This fall marks the 10th anniversary of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. Despite more than $50 billion in reconstruction funds that have poured into the country—$29 billion of which have gone to Afghan security forces, with an additional $11 billion slated to be spent this year—even the most optimistic assessments are that little progress has been made in rule of law, governance and security.

Now that Washington and Kabul have tagged 2014 as the year that the Afghan National Security Forces will begin taking the lead for the country’s security, the push is on to train and field as many members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) as possible. While NATO trainers have made huge strides in professionalizing the force and growing their ranks while speeding up training schedules, constant combat and staggering attrition call into question how much can really be expected of these forces in a few short years. Chief among the worries is the sorry state of the ANP, whose training and welfare was, until 2009, almost an afterthought.

In December, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Brian Lamson, chief police strategist for NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTMA), told an audience in Washington that “we are right now just at the starting gate of the professionalization of the [police] force.” It was only in November 2009 that NTMA—which has responsibility for training and supporting all Afghan forces—was stood up and began consolidating where and how Afghan police were trained. Up to that point, training was decentralized, disorganized and a mishmash of contractors, military police, infantry from NATO countries and international police units.

Maj. Gen. Stuart Beare of the Canadian Armed Forces, who serves as deputy police commander for NTMA, told DTI last month that “a year ago you could have gone to different police training centers and you would have had national variations of what they thought a patrolman would need to be, or Afghan civil order police or border police needed to be. Today, there’s one program of instruction developed by us with the Afghan interior ministry, which is the standard against which we train.”

While NTMA has spent the past 18 months prioritizing and ordering the training process, a report released late last year that looked at 10 regional police training programs conducted by U.S. and British troops in Afghanistan in 2007-09 is a good example of what things were like during the first decade of the war. Analysts at research group CNA Strategic Studies found that the units partnered with Afghan police were forced to contend 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.” In all, the vignettes bear witness to the disorganized effort to train and field a competent, honest police force in a country desperately in need of stability.

Until 2009, police were for the most part recruited and assigned and then given some field training where possible. But the NTMA flipped that, making sure that police are now recruited, trained and then assigned. But massive, systemic and serious problems remain. Beare says the NTMA and Afghan government have no idea how many untrained police officers are out there. He would only say they “are in the tens of thousands,” with estimates ranging from 10,000 to more than 40,000.

They are trying to get their hands around the problem, however. The German police project program is helping to run a focused district development program that takes some untrained police out of their districts, places them with other police forces, trains them for six weeks and then returns them to their home districts. Afghan forces are also running a district development project that places Afghan trainers in select districts to train with the police. About 13,000 ANP have been trained under these programs since late 2009. What’s more, the interior ministry is putting 500 Afghan trainers into each provincial police headquarters to train those who are already on the force.

One big problem with the training program for the ANP and ANA is attrition, which includes desertions and casualties—killed and wounded. The numbers are stunning. In August 2010, the head of NTMA, U.S. Army Gen. William Caldwell, estimated that to increase the police force from the current 115,000 to the goal of 134,000 by October 2011, NATO would have to recruit, train and assign almost 56,000 men to meet that augmentation target of 19,000. The remaining 37,000 recruits would melt away at some point during the process. When asked about attrition, Beare admitted that “if we continue to perform at last year’s rates, we won’t get to 115,000.”

While Beare says that attrition rates are getting better, the numbers still don’t inspire much confidence in the health of the force, or its future as an effective institution. In January, ANP had an attrition rate of 1.84%, and expects that 15% will desert, be wounded or killed this year. In a surprise, the force with the lowest rate of attrition is the local uniformed police who work in their own districts but are generally considered to be the most ill-trained and equipped. Over the year, about 13% of them are expected to desert, be wounded or killed. The worst numbers come from units with the most training, highest literacy rates and highest pay: the border police and the Afghan national civil order police (Ancop). Border police are expected to average 26% attrition for the year, while the Ancop numbers—which were at 75% last year—have dropped to 35%.

Beare says that last year NTMA could only maintain 6,000 Ancop in the fielded force “no matter how many you trained,” while there are now over 7,000 in the force with 3,000 more in training. The goal is to field 18,000 Ancop by November.

There are 850 professional police trainers working at seven training centers around the country, a mix of American and NATO trainers, as well as contractors. Still, the police training system is short 290 trainers, and despite repeated pleas—and promises from allies—there doesn’t look to be any more trainers coming. Despite this, Jack Segal, former chief political adviser to the commander of the NATO Joint Force Command in Afghanistan, says that he thinks Afghanistan can eventually achieve a reasonable police force, but that “we need to reassess that it needs to be national. I don’t think it needs to be—but that requires a strategy.”

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. (ret.) David Barno, who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2003-05, says the lack of trainers being applied to the effort by the U.S. and NATO allies is “unconscionable,” but adds, “that is a choice that has been made. This has been a three-year discussion to try and get NATO to contribute more individuals into the training pipeline so the U.S. didn’t have to fill that with American forces. At this point I would argue that if these aren’t filled, and this is moving to your No. 1 effort, you’ve got to fill them. If you have to give up a battalion somewhere else in the country to put those billets against the training establishment, that’s what you do. It’s far too important.”

Beare says that while in the past the contractor presence in training centers was high, as more NATO trainers came in they’ve been moving contract trainers into the field to partner with the police under the Embedded Police Mentor program.

Bob Perito, an expert on efforts to train police in stability operations, says that in a counterinsurgency environment, training a competent police force may be the most critical effort. “Police are the face of the government that is seen by everyone,” he says. “Police are a source of the legitimacy of the government . . . police are a source of intelligence about the insurgency. The relationship between the people and the police is critically important.”

Photo: Paul McLeary

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