Word: balas
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...Afghanistan, police work is like fighting a war. Ask Haji Khodaydad, police chief of Bala Beluk, a district in Afghanistan's southwestern province of Farah. Since he took over in April, Khodaydad has lost nearly two dozen men in skirmishes with militants, making his the most dangerous of Afghanistan's 366 districts. But despite the risks, Khodaydad chooses to fight. "The Americans have come to support the government of Afghanistan," he says. "We have to fight...
...posts along major transport routes, such as Bala Beluk, go for $200,000 or more a year, money that is then recouped up to eight-fold via tolls, pay-offs and unofficial taxes on merchants. One hapless would-be district chief, General Habibullah, sold his Corolla in order to pay the 150,000 Afghanis ($3000) bribe he thought he needed to secure a lucrative post in the northern province of Takhar, only to learn his mistake a day later: the request for 150,000 referred to dollars, not the local currency. "One hundred and fifty thousand Afghanis didn't seem...
...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...
...ground in Bala Beluk, the trainers see a more pressing reason to have embedded mentors: 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...