Afghanistan 2009

THE AFGHAN MISSION
Mentoring pays off as Afghan forces hit insurgents

JESSICA LEEDER

May 7, 2009

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- On top of a bedsheet-covered table in a guarded compound in central Kandahar lies a city map.

Sheathed in plastic, it has been scribbled over with erasable markers to divide the city into boxes, coloured according to their ripeness for police raids.

Blue is for those that have already yielded rich caches of weapons - raw explosives, AK-47s, suicide vests, rocket launchers, grenades - as well as dozens of insurgents themselves. Areas outlined in red represent even more glowing prospects: known Taliban hideouts that soldiers and police officers have their eye on, biding their time before they attack.

For a high-level coalition of U.S. and Canadian troops given the task of rebuilding Afghanistan's security forces, the map represents something more than an impending blow to the urban insurgency. It is a long overdue sign that years of mentoring senior Afghan officers is starting to pay off.

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Afghan security forces - police and army - planned and executed the series of early-morning raids across the city over the past week on their own. By the time coalition soldiers found out about the raids, the Afghan forces were already in motion. Left waiting in the wings were their bewildered but pleased North American and British advisers.

"It's true mentoring," a grinning U.S. Army Colonel Bill Hix said.

For 19 months, Col. Hix has been at the helm of the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command in the southern quadrant of Afghanistan. His job is to use U.S. and Canadian police mentors to rebuild Afghanistan's police force, which he said was "destroyed by 30 years of war."

During his tour, he has fought constantly to extinguish perceptions - even his own, on occasion - that his Afghan counterparts are corrupt and incapable of self-sufficiency.

So it was with a mix of glee and disbelief that he attended a planning meeting in Kandahar yesterday for the next series of counterinsurgency raids, which Afghan forces unilaterally deemed necessary. Their goal is to flush the insurgents out of the city and destroy their weapons caches before the summer fighting season and the August election. Then they'll choke off entryways into Kandahar city to prevent the Taliban from re-entering, thus achieving - and, ideally, maintaining - some semblance of security.

"This was a surprise to the coalition, which I think was great," Col. Hicks said. "They are far more capable than we think or allow," he said, pausing to add a caveat: "That's not to say that they're ready to be off on their own."

Senior Afghan security officials admit as much. During a three-hour meeting designed to map out the next and most difficult phase of the raids, the dominant subject was the scarcity of police, which threatens to jeopardize not just the operation, but its aftermath.

"They don't have the numbers necessary to sustain security," Col. Hix explained, adding that he expects that toward the end of their operation, the Afghans will begin struggling to keep the insurgents from creeping back in and to achieve lasting results. "There will be a point where they'll run out of capacity."

Solving that problem is a dilemma facing both the Afghans and the coalition forces. The current police chief has already hired about 1,000 more officers than he is "allowed" under a cap put in place by a committee of international stakeholders who are financing the police. Some European nations believe that police should be kept at minimal levels.

But General Esmatullah Dawlatzai, a former police official who is now a high-level administrator for the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, said the size of the force has been limited by the amount of funding from donating nations.

"The enemy is equipped better than the Kandahar police," he told NATO soldiers listening in on yesterday's meeting. "They have better weapons. Police weapons, if it is not better than the enemy's, it has to be equal," he said.

If Col. Hix has his way, Kandahar city will soon have 3,000 police officers, about double the number it has now. And against the wishes of his European counterparts, they would all be trained in counterterrorism tactics and carry AK-47s, another bone of contention between U.S. forces and some NATO allies.

"They want them to be normal policemen," said Col. Hix, shaking his head and citing examples from a few years ago, when poorly armed police were routinely slaughtered by insurgents.

"Now when the Taliban come after these guys, they can give it back to 'em," he said, adding: "That's progress. It's ugly progress. But it's progress."

And he insists that if progress continues, the city will not always have a need for machine-gun-carrying police.

"It's not the end game," Col. Hix said. "But we're nowhere near the end."