Police seen as big part of problem

AFGHANISTAN: Corruption and the abuse of power among Afghan police have alienated local people and driven some to join the Taleban, British commanders returning from Helmand have warned.

Senior officers stressed that the police force was being urgently reformed and that new members were winning the trust of residents in areas recently recaptured from the insurgents. But Brigadier James Cowan, the last head of British troops in Helmand, said some police had caused severe damage in the past.

He added: "The police in many ways were the cause of the problem as well as the solution. We have had cases so often when captured Taleban mention the police for them joining the insurgency in the first place."

Five British soldiers were murdered by an Afghan policeman they were training at Nad-e-Ali, in Helmand, last November. Lieutenant Colonel Roley Walker, commander in the area, said people had "become disaffected" by the way the police had treated them.

Walker, of the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, added that the insurgents had exploited the antipathy and fear felt by many local people towards the police.

"We have had reports of the Taleban putting on police uniforms, setting up checkpoints, and then stealing money, phones, watches. Obviously they would have no way of knowing whether these people were genuine police or the Taleban.

"But we have also seen that when properly trained police are introduced the people welcome them. The Afghans are rather embarrassed about having outside forces defending them against the Taleban; they would rather have their own people do it."

General Stanley McChrystal, the United States commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, recently warned that a lack of fully trained police in the retaken Taleban stronghold of Marjah was creating a "bleeding ulcer".

The International Security Assistance Force is running a programme which aims to create 600 new police officers every eight weeks.

Greater screening of recruits and ensuring that the police are properly trained and paid have raised the level of the force, said Cowan. The force was prepared to act as a "gendarmerie", able to take on militants, he added. "Those who are coming through are as good if not better than the [Afghan] Army."

- Independent