RCMP Superintendent John Brewer with Border Police commander Major General Mohammed Noorza speak with tribal elders from Bala Murghab District in Badghis province, over increasing the Afghan Border Police garrison there for protection against insurgents.Sergeant Phillip Frazier , USMC photo
In the nine months he worked as senior adviser to the chief of the Border Police, John Brewer relied on a local translator to navigate Afghan culture. Yet the Canadian Mountie spent as much time trying to interpret the actions of foreign forces to equally puzzled Afghans.
Why, they asked him, did Germany provide their training base with drug-sniffing police dogs but not dog food or kennels? Why would the Americans build a brand new border police headquarters on land with no water? And what should be done with the thousands of donated European radios that do not operate on the same frequency as the Afghan ones?
His polite response was to suggest that Afghans speak up for themselves and that NATO officers listen to them more. Still, the plain-spoken Superintendent Brewer will admit to some frustration with the waste of time and money through miscommunication. "A lesser man," he says, "would say it's pissing in the wind."
Canada is pulling out combat troops from Afghanistan by July of this year, but announced in November that it would provide 750 trainers and 200 support staff who would stay in Afghanistan to assist the NATO mission. Mr. Brewer's experience poses the question of whether the effort will accomplish its goal of creating a self-sustaining and effective Afghan security force.
The Afghan army and police are the linchpin of the coalition exit strategy, which calls for Afghans to progressively take charge of security around the country starting next spring.
NATO countries have pledged to spend $11-billion a year over the next three years to train and develop the fast-growing Afghan security forces. All but 10 per cent will be U.S. money, but Canada could be a major provider of manpower.
If the pledge materializes, the Canadians will make up more than one-fourth of the total 2,800 trainers that coalition commanders say will be needed. What they may find is a well-intentioned but troubled training program that has been beset by false starts, lack of co-ordination, concerns about corruption and a persistent debate over whether it is too focused on order rather than the rule of law.
Supt. Brewer, who finished his tour as a volunteer and returned home to Victoria recently, had a close-up view of one part of the Afghan security forces. He travelled the country visiting border posts and training facilities, and his trenchant observations underscore the challenges and limitations of the NATO ambitions for Afghanistan.
He says that only hands-on mentoring in the field, where Afghan police confront both insurgent violence and the more mundane temptation of corruption, can produce a force capable of securing the country once NATO troops withdraw.
"If I had been restricted to Kabul, and had to rely on third-hand information, I couldn't have built my group," he says.
If foreign trainers restrict themselves to schools and bases in the heavily fortified capital of Kabul, as proposed by the Canadian government for its trainers, he says they will be "flying the flag" but making little impact.
"You're not going to stop corruption by getting on the phone to an Afghan 600 kilometres away and saying, 'Don't steal,' " he adds. "Where they are partnered, they are more effective. There's less corruption, better skills and the equipment and facilities are better maintained."
Supt. Brewer's experience in Afghanistan coincided with start of an extraordinary expansion of the security forces. After years of sluggish and finally negative growth, 160,000 men and a handful of women were hired and trained in 2010 to bring the number of soldiers and police close to 260,000.
The NATO goal is to add another 50,000 in the coming year. While attrition rates have dropped since salaries were more than doubled this year, they remain so high that coalition commanders say they will need to train 133,000 people by the end of 2011 - the equivalent of today's Afghan army - to reach that goal.
The Border Police grew at the same pace, although on a smaller scale. Its strength is now 21,500, an increase of 5,000 over last year, and the hope is to have a force of 23,500 by the end of 2011. It keeps only two out of three officers it hires, most often losing them to private security companies that pay better and offer less dangerous work.
Like other parts of the security forces, it is a top-heavy force, with some 4,000 officers in senior ranks. But leadership skills - a sense of purpose, logistical capabilities and discipline - are lacking across the board.
When Supt. Brewer first arrived, eager to contribute and infused with a volunteer's zeal, he was surprised at how little the Afghan Border Police took charge on their own.
Unless they were told to do it, he says, Afghan commanders would fail to restock ammunition until the last bullet was gone. Policemen would ask him to solve their problems rather than suggest a solution. High-ranking officers were reluctant to delegate authority but hesitant to make decisions.
On the side of the coalition, a jumble of training programs and infrastructure projects undertaken by individual countries since 2002 left the Afghans confused. Foreign trainers rotated in and out like a revolving door, losing any momentum built up as police units were left without any mentors for weeks at a time.
Supt. Brewer says he spent much of his time trying to get Afghans and NATO commanders talking to each other since the stopgap programs designed and imposed from outside only reinforced Afghan passivity. "We treated them like little kids," he says.
The now-centralized NATO training command, created just over a year ago, has developed a grand scheme for the coming year to put more resources into officer and non-commissioned-officer development. There are plans to open more specialized academies, expand the fledgling air force, train hundreds of officer candidates outside Afghanistan and open more senior staff academies in the country.
It represents a major shift since 2003, when the Pentagon gave the lead training role to private military contractors in a push to get as many armed and uniformed Afghans out on the street as quickly as possible.
The curriculum varied widely, as did the results. An official of EUPOL, the European Union's independent police training unit in Afghanistan, said he saw private contractors teaching with PowerPoint presentations that illiterate Afghan recruits did not understand and were "cut and pasted" from materials used in other conflict zones. "You could see that a lot of it came from Kosovo," the official said.
In the case of the police, most officers got no training at all before being sent to work, with predictably counterproductive effects. As Mark Sedwill, NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan said recently, the police in some places became "a brutal and predatory tribal militia" that made the "repressive but orderly" Taliban seem a tolerable alternative.
Contractor-trainers are now being phased out, but the focus on multiplying the number of Afghan police and soldiers carries a different set of risks.
Afghan commanders have complained that the NATO campaign to train and deploy thousands of new police and soldiers each month reduces their ability to vet recruits for quality and loyalty.
The risk was highlighted in late November, when a border policeman in the Nangarhar province east of Kabul gunned down six American soldiers during a training exercise before he was shot and killed. A year earlier, an Afghan policeman turned on his foreign mentors, killing five British soldiers and wounding six others. He escaped.
More such incidents can be expected, according to Candace Rondeaux, a senior analyst on Afghanistan with the International Crisis Group. "The level of infiltration and people turning on their trainers is going to grow as the withdrawal gets closer," she said.
The Border Police, in its full-scale recruitment drive, have managed to sign up entire high-school graduating classes in some villages in northern Afghanistan. Village elders or tribal chiefs are supposed to vouch for each new hire, but it is an imperfect vetting system in a country where officials who co-operate with the Afghan government and NATO also face threats and assassination by Taliban insurgents.
All branches of the Afghan security forces face the dilemma of where to deploy recruits. If they serve in their home districts, desertion and resignation rates drop. But sending them away from home can remove them from the powerful influence of local Taliban or criminal gangs.
For Supt. Brewer, the question has no clear answer. "The Border Police are unique in that they recruit locally and try to field them locally," he says. "But they recognize this is a double-edged sword."
The Afghan forces train and operate in a country at war, which leads to other compromises that he finds distasteful but temporarily practical.
Insurgents, drug traffickers, smugglers and organized-crime groups crisscross the country's borders. While the leaders of NATO countries complain constantly about corruption in the Afghan police, the U.S.-led military command has hired Afghan strongmen who are widely acknowledged as corrupt to run border outposts.
An example is a man known as Colonel Abdul Razik, a militia leader who was made a Border Police commander and put in charge of the Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan in Kandahar province. In a report called "Warlord Inc." released earlier this year, a U.S. congressional subcommittee said U.S. and NATO officials like that the colonel controls the border but readily admitted that he pockets "a major cut" of all truck traffic.
This is the dark underside of the coalition's stated ambition to reform Afghan policing, admits Supt. Brewer, but he reluctantly learned to live with the contradiction.
"If we physically disarmed the Colonel Raziks out there, there would be a vacuum," he says. "Does he do stuff for his own interest? Probably. Is he effective against the Taliban? Yes."
Still, he adds, he has seen steady improvement in the effectiveness of the Border Police commanders he worked with over his nine-month tour.
"A good day here in Afghanistan is two steps forward, one step back," Supt. Brewer says. Like other NATO trainers, he could only try to put systems in place. "I guess only the Afghans," he adds, "will be able to say if it's sustainable."