy.

During 2008–2009, a group of British police mentors advised the Afghan police in and

around the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. Five teams, each composed of 16 men, advised and trained the police. These teams included military policemen (MPs) and elements of the 2d Battalion, the Royal Gurkha Rifles (2d RGR).

No More “Drive-By” Mentoring

The immediate concern of the mentors was to improve the ANP’s performance in

Lashkar Gah. “If the local population perceived that the provincial governor was unable

to secure his own capital, what hope was there in getting them to accept the government

more broadly?” one British officer recalled. “We had to demonstrate success there.”

Faced with stiff armed opposition from the Taliban in and around the city, police mentors spent most of their time simply holding ground. “But when a battle group got put

in, this freed up the police mentors,” recollected a British mentor.

27 With more troops

on the ground providing security, the British teams could extend their area of operations to include districts outside the provincial capital.

Vignette 3

British Police Mentors

Helmand Province, 2008–2009
30 | Acknowledging Limits

28 United Nations Development Program, Afghanistan Human Development Report 2007, cited in

Naval Postgraduate School, Program for Culture & Conflict Studies, Helmand Provincial Overview,

www.nps.edu/programs/ccs/Helmand.html, accessed 27 February 2010.

The increased troop presence also freed up the British advisors to mentor the Afghans

more intensively. “We needed to build our credibility with the ANP, so we decided no

more ‘drive-by’ mentoring,” according to one officer. Instead of living on their own bases,

the British teams embedded with the Afghan police and lived with them 24 hours a day.

Living Off Their Wits

As the British discovered, the ANP had a will-o’-the-wisp quality. The police kept few

records—perhaps not surprising in a province with a literacy rate of 4 percent—and it was

unclear how many police there actually were.

28 Moreover, there was what one British officer termed a “shed full” of “known and unknown” police checkpoints. “We would go

out and visit checkpoints, get names of policemen, [inventory] equipment, come back

to headquarters, and put it in a database,” he recalled.

British troops patrol with the Afghan police in Musa Qala, Helmand Province.

(Photo courtesy of Andre Prudent)
Helmand Province | 31

High levels of casualties and desertion added to the chaos surrounding police manning. “Two hundred police were recruited and trained [in one district], and they promptly

ran away,” recalled one British advisor. The police were highly vulnerable to bribes, and

while the mentors did not approve of such corruption, the British understood it. Given

their pitiful pay, the advisor said, “They had to sustain themselves by living off their

wits.” In an effort to reduce corruption, which included payroll-skimming by police officials, he continued, “We started taking responsibility for pay, supervising it every step

of the way.”

Given attrition levels, recruiting fresh bodies to fill ANP ranks was critical, but the mentors were underwhelmed by the Afghan recruitment pool. “In an Afghan family, the strong

sons help on the farm, and the bright ones might get an education,” said one British officer, “but the one with a club foot, or a dodgy eye, he’d be told to go stand at a police

checkpoint.” The officer recalled village recruiting drives where elders would offer up

men with one leg as potential policemen. “They thought that standing at a checkpoint

was a good occupation for a guy with one leg—at least he wouldn’t be a burden to his

family,” he said.

Rampant criminality and drug trafficking in the province made a difficult operating environment even more violent and chaotic. “There was a big poppy season,” one advisor

recalled. “Ninety percent of the UK’s heroin came from the province. A former provincial governor was involved in drugs, and he was trying to reassert his authority when we

pitched up.”

On visits to some villages, mentors discovered that elders clearly did not want to see the

police. “They didn’t want us,” one mentor recalled. “They were complicit with the Taliban

and the drug militias.” But in other places the mentors encountered local strongmen

with different attitudes toward the ANP. “In some places, the chief of police couldn’t get

anything done,” the mentor said. “The local headman viewed the police as his personal

force, and he would use them to guard his poppy fields.”

Royal Gurkha Rifles

The British mentors attempted to train the ANP in a formal classroom setting, but the
32 | Acknowledging Limits

29 “Gurkhas Train Afghan Police,” UK Ministry of Defense,

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/MilitaryOperations/GurkhasTrainAfghanPolice.

htm, accessed 2 March 2010. For more on the Royal Gurkha Rifles, see

www.army.mod.uk/infantry/regiments/royal-gurkha-rifles/default.aspx, accessed 10 March 2010.

effort was fruitless. In the view of one advisor, the largely illiterate and undisciplined

Afghan police were simply incapable of absorbing such forms of instruction. The police

“were very immature and couldn’t sit still, and were like children, really,” he recalled. He

therefore stressed practical demonstrations—showing how to man and operate a vehicle checkpoint, for example—

which seemed to be more

readily absorbed by the ANP.

During encounters with the Taliban, he recalled, a number of

Afghan policemen proved

themselves to be “brave and

enthusiastic” fighters.

The Gurkhas within the police

mentoring teams displayed an

ingrained talent for working

with the Afghans. Recruited in

Nepal and renowned for their

professionalism, prowess, and

tenacity, Gurkhas shared linguistic as well as cultural affinities with the Afghans. At a

police post on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, Rifleman Keshab Rai, 2d RGR, said that although he did not speak Pashto, the dominant language of southeastern Afghanistan,

“We speak Urdu, and most of the people here speak Urdu.”29 The Gurkhas, recalled

one British advisor, were “happy to carve up a goat and make a curry” to share with their

Afghan counterparts. Moreover, their patience in dealing with the Afghans was remarkable, and beyond what most British soldiers were capable of providing, he said. Yet

the police tried even the Gurkhas’ considerable patience. The ANP’s approach to its responsibilities was almost comically lackadaisical at times, as reflected in a press acANP officers in the Musa Qala District.

(Photo courtesy of Andre Prudent)
Helmand Province | 33

30 Anup Kaphle, “Policing Afghanistan,” The Atlantic, September 2009, www.theatlantic.com/

magazine/archive/2009/09/policing-afghanistan/7685/, accessed 15 February 2010.

31 Ibid.

count of the arrival of an RGR police mentoring team at a checkpoint on Highway One,

Lashkar Gah’s main road.

All of the policemen, except for the one guarding the main entrance, were

found sleeping under a tent next to the road. . . . It took the Gurkhas nearly

half an hour just to get everyone ready for that day’s [training] session. Later

that afternoon, the same British mentors stopped by another checkpoint

where they found all 12 policemen at the post, including the commander,

taking a postmeal nap.

30

“It is hard to motivate the police,” said one Gurkha officer. “Training them is not the hard

part; teaching them discipline and determination is.”31

Conclusion

The experience of the British teams in and around

Lashkar Gah illustrated some of the central challenges associated with police mentoring in

Afghanistan. Like most other personnel advising

the Afghans, they learned that the ANP was

plagued by low morale, corruption, and a lack of

discipline. These factors were formidable obstacles to building a cohesive, modestly competent

force—let alone a professional law enforcement institution.

But, as the mentors discovered, it was important to

do more than simply identify and lament the ANP’s

many shortcomings. The British came to recognize

that making progress with the ANP required a

strong measure of empathy—an obvious but essential quality when dealing with the Afghans.

Members of the Royal Gurkha

Regiment look on as an Afghan

policeman searches a resident in

Musa Qala District.

(Crown Copyright/MOD 2008)
34 | Acknowledging Limits

The ANP, according to one officer, “were getting ‘thumped’ on behalf of the people,”

and they were also getting abused by the people—such as by local strongmen involved

in narcotics trafficking. For policemen, like most other people in Afghanistan, scratching out an existence requires what in the Western context would be illicit, or at least

questionable, survival skills. The quality of police recruits was poor, but this was partly

a product of village-level destitution and the belief that physically and mentally feeble

young men could make a career of policing.

In addition to empathy, police mentors needed patience—a quality that is sometimes in

short supply among Western advisors in Afghanistan, who are typically eager to demonstrate near-term progress. The Gurkhas, who shared linguistic and cultural affinities

with the Afghans, served a critical mentoring role, but even their patience was severely

tested.
32 Unless noted otherwise, quotations in this vignette are drawn from the author’s telephone

interview, 12 December 2010, and subsequent e-mail communications.

33 “Afghanistan National Police Smartbook,” CJTF-Phoenix J-3 Police Advisory Cell, 1 June 2007, 35.

Combined Joint Task Force–Phoenix (CJTF-Phoenix), made up of personnel from 13 Coalition

partner countries, mentors the ANA and ANP to improve their counterinsurgency and

counterterrorism capabilities. CJTF-Phoenix is a subordinate command of the Combined Security

Transition Command–Afghanistan (CSTC-A). CSTC-A’s mission is to “plan, program and implement

structural, organizational, institutional and management reforms of the Afghanistan National

Security Forces in order to develop a stable Afghanistan, strengthen the rule of law, and deter and

defeat terrorism within its borders.” U.S. Navy, Expeditionary Combat Readiness Center, www.

ecrc.navy.mil/1/idc_deployment/afghanistan.htm, accessed 2 March 2010. CSTC-A was brought

under the command of NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan in 2009.

A team made up of 16 members of the Michigan Army National Guard, led by a lieutenant colonel, arrived in Kabul in May 2007 expecting to advise an Afghan National

Army (ANA) unit.

32 Instead, they were assigned to mentor the Afghan National Civil Order

Police (ANCOP), a relatively new and specialized force, and spent a year doing so.

Afghan National Civil Order Police Roles and Missions

ANCOP was intended to function much like a European gendarmerie—that is, as a welltrained, disciplined paramilitary force capable of operating across the country. Its focus

was on urban areas, and its men were trained to respond to riots and other forms of violent civil unrest, including hostage crises.

33 Indeed, ANCOP was established in response to the failure of the Afghan National Police (ANP) to quell violent protests in

Kabul during mid-2006.

Recruits, who were drawn from the ranks of the ANP, received an additional 14 weeks

of instruction, including specialized training in special weapons and tactics (SWAT) and

Vignette 4

Afghan National Civil Order

Police Advisor

2007–2008
34 Some of this training was provided by Germany and other NATO countries. “German Training for

the Afghan Civil Order Police,” www.diplo.de/diplo/en/Infoservice/Presse/

Meldungen/2008/080515-Afghanistan.html, accessed 22 January 2010.

35 For more on FDD, see Report on Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan

(Washington, DC: Department of Defense, June 2008), 45; and Anthony H. Cordesman, Adam

Mausner, and David Kasten, Winning in Afghanistan: Creating Effective Afghan Security Forces

(Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 2009), 106–11.

crowd control.

34 Unlike the ANP—most of whom were illiterate—prospective ANCOP officers were required to possess basic literacy and numeracy skills.

In addition to riot control and other public order responsibilities, ANCOP was also expected to play a key role in an initiative to improve ANP training, discipline, and performance. Under the Focused District Development (FDD) program, uniformed police are

removed from entire districts and sent to regional training centers. In their absence,

ANCOP officers provide district-level security. Moreover, the relatively highly trained and

motivated ANCOP personnel were intended to give an idea to local populations of how

a professional police service should operate, and they were meant to set the bar against

which returning local police would be judged.

35

Members of the Afghan National Civil Order Police. (German Foreign Ministry photo)
Police Advisor | 37

36 Inspectors General, U.S. Department of State and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), Interagency

Assessment of Afghanistan Police Training and Readiness (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of

State and DOD, November 2006), 11.

37 “Afghan National Security Forces Order of Battle,” Long War Journal,

www.longwarjournal.org/oobafghanistan/index.php, accessed 10 March 2010.

38 As of March 2010, there were a reported 4,900 ANCOP officers. T. Christian Miller, Mark

Hosenball, and Ron Moreau, “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” Newsweek, 29 March 2010,

www.newsweek.com/id/235221, accessed 22 March 2010.

39 Inspector General, DOD, Report on the Assessment of U.S. and Coalition Plans to Train, Equip,

and Field the Afghan National Security Forces (Washington, DC: DOD, 30 September 2009), 128. As

of May 2009, only 2,375 mentors were in Afghanistan—just 39 percent of the requirement set by

CSTC-A.

With most elements of the ANP, it was (and remains) impossible to determine the precise number of personnel at any given time. The ANP lacked a personnel accounting system and, moreover, local police chiefs kept significant numbers of no-show “ghost”

policemen on the payroll.

36 In the case of ANCOP, however, the specialized nature of

the force, its small size, and the relatively lavish amounts of attention paid to it by the

United States and its international partners suggest that the published figure of 557

ANCOP officers (as of June 2007) was probably accurate.

37 Ultimately, the United States

expected to increase the ANCOP force structure to 5,000 by the end of 2008.

38

New Centurions

The police mentoring team (PMT) advised and trained ANCOP’s 1st Brigade, headquartered in Kabul, and mentored ANCOP battalions in other provinces around

Afghanistan. “My mentors went almost everywhere that our ANCOP guys went,” the PMT

commander recalled. With a team that eventually included more than 30 advisors, it was

a rarity in Afghanistan, where most police advisory units have been considerably undermanned.

39 Nevertheless, mentors and other personnel remained in short supply.

“We tried to assign one truck, three U.S. soldiers, and one interpreter to each ANCOP

company, but we never had enough men to do so,” the team leader said.

Like all ANCOP recruits, the men the PMT mentored had been through police basic training and had been vetted by the Afghan Ministry of Interior to screen out criminals and

drug users. By Afghan police standards, the ANCOP officers were impressive, according

to the team leader. Most were senior noncommissioned officers, and 85 to 90 percent
38 | Acknowledging Limits

were literate. “Most could write Dari [the dominant language in the country’s north and

west] and some Pashto [dominant in the south and east],” recalled the PMT leader. As

a national police force, the ANCOP was supposed to reflect the country’s ethnic diversity, but “we seemed to be getting more Tajiks,” he recalled.

In 2007–2008, centers used for ANCOP training were scattered around the capital—

at the Kabul military training center, the ANP academy, and the ANCOP brigade headquarters. The dispersed nature of the training facilities meant that personnel had to be

shuttled by bus between locations. This in turn created security problems. After a suicide bomber blew up one bus, “We changed bus colors,” the team leader said, “and

changed times so they [the insurgents] wouldn’t know it was us.”

The program of instruction focused almost exclusively on preparing the ANCOP for their

public order duties. Training focused on groups of roughly 25 men. “We were not training them to be beat cops,” according

to the team leader. The focus was on

riot and crowd control, SWAT, and

other security missions. The mentors

also instructed ANCOP personnel on

how to establish and man “snap” traffic control points designed to apprehend a particular person or vehicle.

Mentoring also included joint security

patrols with ANCOP in and around

Kabul.

ANCOP officers typically met their

mentors’ expectations. “They did very,

very well,” stated the PMT leader. Particularly notable was the relative lack

of corruption—a significant and enduring problem throughout the ANP.

SWAT training in Kabul, 2007.

(U.S. Department of Defense photo)
Police Advisor | 39

“Sometimes they had their hands out with local merchants,” said the team leader, “but

they were basically not corrupt—they were like the ‘New Centurions.’”

For instance, he recalled an incident where a local businessman was stopped by ANCOP

officers because his car had illegal tinted windows. The businessman was stunned by

the fact that ANCOP officers had not asked him for money—the standard operating procedure for the Afghan police in such circumstances.

All of the units that were mentored faced a very high operational tempo (OPTEMPO) in

the field, and this high tempo limited the training the PMTs could provide. “OPTEMPO

was our biggest enemy,” the team chief recalled. “There was no time to do collective

training, ordnance training, or maintenance training. There were multiple battalion operations all over the country all the time.” The high tempo created an additional problem: with no time for official leave, police who wanted time off “would simply walk away,

and some, but not most, would return,” he said.

But overall, he judged the ANCOP’s performance as good. A key metric of the ANCOP’s

professionalism was the opinion of village leaders during the FDD process, when local

police were away at training centers. “Nine times out of ten, the locals would ask us to

keep ANCOP there. They didn’t want their sons and fathers back,” said the PMT

commander.

Conclusion

ANCOP was established as an elite national force that drew on relatively well-educated

recruits and received longer and more sophisticated training than “conventional” Afghan

police. As part of FDD, ANCOP was meant to fill in for district policemen who were receiving training at regional centers. Additionally, ANCOP was intended to serve as a

model for professional policing by showing village residents how a competent and relatively uncorrupt force could serve the public. Ideally, the memory of ANCOP’s positive

performance would linger on as a yardstick for judging the post-FDD performance of

the ANP.
40 | Acknowledging Limits

40 Author’s interviews with U.S. and UK police mentors, December 2009 and January 2010.

The team commander’s mentoring experience demonstrates that in at least one instance, the ANCOP was able to live up to U.S. and international partner expectations for

the force. Although limited by a very high OPTEMPO, which reduced training time and

contributed to desertions, the ANCOP mentored by the PMT appeared to be a reasonably disciplined and proficient force. While not incorruptible by Western standards,

ANCOP officers were less predatory than typical Afghan police. Moreover, the fact that

most village elders wanted ANCOP to remain confirmed to the commander that the

force was of a far more professional caliber than the ANP it had replaced.

At the same time, it should be noted that ANCOP has not met with universal acclaim.

ANCOP officers have performed professionally in many districts, but U.S. and British police mentors in southern Afghanistan have noted that after a few weeks in their assigned districts, ANCOP personnel would be suborned by local “strongmen” and engage

in the same sorts of corruption and predation that characterized the ANP.

40

Finally, U.S. and Coalition-force mentors have a “stiffening” effect on their Afghan counterparts. That is, the continuing Coalition presence probably helped foster ANCOP’s relative success. It is uncertain whether the police will revert to their old corrupt and

incompetent patterns once their patrons depart.
41 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are drawn from author’s interviews with the U.S. Army

captain mentioned in this vignette, Alexandria, VA, 4 and 16 December 2009 and 29 March 2010,

and subsequent e-mail communications.

42 See, for example, American Forces Press Service, “Coalition Forces Kill Taliban Fighters in

Afghanistan,” 29 December 2008, www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=52498, accessed

April 2010.

A U.S. Army captain mentored Afghan National Police (ANP) units in southeastern

Afghanistan from November 2008 to November 2009.

41 During the first eight months

of his tour, he served in Ghazni Province. Police mentors under his command operated

in five districts and 19 subdistricts. During his last four months in Afghanistan, he served

in Paktika Province, where he mentored a variety of Afghan police units, including the

Afghan Border Police (ABP).

Enhancing Highway Security in Ghazni

In addition to advising and training the ANP, the U.S. Army advisor worked with Afghan

and Coalition forces, including the Poles, to secure a 140-kilometer (87-mile) stretch of

Highway One. This highway, which is the central artery connecting Kabul and Kandahar,

was the scene of frequent kidnappings and roadside bombings by the Taliban, as well

as ordinary criminal activity, including truck hijackings and extortion.

42 The ANP, far from

working to secure the highway, was responsible for some of the crimes on and around

the road.

As the captain was struggling to bolster security, he was approached by a militia leader,

a member of the Hazara ethnic minority, which throughout recent Afghan history had

been marginalized politically and economically by the southern Pashtun tribes and northVignette 5

Police Mentoring

Ghazni and Paktika Provinces,

2008–2009
ern Tajiks.

43 Operation Enduring Freedom and the collapse of the Taliban regime created

new opportunities for the Hazaras, who saw cooperation with the Americans and their

Coalition partners as an avenue out of isolation and oppression.

According to the army advisor, the militia leader was an influential man in southern

Ghazni. He was widely respected for his daring exploits as an anti-Soviet mujahideen during the 1980s and had long been a player in local politics, having served as a subgovernor of two districts. The militia leader’s first wife and son had been killed by the

Taliban, and he was eager to work with the Americans. “He liked me because I was relatively powerful,” the army advisor recalled. “I could call in F-15s.” The quasi-official

status occupied by the militia, while murky by Western standards, was not at all uncommon in the province—or in other regions of Afghanistan, for that matter. While tech42 | Acknowledging Limits

A vehicle search at a checkpoint in Ghazni Province, 2007. (U.S. Army photo)

43 The ethnic composition of Afghanistan is Pashtun, 42%; Tajik, 27%; Hazara, 9%; Uzbek, 9%;

Aimak, 4%; Turkmen, 3%; Baloch, 2%; and other, 4%. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, The World

Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ af.html, accessed 5

April 2010.).
nically not police, the militia fighters acted like law enforcement officers. They wore

ANP uniforms and were paid by the provincial governor to man four checkpoints along

Highway One.

The militiamen established checkpoints at key places identified by the Americans. Locations used by foreign fighters were of particular importance. “I’d tell the leader, ‘At this

intersection where Uzbeks and Saudis are coming through, I want you to build a checkpoint,’” said the Army captain. The militia also served as a “force-multiplier” for the

Afghan army and the ANP. The militiamen were frequently embroiled in firefights with

the Taliban on and around the highway. “We would listen to the Taliban on our police

scanner, and we knew they were fighting the militia,” he recalled.

In exchange, the Americans supplied the militia with fuel. “We didn’t pay them,” the

Army advisor said, “but we filled up their 55-gallon drums with gas so that they could

move their little police force around.” To put the force on a more professional footing,

and to reduce opportunities for corruption, the captain got the governor to institute a

direct-deposit system for paying the militiamen. In addition to concrete benefits, the

militia received important intangible gains from their relationship with U.S. forces. “All

they asked for was fuel, but they also got local prestige,” declared the army advisor.

The Americans concluded that the militia was relatively effective in securing those

stretches of the highway where they operated. It helped keep the Taliban off Highway

One and ensure that commercial trucks got through. Moreover, unlike the ANP, the militia did not prey on the road traffic. “We polled truckers, and they said that militiamen

were not stopping them,” the captain recalled.

However, these gains proved to be temporary. The Americans later turned over responsibility for the artery to the Polish armed forces. By December 2009, Taliban activity and ordinary banditry was endemic along the entire length of the highway. “Under

the Taliban regime,” said a British Ministry of Defence spokesman, “you could put your

daughter on a bus in Kabul, sure in the knowledge that she would get in one piece to

Kandahar. That is not the case at the moment, and we need to change that.”44

Ghazni and Paktika Provinces | 43

44 Aislinn Laing and Ben Farmer, “Travelling by Road in Afghanistan ‘Now More Dangerous than

Under Taliban,’” Daily Telegraph (London), 4 December 2009, www.telegraph.

co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/6718217/Travelling-by-road-in-Afghanistan-nowmore

dangerous-than-under-Taliban.html, accessed 5 April 2010.

A

fghanBorderPoliceinPaktikaProvince,2009.

(U.S.Armyphoto)
The Afghan Border Police

During the final four months of his tour, the U.S. Army advisor served in western Paktika Province. There he oversaw the mentoring of the ANP as well as the ABP. The ABP

mission was to provide security along international borders and at border crossing

points; specifically, it was to prevent people and goods from illegally entering

Afghanistan. It was also responsible for policing the “border security zone” that extended 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the international border into Afghanistan.

45 Finally, the ABP was assigned to collect tariffs and tolls, a potentially significant revenue

source for the chronically cash-strapped Afghan central government.

According to the ANP’s staffing structure (known as the tashkeel), the ABP had an authorized strength of 17,970 men.

46 However, this almost certainly did not reflect the actual number of ABP in service. As with other components of the ANP, it was next to

impossible to determine how many members of the ABP were actually reporting for duty

on any particular day, given the widespread presence of “ghost” policemen on the payroll and the lack of personnel-accounting systems.

Whatever the actual personnel numbers were, the ABP appeared incapable of performing its missions. Like much of the ANP, the border police was riddled with serious

corruption. Taliban fighters and drug traffickers easily transited Afghanistan’s long and

porous borders, and large-scale smuggling was rampant.

47 Border control—a cornerstone of counterinsurgency theory and doctrine—was essentially nonexistent.

Border District Development

Shortly before the Army captain arrived in Afghanistan, the United States launched a

major effort to build the ABP, which had received little American or NATO attention. Mod46 | Acknowledging Limits

45 “Afghan Border Police Undergoes Intensive Reform,” The Enduring Ledger [Kabul, Afghanistan:

CSTC-A], January 2009, 14.

46 The authorized strength was inadequate, in the view of Gen Abdorrahman Rahman, the ABP

commander, who insisted in April 2008 that 50,000 police were required. Trefor Moss, “Afghan

Border Police Commander Warns on Personnel Shortage,” Jane’s Defence Weekly (online edition),

23 April 2008.

47 United Nations, “Report of the Secretary-General on the Situation in Afghanistan and its

Implications for International Peace and Security,” UN Security Council and UN General Assembly,

A/63/372-S/2008/617, 23 September 2008, 7.
eled on the Focused District Development program for the ANP, this pilot program in

eastern and southeastern Afghanistan, known as Border District Development (BDD),

planned to take 52 border police companies to regional centers for vetting, training,

and re-equipping.

The Army advisor’s involvement with the ABP began with the relatively modest task of

ensuring that the border police, after training at the regional center in the town of Gardez

in western Paktiya Province, were returned to their posts in the province’s south on the

Pakistan border. “Every two months, the ABP had a new training cycle, and a new graduating class that had to be moved,” he recalled. There were two border posts in his

area of responsibility, each manned by roughly 40 border police. The plan was to establish an additional three checkpoints and expand the total number of police in the

area to 1,000.

During late 2008, the captain began pondering the fundamental problems associated

with the border and their implications for developing the ABP. Known as the Durand

Line, the border, set down in the nineteenth century to mark the boundary between

Afghanistan and what was then British India, was merely that—a line on the map.

48 The

formal Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier was simply ignored by insurgents, drug traffickers,

and ordinary Pashtuns, who were spread across the border zone. “People thought nothing of moving across the border to visit family,” recalled the captain.

Understanding the nature of this border zone was crucial, in his view. Too many Americans saw the border as controllable—a goal that was unattainable, he concluded. Instead of attempting to seal off and aggressively regulate the frontier—an aspiration that

denied economic, social, and political reality—a priority should be to build a force capable of collecting tariffs for the government. In his judgment, the border-crossing points

should be seen as “revenue-generating enterprises” manned by reasonable, professional police.

Like all units of the ANP, the border police were corrupt. But the advisor believed that

there were different degrees of corruption and that corruption had different conseGhazni and Paktika Provinces | 47

48 The Durand Line has never been recognized by Afghanistan, which has long claimed Pashtun

areas on Pakistan’s side of the demarcation. Frédéric Grare, “Pakistan-Afghanistan Relations in the

Post-9/11 Era,” Carnegie Papers Number 72, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October

2006, 8.
quences. Shaking down the local population, plundering the ABP payroll, and selling weapons to the

Taliban were examples of corruption that were institutionally and operationally destructive, and

therefore unacceptable. On the other hand, selling

gasoline provided by the United States, while hardly

to be encouraged, represented a far lesser form of

corruption—“a survival strategy, really,” in his view.

Although prepared to tolerate relatively minor forms

of graft, the captain believed that the border police

could and should make progress over time. As he

explained,

We might expect them [the police] to work in

all weather, and be fair and honest with everyone. But we need to understand that they will

do things based on village, family, and tribal

loyalties. We should expect for now that a border guard will let his father through without

paying the tariff. But the corruption we accept

today won’t necessarily be acceptable in the

future.

The advisor was committed to the notion that it was

essential to build into the ABP policies and procedures that would reduce possibilities

for corruption and would create positive patterns of behavior that would endure after

the Americans left. For example, many officers were woefully underpaid; they would rob

the local population to generate income. The captain helped ensure that the police

were paid by direct deposit. ABP personnel were notified by their mobile phones that

their pay had been deposited in a bank. The message he hoped to instill within the border police was, “I’m getting paid—now I should do my job right and not demand a portion of the tariff at the border crossing.”

48 | Acknowledging Limits
During his four months of mentoring the ABP, he detected signs of progress. The BDD

program was a step forward in his view. Before the initiative, border police “were just

given a t-shirt and an AK-47 and told to man a post,” he said. “Now, there is a vetted,

trained force, and I think we were starting to get ‘buy-in’ from the ABP.” This training, in

his judgment, gave the ABP a better sense of unit cohesion and a greater ability to survive violent encounters with the Taliban.

During 2009, other U.S. officers noted greater professionalism among the ABP in Paktika Province. According to one press account, American personnel reported that reA border crossing in Kandahar Province. (U.S. Air Force photo)
50 | Acknowledging Limits

49 Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, “Afghan Border Police Make Progress, Slowly,” National Public Radio, 5

March 2009, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101377415, accessed 2 April 2010.

50 Anthony H. Cordesman, Afghan National Security Forces: Shaping the Path to Victory

(Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 27 July 2009), 36.

51 Matthieu Aikins, “The Master of Spin Boldak: Undercover with Afghanistan’s Drug-Trafficking

Border Police,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2009. On page 54 of this article, Abdul Razik, an ABP

lieutenant, announced to a reporter that “I am a smuggler . . . I take cars and things to Pakistan.”

cent graduates of the regional training center “not only look and act more polished, but

are also more confident and motivated to protect their country.”49

Conclusion

The Army captain’s experiences during 2008 and 2009 illustrate three important and

interrelated aspects of mentoring in Afghanistan. First, they show how junior commanders can exercise individual initiative and adapt successfully to complex local conditions. Faced with a persistently ineffectual ANP that was unable to provide security

along the province’s main highway, he looked beyond the official police and turned to

an ethnic Hazara militia that was eager to work with U.S. forces.

Second, the advisor’s tour highlights the often transitory and highly localized nature of

improvements in the Afghan police and in security more generally. Security along the

highway improved, but by the end of the year it had deteriorated again. Among the ABP

in his area of responsibility, there were signs of greater professionalism and effectiveness. But these gains appeared to be local. On the whole, ABP professionalism and effectiveness was minimal, and corruption remained rampant, particularly in those areas

where the police had access to commercial vehicles crossing the Afghan-Pakistan border.

50 Moreover, members of the ABP have reportedly engaged in cross-border smuggling—the very activity they are chartered to control.

51

Finally, these experiences demonstrate the limits that any given mentor could be expected to achieve during his tour. Advisors had to grapple with the problems of police

corruption, incompetence, and poor leadership. These maladies were formidable, but

the mentors could have some reasonable hope that they could be ameliorated. Much

more intractable was the nature of the border itself. Part of the challenge was the sheer

length of the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, which stretches for roughly 2,600 kilometers

(1,600 miles), much of it over extremely rugged and remote terrain. Human geography
Ghazni and Paktika Provinces | 51

52 Carlotta Gall, “Pakistan Accused of Backing Taliban,” New York Times,

www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/world/asia/21iht-web.0121pakistan.FULL.4278465.html?_r=1,

accessed 30 March 2010; and Matt Waldman, “The Sun in the Sky: The Relationship Between

Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan Insurgents,” Crisis States Research Centre, London School of Economics

and Political Science, Discussion Paper no. 18, June 2010.

also contributed to the problem of border control. Families and tribes had straddled the

frontier for centuries and crossed it virtually at will. This reality frustrated any hope of

establishing a strict border-control regime, as the captain concluded. Border security

was rendered impossible by the actions of Afghanistan’s neighbor to the east. For Pakistan, the border was a fiction that could be ignored in the interests of wider political objectives. As part of a wider campaign to influence events inside Afghanistan, Pakistan’s

intelligence services facilitated the movement of Taliban fighters across the frontier into

Afghanistan.

52 Under such conditions, it seems safe to conclude that securing the

border would have required much more than what police mentors could be expected

to provide.
53 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are drawn from the author’s interviews with the mentoring

team commander, Quantico, VA, 22 December 2009, and at Camp Lejeune, NC, 17 February 2010,

and subsequent e-mail communications.

A first lieutenant in a military police (MP) company attached to the 5th Battalion, 10th

Marines, arrived in Afghanistan in April 2009.

53 His 23-man platoon, which replaced a

badly overstretched two-man contingent of British advisors, would spend the remainder

of the year mentoring a group of policemen from Garmsir District in Helmand Province.

His team spent the first two months with the Garmsir police at the regional training center in Spin Boldak District, Kandahar Province, and then returned with them to their

home district to continue mentoring.

Police Shortfalls

Across Afghanistan, the U.S. approach to the Afghan National Police (ANP) stressed

paramilitary rather than law enforcement training. Mentors typically stressed the development of tactical, battlefield skills rather than those used in preventing and investigating crime. This orientation was understandable, given that many mentors came

from conventional infantry units.

As a Marine MP, the lieutenant brought a law enforcement perspective to his mentoring assignment. While acknowledging that the ANP needed skills for surviving violent encounters with the Taliban, he believed that the police also required more conventional

law enforcement abilities that would enable them to protect the district’s civilian

population.

But the ANP was a long way from being able to provide anything approaching what the

West refers to as “community policing.” Widespread illiteracy among ANP officers was

Vignette 6

U.S. Marine Corps Police

Mentoring Team Commander

Garmsir District, 2009
54 | Acknowledging Limits

54 Ann Scott Tyson, “Dearth of Capable Afghan Forces Complicates U.S. Mission in South,”

Washington Post, 25 July 2009, www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/07/24/AR2009072403760.html, accessed 23 October 2009.

a particularly significant hurdle. “Paperwork, evidence, processing—they don’t know

how to do it,” the lieutenant said. “You can’t get a policeman to take a statement if he

can’t read and write.”54

Moreover, the force was plagued by the other usual ills working against police professionalism and effectiveness in Afghanistan: physical disabilities, drug use, poor morale,

and widespread corruption. Rather than providing law and order to the residents of

Garmsir, the ANP in the district served as sources of insecurity.

“We Were Always in Their Faces”

The lieutenant’s approach to the ANP

stressed “hands-on” mentoring. Under the

Focused District Development (FDD) program, police from Garmsir and other districts

were sent as units to regional training centers for an eight-week course, where they

were trained, screened for drug use, and issued new uniforms and weapons. In their absence, members of the paramilitary Afghan

National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) provided

district security.

The Marine platoon commander concluded

early in his tour that it was essential to attend

the course along with the police he was mentoring. He and other members of his platoon

stayed at the regional training center in Spin

Boldak from April through mid-June. “We

went through class with them,” he recollected. “We were able to witness the training

that the police received, and then hold them

up to those standards after they graduated.”

A Marine police mentor conducts a class

on search operations in Garmsir District,

August 2009. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)
Garmsir District | 55

While the ANP was away, the citizens of Garmsir

grew weary of ANCOP’s paramilitary approach,

confirming the platoon commander’s belief that

what the district needed was community-oriented policing. “They needed a sheriff, not riot

control cops,” he stated. So, despite the ANP’s

soiled reputation, district residents welcomed

the return of the police. “They held a welcomehome parade for the ANP,” he recalled.

The Marines’ hands-on approach continued

after the ANP’s return to Garmsir. Rather than

live at the forward operating base, the lieutenant

decided to move his team into the local police

station. “We were always in their faces,” he said.

The team routinely interacted with the ANP at

meals and in chess games, darts, volleyball, and

other diversions.

Such interactions were intended to foster a sense of camaraderie among the police

and between the police and their mentors. To reinforce the instruction provided during

FDD, the Marines also conducted follow-on classes in topics ranging from first aid to

“cordon-and-knock” operations.

Patrolling with the Afghan National Police

Twice-daily patrols were a central part of the mentoring process. “It was important to

show Afghans, not just tell them,” said the platoon commander. Early in the morning,

and again in the evening, three or four Marines and an interpreter would accompany a

group of 10 to 15 Afghan police. “The police would hand out candy and drink tea with

locals,” he noted. “These security patrols were really community policing.”

An Afghan policeman at the regional

training center in Kandahar.

(U.S. Air Force photo)
56 | Acknowledging Limits

Police checkpoints were another focus of the mentors’ attention. Many checkpoints

were solid structures reinforced with sandbags and concertina wire. Typically, police

lived as well as worked at their checkpoints.

In Garmsir, the police were reluctant to move from the relatively safe confines of the district center; living on their own at checkpoints would expose them to Taliban attacks. “We

pressed them to move into checkpoints in outlying villages,” remembered the lieutenant.

“We wanted them to increase their influence in the villages and become the face of the

government.” Through regular visits from the mentors, including overnight stays, the

ANP was persuaded to man the checkpoints.

Still, the police at checkpoints required careful monitoring and supervision. In addition

to engaging in unprofessional behavior, such as napping on duty and taking drugs, the

ANP used the checkpoints as platforms for extracting unofficial “tolls” and robbing vehicles and their passengers. Routine visits from the mentors were meant to deter crime

Marines prepare to patrol with the ANP in Garmsir District, August 2009.

(U.S. Marine Corps photo)
Garmsir District | 57

55 As of January 2009, some 600 civilian police advisors—mostly from DynCorp—were working in

Afghanistan. Kenneth Katzman, “Afghanistan: Post-War Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy,”

RL30588, Congressional Research Service, 16 January 2009, 38.

and dereliction. To ensure that the police were behaving properly, the mentors sometimes also conducted covert surveillance of the checkpoints.

During the summer, the MP platoon was joined by a civilian advisor working for a U.S.

defense contractor. Since 2003, the contractor, under a series of contracts with the

U.S. Department of State, had been responsible for setting up and running regional police training centers, providing logistical support to the Afghan police and a limited

amount of training and mentoring outside the classroom setting.

55 At the regional training centers, Afghan nationals served as instructors but used a curriculum developed by

the company.

Like other U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, the Marines discovered that the company’s field representatives varied widely in terms of their experience, expertise, and

commitment. The first advisor sent by the contractor had to be replaced after he complained that conditions were “too Spartan,” according to the lieutenant. His replacement arrived in August, about halfway through the platoon’s tour.

A number of challenges emerged. The company claimed to have a thorough understanding of the Ministry of the Interior, the Afghan department responsible for equipping,

paying, and supplying the ANP. But in the platoon commander’s view, the contractor

knew little about the Afghan support structure or how to exploit it for the benefit of the

ANP. As a result, the ANP had to eke out whatever supplies and equipment it could. The

mentors struggled to get the contractor to live up to its obligation to maintain the ANP’s

ramshackle fleet of Ford Ranger pickup trucks. “The ANP had to hitch rides from the locals. There was no logistics,” he recalled.

He was also critical of the training that the contractor was responsible for providing at

the regional training center. In his judgment, the company’s program was inappropriate

for the ANP. “It was unrealistic,” the lieutenant proclaimed. “It focused on things like traffic policing and ethics, but it should have stressed community-oriented policing, conflict

resolution, and dealing with the population.” At his urging, the company modified the

program of instruction, with less emphasis on lectures and more on practical policing

demonstrations, such as how to conduct a search.
58 | Acknowledging Limits

56 Tom Coghlan, “Laying Down the Law: U.S. Tries to Make Policemen of the ‘Robbers in Uniform,’”

The Times (London), 21 July 2009, www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/

article6721176.ece, accessed 12 February 2010.

Signs of Progress

Over time, the platoon saw indications that the Garmsir ANP was improving. “They were

paid attention to, given equipment, dressed like policemen and treated like policemen.

So they started to act like policemen,” the lieutenant said.

56 The FDD program was a key

contributor to this growing professionalism, in his view. Attending the two-month course

at the regional training center along with the ANP “set me up for success,” he believes.

In addition to providing training and equipment, the FDD training strengthened bonds

among the ANP, and between the ANP and their mentors. The district chief of police

was willing to work with his American advisors. The chief was an influential man who was

close to the district subgovernor. Because of the Marines’ good relationship

with the district police chief, he could

serve as a guide to the complex politics

of policing in Garmsir.

The police advisors discovered that

there were really two police forces in

the district. In addition to the official

ANP, there was an unofficial, “shadow”

force run by a son of the former chief.

The son considered the police to be a

family business, and he believed that

he had the right to inherit his father’s

post. In an effort to reduce tensions,

the chief allowed the son to run some

police checkpoints. The two men sometimes worked together, but their relationship remained strained.

Over the course of the summer and

into the fall, the platoon detected signs

An Afghan policeman speaks with a village elder

during a security patrol in Garmsir District,

August 2009. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)
Garmsir District | 59

of progress in the Garmsir police. The police chief showed increasing initiative. Instead

of relying on the Marines to plan and schedule patrols, he took over responsibility for

all phases of these missions. The chief also demonstrated a greater willingness to command. For example, he began holding twice-weekly group meetings with all of his checkpoint commanders.

According to the lieutenant, the ANP also showed improvement at the tactical level. In

contrast to the ANP in other districts and provinces, the Garmsir police became

something more than a paramilitary force: they developed elementary law enforcement

skills, such as the ability to gather evidence and investigate crime, albeit in a

rudimentary way.

Most significant from a counterinsurgency perspective was the apparently improving

relationship between the ANP and the population they were meant to serve. Before the

FDD training, local residents would never approach the police with information or complaints, but now they did, the platoon commander said. The stature of the police was

increasing among the public who saw district police as an “emerging tribe” worthy of respect, according to the lieutenant. That said, by Western police standards, the Garmsir

ANP could hardly be considered a model force. “They met the ‘just good enough’

criterion,” the lieutenant concluded.

Conclusion

The emphasis that the platoon placed on building a public service-oriented police force

in Garmsir was in contrast to the approach of many other police mentors in Afghanistan,

who emphasized building ANP combat skills over law-enforcement training.

The public’s greater willingness to share information with the ANP was likely a function

of this new approach to policing as well as the police force’s growing professionalism

and discipline. That said, public support was hardly universal. In July 2009, one resident

told a reporter, “People in Garmsir hate the police . . . [the police] just steal from the

people and disturb the people.”57

57 Ibid.
60 | Acknowledging Limits

58 The population figure is from “Garmsir Returnees Angered at Devastation,” Institute for War and

Peace Reporting, 8 August 2008, http://www.iwpr.net/report-news/garmsir-returneesangereddevastation, accessed 10 April 2010.

59 For Helmand as a whole, there were approximately 3,000 police for a population of roughly 1.4

million. “U.S. Boosts Effort to Train Afghan Police,” National Public Radio, 27 May 2009,

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104607440, accessed 5 March 2010. The

province’s overall police-to-population ratio was better than it was in Garmsir, but still grossly

inadequate by Western policing standards.

The platoon’s “hands-on” approach differed from that of other U.S. military mentors in

Afghanistan. While some police advisors in other districts and provinces lived with the

police, the lieutenant’s decision to accompany the Garmsir ANP through its FDD training was unusual—and, in his judgment, it paid rich dividends in terms of building a relationship among the police and between the ANP and the mentors.

More typical were the Marine’s challenges with the defense contractor responsible for

supplying police advisors and other services. Across Afghanistan, U.S. military mentors

have noted the varying degrees of expertise, experience, and motivation among

defense contractors. Given the shortage of mentors, a lack of capacity within U.S. civilian agencies, and a long-term U.S. government policy that stresses contracting out many

services, it seems inevitable that private companies will continue to play a role in building and supporting Afghanistan’s security forces. As a result, many other

mentoring teams will face the challenge of ensuring that contractors live up to their

responsibilities.

Finally, the lieutenant’s tour in Garmsir highlights other enduring challenges for police

mentors. His mentoring team was at full strength, but elsewhere in Afghanistan police

mentors were in short supply. Moreover, police forces across the country were significantly undermanned. In Garmsir, a mere 80 policemen were expected to serve a population of roughly 100,000 people.

58 To the extent that it helps create police forces that

Afghans want to join, mentoring could spur recruitment.

59 However, a number of critical

factors, such as low pay, are beyond the power of any individual police mentoring team

to change.
60 Quotations in this vignette, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the author’s interviews,

Shrewsbury, UK, 6 February 2010, and subsequent e-mail communications.

61 However, both the Afghan National Civil Order Police and the counternarcotics police were

recruited on a national basis.

A British Army lieutenant colonel arrived in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand

Province, in April 2009.

60 He spent his nine-month tour headquartered in the capital,

where he served simultaneously in two mentoring roles: as the commander of British

police mentors and as an advisor to the province’s chief of police.

Mentoring the Afghan National Police

The lieutenant colonel’s objective was to transform the province’s roughly 2,400 members of the Afghan National Police (ANP) into what he termed “a disciplined body of

men with professional policing skills.” Building such a force would contribute to broader

counterinsurgency goals. In his view, the police functioned as the “primary interface” between the public and the government. He believed that successful counterinsurgency

required capable and credible state institutions, and that “if the police were not credible, the government wasn’t credible.”

Like the police in the country’s other provinces, police in each district of Helmand

Province were recruited locally.

61 Local recruits had a number of advantages, according

to the British advisor. They had considerable knowledge about the people and conditions

in their districts and did not pose the danger of exacerbating ethnic and tribal tensions

the way recruits from outside of the area might. The problem for the mentors was that

the province’s recruitment pool was extremely shallow. Illiteracy, drug abuse, and corruption were rife; leadership skills were lacking; and across the province the ANP force

was plagued with incompetence and unprofessionalism.

Vignette 7

British Police Mentor

Helmand Province, 2009
62 | Acknowledging Limits

62 Policing in Afghanistan was a high-risk occupation. “Between January 2007 and October 2008,

international forces suffered 464 personnel killed in action, the ANA lost 505 personnel, and the

ANP lost 1,215.” DOD, Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan

(Washington, DC: DOD, June 2009), 32.

Until a suitable local talent pool could be

identified and nurtured, the logic of the situation dictated that the police look outside Helmand for individuals with leadership skills.

But this was problematic. Police who were

considered “foreigners” in local eyes could

stir up communal conflict.

Moreover, capable police from outside the region had no desire to serve in Helmand’s dangerous, insurgent-ridden environment. Like

the ANP elsewhere in southern Afghanistan,

the police in Helmand were used in offensive

operations against the Taliban.

62 “Police in

Kabul had no interest in giving up a safe job

and going to Helmand,” the UK mentor

concluded.

The U.S. Marines Arrive

In early July 2009, the 2d Marine Expeditionary Brigade arrived in the province. The appearance of the Marines had a powerful impact on the ANP and their British mentors.

The police, according to the lieutenant colonel, detected a shift in momentum in favor

of the government, and the ANP “realized that the Taliban were not going to regain

power” in Helmand.

Before the Marines arrived, he recalled, “The police were willing to switch sides and

join the Taliban.” Now, for the first time in modern memory, serving in the ANP became

a “viable, long-term choice for the Afghans,” said the police advisor. Similarly, the arrival

of the Marines reinforced his belief that the tide had turned against the Taliban and

the long-term prospects for the ANP were good: “I was convinced that the UK and the

Marines could create a disciplined body of men.”

LtCol John E. McDonough, commanding

officer of 2d Battalion, 2d Marines, speaks

with LtCol Gul Aqa Amiry, the Garmsir

Afghan Border Police commander, after a

shura on 19 November 2009.

(U.S. Marine Corps photo)
63 Ben Glaze, “Anglesey Soldier’s Taxing Question to Brown,” WalesOnline, 30 August 2009,

www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2009/08/30/anglesey-soldier-s-taxing-question-tobrown-91466-24563479/, accessed 5 March 2010.

Training for the police grew more rigorous and systematic over the course of the summer. Previously, Afghan policemen “had simply been given a gun and told to go to a

checkpoint,” the British advisor recalled. The ANP in selected districts, under the Focused District Development program, were now being sent to training facilities, where

they were screened for drug use, re-equipped, and given instruction in basic skills. “Now

they had to meet pass-out requirements, and only at that stage could they go to checkpoints,” he noted.

The Marine presence improved security in the province. Rather than fight the Taliban,

the ANP could now focus on serving the local population. Greater professionalism among

the police was instilling growing confidence in the province’s residents. “The population has proven to be quite content to ring up and pass on information,” the British mentor said.

63 Still, the ANP had not reached Western law enforcement standards and had

Afghan police at the Helmand police training center in Lashkar Gah in January 2010.

(U.S. Air Force photo)
64 | Acknowledging Limits

64 Ibid.

a long way to go. The police, he said, were not yet conducting “what you and I would call

community policing.”64 But, in his view, “conditions were being set for success.”

Taliban Administration

During his tour in Helmand, the lieutenant colonel developed an understanding of the

Taliban’s formidable ability to exercise control over villages and districts in the province.

According to him, the Taliban were made up of three elements: the “hard-core” fighters;

the foreign or “out-of-area” fighters—including Uzbeks and Pakistanis—who supplied

important technical skills, such as those for making improvised explosive devices; and

local insurgents, who made up the vast majority of fighters.

A Tribal shura in Helmand Province in July 2009. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)
Helmand Province | 65

65 According to the British advisor, the Afghan government—unlike the Taliban—was attempting to set

up an education system. “Education was something local communities desperately wanted,” he

said. In his view, education should be highlighted as a “defining benefit” to the population for

supporting the government rather than the insurgents.

In the police advisor’s view, the hard-core fighters and foreign fighters were irreconcilable and had to be defeated with force. Local fighters, on the other hand, could and

should be won over. Many of them, he concluded, were “ten-dollar Taliban” who simply

saw the conflict as a means to survive. “War was a way of life to them,” he concluded.

“They had fighting skills, which were a way to get food.”

But the Taliban did more than fight—they also provided local residents with critical services that the Afghan government was unable to deliver. In particular, the Taliban addressed the security gap experienced by most of the population. “The fundamental

thing an Afghan wants is to get up in the morning knowing he can work his fields, take

his produce to market without being intimidated by the Taliban or the police, and return

home knowing he will find his family safe,” said the British mentor.

Bashran, a district north of Lashkar Gah, offered an example of what the Taliban could

deliver. From their courthouse, the Taliban dispensed informal justice. Tribal elders,

who had traditionally provided justice, had been driven out of the district and replaced

with the Taliban’s own local people. “The Taliban demonstrated the higher level of security they could provide,” the UK advisor recalled. The Taliban also conducted their

own reconstruction and development activities. Bazaars were open, and the economy

was vibrant. “It outpaced anything we were able to do,” he declared. “Shadow government is easy for the Taliban. They didn’t do everything, and any shortfalls could be

blamed on the government.”65

Informal Justice

For the lieutenant colonel, justice administered informally at the village level needed to

be a part of security sector reform in Afghanistan. Customary or traditional justice had

been a feature of local life for centuries. Its effectiveness and legitimacy stemmed from

the fact that it was provided locally by respected figures. The Taliban accepted these traditional, informal means—albeit with their own, handpicked figures in charge.

Reflecting a long history of administering an empire indirectly through tribal and other

elites, the British also recognized the importance of Afghanistan’s traditional justice
66 | Acknowledging Limits

66 Based in Lashkar Gah, the provincial reconstruction team was a component of Task Force

Helmand, a primarily British force that also included a Danish battle group as well as Polish and

Czech contingents.

67 Andrew Legon, “Ineffective, Unprofessional, and Corrupt: The Afghan National Police Challenge,”

Foreign Policy Research Institute, June 2009,

www.fpri.org/enotes/200906.legon.afghannationalpolice.html, accessed 25 April 2010. According

to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the prisoner review shuras “represent an intersection

between the formal and informal justice sectors in that they use a traditional forum (the shura)

while involving the statutory agencies (Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police, National

Directorate of Security), as well as community representatives where elected.” “Written Evidence

Submitted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office: London Conference Update,” 18 February

2010, www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmfaff/398/398we03.htm,

accessed 20 April 2010.

68 For more on the history of village self-defense, see Seth G. Jones, “Community Defense in

Afghanistan,” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 57 (2010).

system. At the same time, they stressed the need to integrate the customary institutions into the country’s formal justice system.

Toward that end, the British-led provincial reconstruction team in Helmand supported

prisoner-review shuras.

66 Established in the districts of Musa Qala, Sangin, and Nad-eAli, these mechanisms were traditional in many respects, but they were also a part of

Afghanistan’s formal justice structure. In the words of one analyst, the prisoner-review

shuras helped “prevent excessive prisoner detention, and ensure[d] the release of prisoners with no evidence against them . . . [They were] also integrated into the formal justice sector, with serious cases transferred to Lashkar Gah and the central rule of law

system.”67 In the British mentor’s view, these shuras reflected Afghan history and culture while acknowledging that “the formal justice system still had to exist, and murderers had to go to prison.”

Village Self-Defense Forces

The British mentor also believed that an American program to create local self-defense

forces had to include provisions for making these forces part of the country’s official security structure. Known as the Community Defense Initiative, the program used U.S.

Special Forces in a small number of areas around the country to help villagers organize to defend themselves against the Taliban.

68
Helmand Province | 67

The lieutenant colonel was skeptical about the program at first. He knew of at least one

case where members of local defense forces were not being paid and were accountable

only to the village elders. “The last thing you needed was a group of armed civilians

running around,” the UK advisor said. “There were tribal disputes daily, and it was very

easy for them to escalate. Without salaries they would have to steal from the very community they were supposed to be protecting.” In one village in Helmand, U.S. commanders were convinced that the village defense force should be given uniforms,

receive a salary, and become a part of the ANP. “They became accountable,” he stated,

adding that becoming part of the country’s formal security structure “gave them

tremendous pride.”

The Provincial Chief of Police

Much of the lieutenant colonel’s tour was occupied with mentoring the provincial chief

Afghan police at a checkpoint with a British advisor in Sangin.

(Photo courtesy of Andre Prudent)
68 | Acknowledging Limits

of police. Like a number of other senior Afghan security officials, the police chief had

been trained by the Russians and had survived decades of war in the province. He had

considerable leadership talent, and he was determined to reform the ANP. “He had

strength of will, and he was capable of delivering in the short term,” the UK advisor recalled. “He understood that his political survival depended on improving the capability

and credibility of the ANP.”

Mentoring the police chief, like mentoring all of the police, required considerable patience as well as an ability to overcome an understandable desire to accomplish as

much as possible during a relatively short tour. Avoiding the “‘fix it, and fix it yesterday’

mentality” was crucial, in the UK advisor’s judgment. A police mentor, he believes, should

focus “not on what I can do, but what I can do for the next guy.”

Effective mentoring also required an understanding of Afghan culture. “Afghanistan is

a warrior society,” he said, “and they want their mentors to look the part.” Toward that

end, he took care to ensure that both his appearance and bearing were always highly

professional. “You are a status symbol, and you can enhance the credibility of the people you mentor,” he said.

He took additional steps that reinforced the police chief’s position and prestige. On one

occasion, the chief “rang up and told me that a checkpoint was under attack, and asked

me what I was going to do about it. I was able to divert an Apache [helicopter] and keep

the checkpoint from being overrun. The police chief got a huge boost of credibility with

his men.”

Success required both empathy and a sensitivity to the human dimension of mentoring.

As he noted: “It was about personal relationships, mutual respect, and not being arrogant. It was really about good manners.” Trust was important, but it had limits. “The Taliban had plants in the ANP, and you had to keep an eye open,” the UK advisor explained.

“Partnership doesn’t mean complete trust, but rather the appearance of complete trust,”

he added.

Successful mentoring also required a willingness and ability to let the Afghans fail—and

learn from the experience, according to the lieutenant colonel. He remembered one in-
Helmand Province | 69

cident when the Ministry of Interior insisted on sending 150 policemen for training in

Ghorak District in Kandahar Province:

We had no way to get them there, no way to validate the training, and the time

line was all wrong. We were opposed, but they went through with it anyway.

Needless to say, it was a complete failure with no training actually taking

place, and they were stuck for three weeks trying to get back. We let them

make the decision, but we made it clear where we stood, and they finally

started to appreciate the level of planning detail required.

In his view, the successful mentors were the ones who realized that “one day the

Afghans would have to stand on their own.”

Conclusion

The British advisor’s tour in Helmand illustrates important dimensions of police mentoring in Afghanistan. His goal was to build a disciplined, professional force, but the

quality of locally recruited personnel was poor. Looking outside the province for higherquality men was also problematic: suitable outsiders were less knowledgeable about

local conditions; their presence could cause communal tensions; and they were unlikely to be willing to serve in Helmand’s violent environment.

Like the ANP in much of Afghanistan, the police force in Helmand was riddled with corruption, incompetence, and drug abuse. Moreover, its loyalty was very much in doubt.

In the view of the lieutenant colonel, the arrival of the U.S. Marines in July 2009 helped

convince the police that the Taliban could not prevail and that being part of the ANP was

a “viable, long-term choice.”

The UK advisor’s experience with the province’s chief of police highlights the significance of mentoring’s intangible aspects. He believed that successful mentoring in

Afghanistan’s “warrior culture” required him to capitalize on his own status as a member of the profession of arms. He used his own professional military bearing and performance to bolster the police chief’s prestige among his men and his colleagues.
70 | Acknowledging Limits

The lieutenant colonel’s tour also gave him insights into the Taliban. He observed the

movement’s program to control populations in the province and noted its ability to “outcompete” the Afghan government in terms of providing local security and development.

Finally, the British advisor’s experience illustrates some of the complexities surrounding efforts by Coalition forces to address the gaps in security and justice created by the

lack of Afghan government capacity. Initiating prisoner-review shuras and building village self-defense forces were two attempts to build on long-standing local mechanisms

to provide critical public services. But in the UK mentor’s view, their contribution to longterm success in counterinsurgency required them to be linked to Afghanistan’s official

justice and security system.
69 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are drawn from the author’s interview, National Harbor,

MD, 18 November 2009.

70 However, during this period, mentoring took place in only eight out of nine provinces. Badakshan,

a low-priority province, was excluded.

Arriving in Mazar-e Sharif, Balkh Province in May 2007, a colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard spent the next 12 months serving as the commander of a regional police

advisory team.

69 An infantry officer who in civilian life worked for a manufacturing company, the colonel had expected to mentor units of the Afghan National Army (ANA). But

shortly before arriving in Afghanistan he was ordered to work with the Afghan National

Police (ANP).

Although relatively peaceful when compared to other parts of the country, his area of

responsibility in northern Afghanistan was vast. With a population of approximately 9 million, it included nine provinces that stretched 1,200 kilometers (747 miles), from Faryab

in the west to Badakshan in the east.

70 The deficiencies of the region’s 11,000 police

were profound: corruption, a lack of public respect and trust, poor leadership, and widespread illiteracy. Moreover, the police at all levels were plagued by a lack of organization, poor logistics, and vast shortages of equipment. The colonel had two primary tasks:

advising the Afghan police chief responsible for the northern region and commanding

police mentoring teams (PMTs) who served at the provincial and district levels. He also

provided a limited amount of mentoring to the Afghan Border Police. “We weren’t resourced for it, but I tried to spend time with the border brigades,” he said.

Mentoring the Regional Police Chief

The guidance the PMT commander received from higher headquarters identified five

Vignette 8

Regional Police Mentoring

Team Commander

Northern Afghanistan, 2007–2008
72 | Acknowledging Limits

functional areas requiring particular attention by mentors at all levels: personnel, training, finance, logistics, and operations. As the mentor to the regional police chief, the

advisor focused on building staff skills and, more broadly, injecting a measure of U.S.-

style military rationality into the administration and organization of the region’s

policing structure.

The regional chief, a two-star Afghan police general, was a promising subject for mentoring, in the advisor’s view: “He was a career police officer, very professional, and literate in Dari.” But the staffing structure in place was highly inefficient by U.S. standards.

For example, three to five people would be responsible for one area of logistics: “one

for weapons and ammo, one for

food, and so on, with all of them

reporting to the chief of police.”

The mentor instituted an American-style staff structure, with

one individual responsible for

operations, one for pay, and one

for logistics.

He also encouraged the regional

chief to assert his authority over

his provincial police commanders. Although the regional chief

was nominally in charge, the

provincial chiefs were appointed

by the Ministry of Interior (MoI)

and, ultimately, the Afghan president, and they treated their provinces as independent fiefdoms. “The nine province

chiefs were supposed to report to him, but they went around him and dealt directly with

the MoI in Kabul,” recalled the colonel.

Some had spent as much as $400,000 to “buy” their positions from the authorities in

Kabul, according to the mentoring team commander. Much of the police leadership at

Police training, Mazar-e Sharif regional training center in

January 2007. (U.S. Army photo)
Northern Afghanistan | 73

the provincial level was rife with corruption. “The Kunduz chief of police was the most

corrupt,” he remembered. This chief controlled a bridge to Tajikistan, and he was able

to extract revenues from the cross-border trade. Members of the Afghan security forces

fought openly for control of the bridge and its revenues. “There were running gun battles, with the ANA sometimes fighting the ANP,” the colonel recalled.

At the advisor’s urging, the regional chief assembled the nine provincial commanders.

“He got them all together and told them he’d go to the MoI and get them what they

needed,” the colonel said. But while the Americans detected some signs of progress,

the regional chief could ultimately do little to reign in individuals who had direct relationships with senior figures in Kabul.

Local Police Mentoring

At the district level, the immediate need according to the mentor was to improve “tactical, day-to-day police operations.” Many police did little more than guard their stations

or man highway checkpoints—typically mud brick structures or shipping containers—

and collect unofficial “tolls.” In some instances, weapons were not even distributed.

“The chief of police kept them [locked up] in a magazine,” he said. “If things went bad,

he could use them to start his own militia.”

Police at the district level were also plagued by shortages of uniforms, blankets, food,

and other materiel and equipment. These scarcities could be attributed largely to pervasive corruption, but the colonel thought that the lack of organization, procedures,

and discipline also played a part. He related an incident in fall 2007, when mentors

were helping the police in one province prepare for winter:

We helped them put together a request to the MoI for warm clothes. They

were shipped in multiple Connex [shipping] containers down to provincial

headquarters. We worked with headquarters to distribute them to 11 or 12

districts. But when the containers arrived in a district, all of the police showed

up at the same time and there was a mad scramble around the containers.

There were brawls over the clothes and blankets.
74 | Acknowledging Limits

71 For more on medical civic action, see Frank J. Newton, “Medical Civic Action Programs for the 21st

Century: The Application of Military Medicine in Civil-Military Operations,” www.apmmc.org/2010-

presentations/Thursday/Breakout4_Java/Newton.pdf, accessed 5 December 2010.

The PMTs under the colonel’s command were considerably understrength. “They were

supposed to have 16 men, but they usually only had 9 or 10,” he said. In addition to officers and senior noncommissioned officers, the teams included personnel from a U.S.

contractor that provided trainers (typically retired law enforcement officers) for police advisory missions.

The quality of the contract advisors varied, according to the PMT commander: “Some

were very experienced, with 25 years as sheriffs, but many only had two or three years

of law enforcement experience.” The nature of their experience also varied. “You could

have a ‘good old boy’ from a small town who had been writing tickets for barking dogs,”

he recollected.

Under the Focused District Development program, police were sent from their districts

for eight weeks of instruction at regional training centers in Kunduz and Mazar-e Sharif.

After their return to their home villages, they were to be mentored by PMTs.

Field operations, which were part of the mentoring effort, proved to be a challenge for

the ANP. Working with the U.S. and NATO forces, the ANA would set up an outer security cordon around a village. A police commander would then meet with town notables

in order to ask permission to search houses for weapons caches. As part of the operation, Afghan and Coalition personnel would perform “medical civic action”—that is, establish temporary clinics and provide local communities with basic treatment in an effort

to build popular support for the Afghan government.

71

After a few days, the military forces would leave, and the ANP would remain in the village. The problem was that the police lacked the resources to stay for extended periods.

“The ANP isn’t expeditionary,” the police mentor said. “They didn’t have the food, bedding, or fuel. They just couldn’t sustain themselves.”

International Partners and the Afghan Police

The U.S. Army was not the only force mentoring police in northern Afghanistan. A variety of European countries and organizations carried out separate but overlapping police training activities.
Northern Afghanistan | 75

Police training teams from Coalition partner countries were assigned to their respective

provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs).

72 These teams trained local Afghan police in

criminal investigation, traffic control, administration, and other law enforcement skills.

The European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan (EUPOL)

73 focused on building police

institutions at the provincial and regional levels. EUPOL advisors worked at provincial police headquarters, at the MoI in Kabul, and as members of their national PRTs. A separate German Police Project Team

supplied equipment; built infrastructure; and trained the Afghan

National Civil Order Police, the

ANP’s specialized riot-control

force.

This complex array of international

police advisors created challenges

for the advisor. “I probably spent

more time working with the Coalition than with the ANP,” the

colonel recalled. With PRTs,

EUPOL, and the Germans pursuing

different and sometimes competing agendas, he attempted to synchronize the multinational effort.

“I’d meet once a week with the

German provost marshals,” he

said. Some issues involved the

lack of resources—the Swedish

PRT, for example, was chronically

underfunded, and so had difficulty

carrying out effective mentoring.

A U.S. Army mentor and an Afghan police officer examine

an improvised explosive device during an operation in

Faryab Province, November 2007.

(U.S. Navy photo)

72 The PRTs were under the command of the ISAF, the NATO-led force established by the UN Security

Council in December 2001.

73 For more on EUPOL, see “EUPOL Afghanistan: European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan,”

www.eupol-afg.eu/, accessed 6 December 2010.
76 | Acknowledging Limits

74 As noted in a UK parliamentary report, “The U.S. and NATO’s prime concern was rapidly to build

an anti-insurgency force where numbers and speed were important, using a basic six-week NTM-A

[NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan] training course (which mainly covered the use of firearms).

EUPOL on the other hand aimed to form a force, which would undertake a traditional policing role

over the longer term.” House of Lords, European Union Committee, The EU’s Afghan Police Training

Mission, 8th Report of Session 2010–11 (London: The Stationery Office Limited, 16 February

2011), 23.

The more fundamental issue was one of policing philosophy. These different views were

irreconcilable. In the colonel’s judgment, the ANP needed paramilitary rather than law

enforcement training. “Afghanistan needed a force that could provide security,” he remarked. “It was like the Wild West in the 1860s, and the police needed combat skills

to survive.”

The Europeans, however, stressed the need to build forces for civilian policing rather

than counterinsurgency missions.

74 The Finnish/Swedish PRT in Mazar-e Sharif “trained

the ANP in CSI [crime scene investigation] and chain of custody,” the PMT commander

recalled. The Norwegian PRT in Faryab Province had a more appropriate approach, he

said, “but they didn’t understand why the police needed machine guns and RPGs

[rocket-propelled grenades].”

A European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan officer mentors the Afghan National Police.

(EUPOL photo)
Northern Afghanistan | 77

Ultimately, the disagreement between the advisor and the other international mentors

was a product of the failure of the United States and the Coalition forces to make a firstorder decision about the ANP’s roles, missions, and functions—specifically, whether the

force should support counterinsurgency operations or serve as a conventional law enforcement service.

Police Mentoring Lessons

The colonel arrived in Afghanistan after two months of mentor training at Fort Riley,

Kansas. That instruction focused on practical skills, such as convoy operations, as well

as Afghan cultural awareness and a smattering of language classes. But he said he received no training in how to actually mentor Afghans. “There was nothing on how to

mentor,” he recalled.

Acquiring mentoring skills required on-the-job training. Successful mentoring, in his

judgment, had to be built on a foundation of personal relationships. “You can be a highly

proficient officer, but if you can’t develop relationships, the Afghans tune you out,” he

noted. One of the most effective PMT members was a first lieutenant who served as a

firefighter in civilian life: “He was very engaging, and he developed great relationships

with senior officers,” recollected the colonel.

Negotiation, compromise, and a willingness to commit vast amounts of time to nurturing the Afghan personnel were essential, in his view. It took at least three or four long

visits with a counterpart before a mentor could begin to build a relationship. “On the first

visit you have to spend a few hours talking about things in general,” according to the

commander. “You have to let them talk. If you let them talk, they will eventually come

around and recognize the right thing to do.” After a relationship was established, it was

possible to give advice more explicitly. He believed that the ability to provide guidance—

not just impart technical skills—was the ultimate measure of effective mentoring.

Conclusion

The colonel’s tour in northern Afghanistan highlights the complexities of the environment

in which police mentors operated. His predeployment training did little to help him un-
78 | Acknowledging Limits

75 Robert M. Perito, “Afghanistan’s Police: The Weak Link in Security Sector Reform,” U.S. Institute of

Peace, Special Report 227, August 2009, 11.

derstand the demands he would face. By Western military standards, command and

control arrangements were irrational and inefficient. The regional chief of police exercised only nominal control over his provincial subordinates, who retained independent

relationships with the MoI in Kabul—the true center of power.

Corruption among senior ANP officials in some provinces reached truly industrial proportions. Police chiefs “bought” their positions from senior officials in the capital, and

they used their positions to further criminal enterprises.

The ANP’s logistical and materiel shortfalls were daunting. At the most fundamental

level, the ANP lacked the organization and structure to keep its officers fed, clothed, and

equipped. After joint operations in remote areas with U.S., NATO, and Afghan army

forces, the ANP was expected to remain behind and provide police projection—a goal

thwarted by the lack of the ANP’s “expeditionary” capability.

Adding to the complexity was the presence of an array of police mentors drawn from

Coalition partners and multinational bodies, such as the European Union. Synchronizing the efforts of actors who had overlapping agendas proved to be a considerable challenge. Some of these mentors, such as those in the Swedish PRT, were lacking in

resources and thus limited in their ability to contribute to the broader police training effort in the region.

Nevertheless, the most fundamental obstacle was a difference in policing philosophies.

Although the northern region was among Afghanistan’s safest areas, the PMT commander maintained that mentoring should stress paramilitary “survival” skills. European mentors, on the other hand, insisted on the primacy of improving the ANP’s

policing skills, including criminal investigation, traffic control, and administration.

As one leading authority on the Afghan police has concluded, the Europeans typically

“stressed the importance of community policing and taught civilian police skills, but

they also reflected differing national policing philosophies and practices, adding another level of confusion to an already bifurcated program.”75
Northern Afghanistan | 79

Ultimately, the difference in policing philosophies stemmed from the failure of the United

States and the Coalition forces to make a first-order decision about whether the ANP’s

role was to support counterinsurgency operations or to serve as a conventional law-enforcement service.
76 Quotations used in this vignette are drawn from the author’s interview with the mentoring team

commander, Camp Lejeune, NC, 17 February 2010, and subsequent e-mail communications.

A U.S. Marine staff sergeant serving in a military police (MP) company, 2d Marine Division, arrived in Nawa-I-Barakzayi District, Helmand Province, in May 2009.

76 During his

seven-month tour, he led a police mentoring team (PMT). During that time, he advised

groups of Afghan National Police (ANP) officers, as well as the district’s chief of police.

The District’s Police

The sergeant arrived in Afghanistan expecting to perform conventional MP roles and

missions in a combat environment—such as main supply route clearance and convoy security. Instead, he was attached to the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, and in June was sent

as part of a four-man advance party to Nawa to prepare for the arrival of the main body

of the PMT.

The 23-man team began its work with the ANP in July. Police deficiencies in the district

were considerable. Few residents volunteered for the ANP. Village elders, under pressure from district and provincial officials, offered up recruits, but these men were typically drawn from the bottom strata of village life. The vast majority of the district’s police

were uneducated, malnutrition was widespread, and some policemen “were physically

and mentally challenged,” according to the sergeant.

Lawlessness among the police was rampant. “We had reports on the ANP—drugs, illegal taxation, and corruption,” the PMT leader recalled. “Eighty percent of the police

were high on drugs, and 50 percent of this drug use involved opiates,” he said. The ANP

also routinely “shook down” Afghan civilians, he added, “and if they didn’t have the

money, the police would kidnap family members for ransom.”

Vignette 9

U.S. Marine Corps Police Mentoring

Team Commander

Nawa-I-Barakzayi District, 2009
77 In their absence, the Afghan National Civil Order Police provided district security. The course was

originally eight weeks long, but was subsequently shortened to six weeks in order to speed up the

FDD process.

“Spinning Them Up”

The immediate challenge was to prepare Nawa’s police for the Focused District Development (FDD) program. Under FDD, an entire district’s force was sent through a sixweek course at a regional training center (RTC), where they were vetted, trained, given

new uniforms and identification cards, and then returned to their home district, where

they received follow-on mentoring.

77

Before the police were sent to the RTC, American personnel screened them for drug use.

Marijuana was tolerated, but any evidence of opiate use was grounds for exclusion from

the training course. Moreover, the PMT encouraged the Afghans to fire any ANP member who tested positive for opiates. “We couldn’t fire them, but we did pressure the

Afghans to get rid of them,” remarked the sergeant.

Dried poppy in Nawa-l-Barakzayl District (U.S. Marine Corps photo)
Nawa-I-Barakzayi District | 83

For the remainder of the summer, the team focused on improving the ANP’s skills—

“spinning them up technically and tactically,” in his words. Progress was slow. “Everything was so basic,” he said. Lectures and formal classes were out of the question as

the Afghans found it difficult to pay attention for extended periods of time. Instead, the

Marines had to “schedule fun,” he recalled. “We did things like room clearing—the

Afghans weren’t proficient, but it would hold their attention.”

Mentoring by Example

The PMT also sought to improve the moral caliber of Nawa’s police. They “had to be

taught how to be decent human beings first—we couldn’t just teach a bunch of thugs better skills,” noted the sergeant. Building relationships with the Afghans was a critical

step. Showing an interest in their life stories and their families, and understanding police officers on a personal level “helped us gain influence,” he recalled.

Team members attempted to teach by example. Professionalism, respect, and discipline among the Marines, the PMT commander thought, would help improve the outlook

and performance of the ANP. The PMT worked to instill in the Afghans the notion that

policing was a worthy cause and that “there was honor in protecting someone.”

The sergeant stressed the need for firmness in dealing with the Afghans. While showing that they cared about ANP officers on a personal level, the trainers also expected the

police to live up to standards. “We wouldn’t accept excuses like ‘my foot hurts,’” he recalled. “At first we were worried about offending them, but then we learned that if you’re

soft, they won’t respond.”

Training at the Regional Training Center

In October, Nawa District’s police force was sent off to the RTC in Kandahar. Members

of the team accompanied the ANP throughout the six-week course. Going with the Nawa

police allowed the Marines to judge the caliber of the training that the police received

at the training center. PMT members also mentored the Afghan personnel who provided

the instruction. “We were there as quality control for the Afghan instructors,” the team

leader said.
Training at the RTC stressed combat and survival skills, including mounted patrols,

movement to contact, fire and maneuver, and improvised explosive device (IED) awareness. In the sergeant’s judgment, the training’s heavily military orientation was essential. In his view, the first priority had to be turning the Nawa ANP into a disciplined

force—and that required military training. “They had no focus on discipline,” he said.

“They needed to be stripped of civilian habits and built up as professionals.” Training

in police-specific skills could come later, he said.

The team accompanied 172 Nawa policemen to the RTC. A handful deserted while on

the course, and a number left because of medical problems. A total of 160 passed the

program and returned to their district.

A U.S. Army mentor oversees Afghan policemen at the Kandahar regional training center.

(U.S. Air Force photo)
Nawa-I-Barakzayi District | 85

78 See vignette 7 for more on the provincial police chief.

The six-week course in Kandahar had a positive effect on the Nawa police. They returned to the district

with a new sense of pride. “They were more confident,” the PMT commander recalled. With new uniforms and new equipment, including body armor,

the policemen “were walking tall.” But this progress

was limited. In such skills as room clearing and

movement to contact, the ANP showed no improvement. “Post-RTC, they were no better tactically,” he concluded.

Reports from district residents suggested that police corruption also declined after the FDD training.

But in the PMT commander’s view, this was a result

of the Marines’ watchful presence in the district

rather than any fundamental improvement in the

ANP’s ethics.

Mentoring the District Chief of Police

In addition to training and advising the Nawa ANP,

the PMT leader also mentored the district’s chief of

police. “I spent every other day with him,” the sergeant recalled. The district chief was

a poor leader in the sergeant’s judgment: “He didn’t care about training or about anyone other than himself and his inner circle. He never asked for blankets or pots and pans

for his men.” Moreover, the district chief had a difficult relationship with the province’s

widely respected chief of police.

78

Like the Marine advisor, the provincial police chief was unhappy with the district police

chief’s performance. According to the sergeant, the district chief “had been surrounded

by the Taliban for 14 months,” and it was widely believed that during that time he had

“made a deal” with the insurgents. He had also alienated the district’s population, who

considered him “uncooperative,” according to the Marine mentor.
86 | Acknowledging Limits

In August 2009, the provincial police chief sent a group of 50

Afghan policemen from Lashkar

Gah, the provincial capital, to

Nawa, ostensibly to provide security for upcoming presidential

elections. The sergeant suspected that the real reason they

were sent was to improve the

public’s perception of the ANP.

The Nawa District police chief

had neglected his own men, and

he had also ignored the security

concerns of district residents. “It

was a ‘hearts and minds’ effort,”

said the Marine.

The Lashkar Gah police remained after the election, and their continued presence was

a source of considerable irritation to the district police chief, who saw them as a challenge to his authority. “He wanted them gone,” recollected the sergeant, “and we told

him he would have to take it up with the provincial chief of police.”

Conclusion

The sergeant’s tour as a PMT leader in Nawa District highlights some of the enduring

challenges of police mentoring in Afghanistan. The district chief of police, who was more

interested in maintaining his own position than in providing effective leadership for the

men under his command, proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for his American advisor. Although mentors could attempt to influence the Afghans, they had no authority

to remove ineffective or corrupt policemen.

By some measures, the U.S. Marine mentors made progress with the ANP’s rank and

file. During the run-up to FDD training, drug tests led to a decline in opiate use. Almost

A U.S. Marine meets with local notables in Nawa District.

(U.S. Marine Corps photo)
Nawa-I-Barakzayi District | 87

all of the district’s police passed the course at the RTC in Kandahar. The police returned

to Nawa with new uniforms, new equipment, and a new sense of pride, and ANP

corruption appeared to drop.

Still, other indicators were less positive. Although they developed a new esprit de corps,

the Nawa police showed no improvement in their tactical skills. In the sergeant’s view,

reduced police corruption was the result of the presence of vigilant Marines rather than

a fundamental change in police morality.

The PMT adopted an approach that stressed mentoring by example. Professionalism and

discipline on the part of the Marine mentors was intended to shape the behavior and

outlook of the Nawa police. In the sergeant’s opinion, the Marines did have a positive,

“stiffening” effect on the ANP. How long this effect would persist, however, remained

uncertain.
79 Quotations used in this vignette are drawn from the author’s interviews, Camp Lejeune, NC, 17

February 2010, and subsequent e-mail communications.

Vignette 10

U.S. Marine Corps Police Mentor

Now Zad District, 2009

A gunnery sergeant serving with a military police (MP) company, 2d Marine Division, arrived in Now Zad District, Helmand Province, in August 2009.

79 As a member of a PMT,

he trained members of the district’s Afghan National Police (ANP).

“Welfare Cases”

Some of the Afghan police had been trained by British mentors. They had uniforms,

and 10 of them had been through the Focused District Development, which vetted, retrained, reequipped, and mentored district police forces. But the 36 men that the sergeant was to mentor required substantial additional training.

“We had only a handful of guys who wanted to be legitimate police,” he recalled. Conditions for ANP officers were poor. There were a lot of “welfare cases,” he said. “They

weren’t getting their basic needs met—food, warm clothing, vehicles.” The district chief

of police did nothing to try to meet these shortfalls. Driven out by the Taliban in 2007,

the chief was “more concerned about his Land Rovers and getting a gift” now that he

was back, the Marine recalled.

Things Start to Get Hot

The team set up a training schedule for the ANP. For two weeks, the focus was on developing law enforcement skills, including checkpoint operations and vehicle and personnel searches. But then “things started to get hot again” when Taliban snipers began

operating in Now Zad, remembered the Marine advisor.

In addition to mentoring, the PMT had to serve as a quick-reaction force (QRF). “We

were called into action to assist the infantry who were pinned down by the enemy sniper

U

.S.MarinesinNowZadDistrictinApril2009.

(U.S.MarineCorpsphoto)
92 | Acknowledging Limits

teams,” he explained. “I had military working dogs that I used to track the enemy snipers

to their positions and take them out.” The team also provided security during the evacuation of civilian casualties and during joint Afghan National Army–Marine patrols. Continuing threats posed by the Taliban illustrated for the police mentor the importance of

previous combat experience. “You needed to go to survival mode quickly,” he said.

Police-Oriented Training

During the fall, security had improved to the point where the team could devote more

attention to police-oriented training. “We tried to go beyond just having them go out and

arrest people,” the Marine advisor said. “The focus went from being aggressive to starting to collect names and intelligence on local bad guys.” The PMT also attempted to

foster relationships between the district police and village elders—a version of Western-style community policing in which law enforcement personnel worked with local residents to solve problems. “We had the ANP attend shuras and play mediator in things

like land disputes,” the Marine mentor recalled.

But overall, progress was slow. As in many other districts across Afghanistan, most of

the ANP in Now Zad were illiterate, and a number of policemen were as young as 14

years old. A lack of formal education meant that Now Zad policemen generally lacked

the discipline and persistence to absorb the PMT’s mentoring. “They had a 10- to 15-

minute attention span,” the sergeant said. “We had to keep things very visual and do

a lot of hands-on training.”

The ANP’s personnel system presented the mentors with other difficulties. Provincial police headquarters in Lashkar Gah was supposed to generate an ANP roster for the district but never did. As a result, it was impossible for the team to determine who was

officially a policeman and who had been vetted by the Afghan authorities. Provincial

headquarters also failed to provide a police recruiter, but according to the sergeant, no

recruiter was willing to venture into the district.

Motivating the Now Zad police proved to be a considerable challenge. “They didn’t want

to run point on patrol,” he recollected. “We had to use psychology on them.” For exam-
Now Zad District | 93

ple, the PMT appealed to the Afghans’ self-image as a culture of warriors: “I’d say to

them, ‘We hear back in the States that you’re fierce warriors, but I’m not seeing it.’” The

PMT pressed the police to take responsibility for planning and conducting their own operations, but with limited success. “We didn’t go outside the wire without the ANP,” the

Marine said. “We pushed them to plan cordon-and-knock operations and raids. We’d tell

them, ‘You have information, this is your country, you’re the police. What are you going

to do about it?’”

A Question of Trust

In the sergeant’s view, two other factors limited the ability of the mentors to make

progress with the ANP. The first was the inability of the Marines to “get past” the differences they had with the Afghans. The problem was particularly acute with respect to

rampant police corruption and criminality, which the ANP considered a normal part of

being a police officer. The PMT found it hard to develop a sense of respect for men who

engaged in illicit behavior to the degree the Now Zad ANP did.

U.S. Marines and an Afghan National Police officer on patrol in the Now Zad bazaar.

(U.S. Marine Corps photo)
94 | Acknowledging Limits

The second factor was a lack of trust. Team members often found themselves secondguessing the Afghans and their motivations. In the case of the ANP’s mediation of land

disputes, for example, the police seemed to be acting in a positive way, but the Marine

advisor often found himself wondering what the real agenda was behind their actions.

“With the Afghans, who knows?” he wondered. He was also concerned about the ANP’s

loyalty. “How much do you really want to train them?” he asked. “After all, they can

switch sides and join the Taliban.”

Conclusion

The sergeant’s experience in Now Zad highlights some of the major challenges that police mentors faced in many parts of Afghanistan. The security situation in Now Zad required the team to function as a QRF in addition to performing their mentoring duties.

In his view, previous combat experience was invaluable in a mentoring environment

that could quickly “get hot.”

The police force was riddled with corruption, incompetence, and criminality. At the senior level, the district chief of police was unwilling or unable to improve the conditions of

the men serving under his command. At the rank-and-file level, illiteracy and a lack of

discipline made mentoring difficult.

Motivating the district police posed another serious challenge. The team prodded them

to take responsibility for planning and conducting their operations and appealed to their

sense of themselves as Afghan “warriors” to carry out their missions, but with limited

effect.

Finally, the sergeant’s tour with the Now Zad PMT exemplifies the importance of trust

in effective police mentoring. The mentoring team found it impossible to look beyond the

corruption and criminality that plagued the force. Widespread illicit behavior on the part

of the police led the Marines to call into question the motivation of the men they were

mentoring. The team also questioned the loyalty of the Now Zad police. Under such circumstances, it was impossible to create the bonds of trust and respect necessary for

effective mentoring.
As illustrated in the preceding vignettes, the capabilities, performance, and leadership

of the Afghan National Police (ANP)—like other Afghan institutions—differed from district to district, province to province, and region to region. In the view of a British police

advisor in Lashkar Gah, the ANP showed signs of a growing commitment to serving and

protecting the public. Specialized police units such as the Afghan National Civil Order

Police (recruited on a national basis and provided with intensive and sustained advice,

training, and support) displayed considerable professionalism and prowess. In many

districts, however, the local police remained hobbled by drug addiction, endemic corruption, and poor leadership.

Senior Afghan police commanders also varied widely in terms of their commitment to

protecting local communities and in their ability and motivation to provide effective leadership to the men under their command. In Helmand, for example, the provincial chief

of police demonstrated to his UK mentor impressive leadership skills and a commitment to police reform. In Kunduz Province, however, the provincial police chief, who had

spent $400,000 to acquire his post, used his position to prey on lucrative cross-border

commercial traffic.

The experiences of American and British mentors also differed considerably. To some

degree this was a function of the different backgrounds, perspectives, and attitudes

U.S. and UK personnel brought to their missions. The availability of resources, the local

conditions, and the caliber of the Afghans who received training and advice also played

a part in shaping advisors’ perceptions about the relative effectiveness of police

mentoring.

Some mentors, such as the U.S. Marine police mentoring team (PMT) commander who

served in Nawa-I-Barakzayi District, concluded that the presence of the Marines had a

positive, “stiffening” effect on the Afghan police. However, police mentors in other disConclusion
96 | Acknowledging Limits

80 “NATO and Afghanistan Launch Transition and Embark on a Long-Term Partnership,” NATO, 20

November 2010, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/news_68728.htm, accessed 15 December

2010.

81 DOD, Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan (Washington: DOD,

November 2010), 9

82 According to a nationwide survey conducted jointly by the United Nations and the Afghan

government, “73 percent of the Afghans polled said they have respect for the police and 71 percent

confidence in its abilities.” However, the same survey revealed that “in regions where police

presence has been replaced by military operations, particularly in the southern areas such as

Helmand, Afghans’ confidence has fallen to 48 percent—down 19 points from a year ago.” United

Nations Advisory Mission in Afghanistan, “Majority of Afghans Positive About Local Police, Survey

Shows,” 3 February 2011,

http://unama.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?tabid=1741&ctl=Details&mid=1882&ItemID=12228,

accessed 2 March 2011.

tricts had distinctly different experiences. A Marine PMT commander in Now Zad experienced intense frustration with ANP corruption and incompetence and found it impossible to forge effective working relationships with the Afghans.

2014 and Beyond

The themes highlighted in this study are likely to resonate in the years ahead as Afghans

take on greater responsibility for their own security. This transition process is expected

to unfold district by district and expand gradually across the country, with the army and

police of the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan assuming the lead role

for security by the end of 2014. But this will not mean the end of the alliance’s involvement in Afghan security. A “long-term partnership between NATO and Afghanistan

. . . will endure beyond our combat mission,” according to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

80 This will almost certainly include advising, training, and equipping the ANP and other Afghan security forces.

Many of the challenges identified in this study are likely to persist during the transition

period. NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan continues to face significant shortages of police mentors and trainers. The ANP is expanding, but the quality of the force—and in

particular, its leadership—remains less than satisfactory, according to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

81 And while the Afghan population as a whole expresses considerable confidence in the police, public support for the ANP in contested provinces like

Helmand continues to drop.

82
Conclusion | 97

83 James Gibney, “Masters of Peace,” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2011, 98.

84 Thom Shanker, “Warning Against Wars Like Iraq and Afghanistan,” New York Times, 25 February

2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/world/26gates.html, accessed 26 February 2011.

85 Ibid.

What this suggests is that mentors must

be prepared for the kinds of conditions

and operating environments discussed

in this report. Although the ANP may

make significant gains during the “Afghanization” of counterinsurgency and stability operations, it seems likely that

inadequate leadership, illiteracy, and ill

discipline will remain attributes of the

police. Learning to manage our expectations for what the Afghans can reasonably achieve should be a key

component of our approach to the

ANP—both as the transition unfolds and

after 2014.

Finally, the lessons identified in this

study have utility beyond Afghanistan.

Afghanistan (and Iraq) may have what

one scholar terms a “strong inoculative

effect on future interventions,”83 and according to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M.

Gates, “[t]he odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq—invading, pacifying, and

administering a large third-world country—may be low.”84 Acting early to prevent what

Gates terms “festering problems” from spinning out of control will obviate the need for

large-scale military intervention later, in his view.

85 Building the capacity of local

police—and, in some circumstances, the capacity of irregular, tribal, and informal policing structures—has an obvious role to play in a preventative approach to violent subnational conflict.

Afghan National Police and village guard at

a checkpoint in Garmsir District, 2011.

(Photo courtesy of Patricio Asfura-Heim, CNA)
98 | Acknowledging Limits

86 For more on the lack of civilian police assistance capacity in the U.S. government, see Walter C.

Ladwig III, “Training Foreign Police: A Missing Aspect of U.S. Security Assistance to

Counterinsurgency,” Comparative Strategy 26 (2007), 285–86.

87 Dennis E. Keller, U.S. Military Forces and Police Assistance in Stability Operations: The LeastWorst Option, PKSOI Paper (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, August

2010), xiii.

Ideally, U.S. civilian agencies rather than the U.S. military should organize, train, equip,

and advise law-enforcement institutions abroad. Since the mid-1970s, however, civilian

departments have lacked both the capacity and, in many cases, the legal authority to

assist foreign police forces. There are exceptions. The Departments of State, Treasury,

and Justice perform specialized law enforcement training overseas, typically through

contract personnel. But during and after violent conflicts over the past two decades, in

countries ranging from Panama to Iraq to Afghanistan, U.S. armed forces (operating

under legislative waivers) have been largely responsible for rebuilding local

police institutions.

Given the potential demand for local police as an instrument to preempt conflict and the

lack of standing international police assistance capabilities within U.S. civilian agencies—a condition that appears unlikely to change anytime soon—it seems probable that

the American military will again be called upon to support foreign police institutions.

86

As in Afghanistan, those responsible for mentoring the police in other conflict zones will

almost certainly encounter austere operating environments, official corruption and other

malfeasance, and a shortage of human capital. In countries throughout the developing

world, the police are typically impoverished and neglected relative to the armed forces.

Advisors must be alert to the institutional, political, and even social constraints and limitations faced by the police they are called upon to mentor.

Police mentors must also recognize the inherent and fundamental contradiction between paramilitary forms of policing (with its heavy emphasis on weapons proficiency,

vehicle checkpoints, and what one analyst terms other “higher end stability policing

tasks such as riot control”) 87 and what has been called “community,” “democratic,” or

“core” policing. Ultimately, of course, resolving this contradiction—that is, deciding

whether the police should be developed as a “force” or as a “service”—is the responsibility of policymakers rather than police mentors on the ground.
MARINE CORPS

U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

The role of the police is an important

but underexamined aspect of contemporary counterinsurgency and stability operations. Academic

and policy specialists have studied the role of police in post-conflict environments but have left

largely open the question of how police should be

organized, trained, and equipped for counterinsurgency campaigns.

Because of the lack of attention to police in existing

counterinsurgency research, both academic literature and U.S. military doctrine have even further

neglected the subject of mentoring—that is, advising

and training—foreign police forces, which has left

troops preparing to deploy to Afghanistan for the police mentoring mission with few sources of information and analysis available to them.

This book addresses this gap by examining operations involving American and British police advisors in Afghanistan during the 2007–2009 period. The experiences of these mentors highlight

the enduring challenges of building local police and paramilitary forces in dynamic and unstable

environments. The themes highlighted in this study are likely to resonate in the years ahead as

Afghans assume greater responsibility for their own security.

The ideas explored in this book will also have relevance beyond the context of Afghanistan. Building the capacity of local police—and, in some circumstances, the capacity of irregular, tribal, and

informal policing structures—has an obvious role to play in a preventative approach to violent subnational conflict. As in Afghanistan, those responsible for mentoring the police in other conflict

zones will almost certainly encounter austere operating environments, official corruption and other

malfeasance, and a shortage of human capital. In countries throughout the developing world, the

police are typically impoverished and neglected relative to the armed forces. Advisors must be

alert to the institutional, political, and even social constraints faced by the police they are called

upon to mentor.

William Rosenau is a senior analyst in the Stability and Development Program, CNA Strategic Studies, Alexandria, VA, and an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program, Walsh School of 

Foreign Service, Georgetown University. His previous publications include US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam: Insurgency, Subversion and Public Order (Routledge, 2005); Subversion and Insurgency (RAND, 2007); and Corporations and Counterinsurgency (RAND, 2009).

Front cover: Official Marine Corps photo by Sgt Mark Fayloga

Back cover: Official Marine Corps photo by SSgt Luis R. Agostini