Word: afghanization
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...toll has prompted accusations from security analysts and development organizations that the police are being used as cannon fodder - a cheaper version of the ANA, which benefits from several more months worth of training, and better weapons. Major General Robert Cone, the U.S. commander in charge of building the Afghan security forces, defends the program, pointing out that the ANA is still too small to tie brigades down to high-risk districts when the mobile forces are required to clear other insecure areas. Instead, police districts that have gone through FDD are paired with U.S. military mentor teams that...
...Both Afghan police and Western observers describe a kind of pyramid scheme of corruption that goes to the top of the Afghan government. "It's like a feudal system," says Captain David Panian, a U.S. reservist now training Afghan Police in Western Afghanistan. "The baron pays the count, the count pays the duke, the duke pays the king. So if you are Joe Chief of Bala Beluk, in order to maintain your job you have to give X amount to the provincial guy, and he has got to give it to the regional...
...eight weeks of training may root out some corruption, but it is not enough to bring security to the insurgency-wracked villages of southern Afghanistan. Afghan police are only lightly armed. They carry AK-47s, and each truck is mounted with a Russian light machine gun. In Bala Beluk, Khodaydad's forces routinely face insurgents armed with an arsenal of mortars, rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, armor piercing rounds and increasingly sophisticated Improvised Explosive Devices. Between March 2007 and March 2008 police casualties hit 1119, according to the Ministry of the Interior. Afghan National Army deaths, by contrast, were...
...preventing the newly trained police from backsliding into old practices, and protecting them from corrupt officials who are threatened by clean cops. They compare Bala Beluk to 1970s New York City, with its toxic mix of gang warfare, corruption, organized crime and drug commerce. Khodaydad, they say, is an Afghan Frank Serpico, the cop who exposed systematic and widespread corruption within the city's police ranks, and was shot by heroin dealers in what was thought to have been a hit organized by corrupt colleagues. Khodaydad is the only non-commissioned officer in Afghanistan to have risen to the rank...
...Kandahar, another route I used to drive several times a year. A week ago, Taliban insurgents stopped a bus convoy and abducted 27 men. Six were beheaded and all but one of the rest were killed, according to another Taliban spokesman. He said they were all soldiers for the Afghan National Army. The government, however, says they were migrants, heading to Iran for work...