There is progress in Afghanistan, but the danger is increasing

NATO was slow to take an interest in the ANP’s training. Some Western authorities still doubt the good faith of President Hamid Karzai’s government in training the police. “You get all the Afghan leadership together, from Karzai on down,” one senior NATO officer said. “Put ’em in Ghazi stadium [Kabul’s main athletic venue] and ask them, ‘Do you want a competent, professional, dedicated police force?’ And give them some sort of truth serum. My guess is that fewer than 30 per cent of them would say yes. Shaking down a corrupt police force is how these guys make their money. People say, ‘Clean up the police.’ It’s a cop-out. We need to clean up the government.”

Despite that atmosphere of malign neglect, Western authorities have finally begun making strides toward training and professionalizing the police. One is salary reform: police are now paid at the same rate soldiers are, so taking bribes is no longer a necessity for simple survival. And they’re now paid by electronic transfer using personalized smart cards—so the pay gets to the individual cop rather than to his boss or the local warlord.

The other big innovation is effective training. Western authorities wasted too many years training Afghan police one by one, teaching an officer new techniques—often beginning with basic literacy—and then sending him back to a corrupt and corrupting precinct station. Last year the westerners introduced Focused District Development, which trains every man in a police station together, while members of an elite national police squadron hold the fort in their absence. “Bring them in to train alone, they fail,” one trainer said. “Bring the group in, even if you need to trim the group because of hot urinalysis and a couple of other problems, the rest of the group succeeds.” Focused District Development is now key to a lot of other decisions about how to allocate resources in a theatre of war that’s way too big for the NATO resources at hand. Military commanders now prefer not to clear an area of Taliban unless the police in that area have gone through FDD, because they’re likeliest to be able to keep the Taliban out later.

In Kandahar, where many members of the ANP have been trained by members of Canadian police forces, Precinct 9 has doubled its rate of IED discovery this year. In Canada we only hear about IEDs when they kill our soldiers. But most victims of insurgent violence are Afghans. NATO soldiers hope the insurgents’ shift from direct military conflict, which they can’t win, to IEDs, which they can’t target, will cost them local support. “The Taliban have lost ground with the local population,” one soldier insists. “They don’t deliver any services. The only service is, ‘You pissed me off so I’m going to hang you from a lamp post.’ ”

But some Western authorities think even a U.S.-reinforced NATO contingent and a swiftly improving Afghan army and police corps won’t be enough to end the standoff with the insurgents. That has some senior NATO officers mulling a dangerous and controversial option: recruiting and arming local tribal militias to help out. There is no formal plan along these lines, but we heard the option discussed at senior levels of the NATO leadership.

We also heard it contested, especially in the south, where tribal affiliations are infernally complex. Arming or paying one faction could have repercussions nobody could predict or control. “On a scale from smart to dumb,” one officer said, holding his hands apart in front of him, “arming the tribes is over here.” He nodded at the “dumb” end of his scale.

If anything, it was harder after this trip to measure the room for optimism in Afghanistan than it was a year ago. The civilian and military resources Canada and its allies are deploying far exceed anything we have put to the task before. Reinforcements are on the way. But the challenge is growing too.

Meanwhile, soldiers keep dying. One of the many who have had to become authorities on that subject is Warrant Officer Colin Clansey. The compact, thoughtful 33-year-old believes he is the first bagpiper deployed to a combat theatre in that role by the Canadian Forces since the Second World War. Since only two soldiers at Kandahar Air Field know how to play the pipes—the other is a truck driver Clansey used to teach—they have been kept busy playing at the ramp ceremonies when transport aircraft fly soldiers’ remains home. Not only to Canada, but to the U.S., Britain, Australia. Clansey has played at 25 ramp ceremonies in his nine months at Kandahar.

Soldiers from every country come, if their operational duties permit, to attend the ramp ceremonies. When the three who died on Dec. 5 went home, 2,000 of their comrades were on hand. Clansey sometimes plays Amazing Grace or songs associated with specific regiments, but this time he played a new song he wrote in November, Task Force Kandahar. “It’s a funeral march, so it’s very sombre at the start,” he said. “But as it progresses, I tried to give it a more positive tone, so it has elements of hope and joy at the end. As if to express the hope that all this isn’t in vain.”