Afghan police – too stoned to function?

Back in June I read a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office which contained some inconvenient news about the state of the Afghan police force, who are being trained by Western powers. The news was so inconvenient that the media completely ignored it, so I’ll repeat it here:

“Since 2002, the United States has provided about $6.2 billion to train and equip the Afghan National Police (ANP). However, as of April 2008, no police unit was assessed as fully capable of performing its mission.”
Government Accountability Office
June 18, 2008 (pdf)

That surely qualifies as among the most expensive and least successful training programmes in history. And you paid for it.

This week Aftenposten newspaper gives details of a Norwegian police report which offers some clues as to how you can spend six billion dollars training cops, and without actually producing any “capable of performing” their job. They report:

“Drug tests performed on Afghan police undergoing training showed that 95 percent of them tested positive for cannabis and amphetamines.”
Police face huge training challenges in Afghanistan
Aftenposten, 29 Sept, 2008

So that’s $6.2 billion up in smoke. Quite a party.

Unfortunately, like most good parties, this is leaving an awful mess and someone will have to pay (again). That’ll be the long suffering Afghan people, who could probably do with an honest police force right now, not least to protect them from local warlords. But the report from Norway shows little sign of it happening

“In July, while Norwegian police were training instructors for the border police unit, an Afghan officer took two police cars and nine colleagues and defected to the Taliban, signing on with a local Taliban leader.
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Female Afghan police officers are the targets of sexual attacks by their superiors.
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Afghan police are believed to be setting free persons arrested on narcotics offenses, probably in return for bribes.”

As Norway’s chief for international police co–operation, Torgrim Moseby, modestly put it, “this is all, of course, very unfortunate”.