Are we healing wounds in Afghanistan?
Updated on 02 February 2008
"Boy are things an uphill struggle when making the Afghan National Police into a police force" - Alex Thomson blogs from Afghanistan.
Ultimately you know, if you really are keen to try and rebuild a country rather than simply use it as your forward operations base against radical Islam, then you need some kind of law and order in place.
And the British to be fair have been trying hard but boy, are things an uphill struggle when it comes to making the Afghan National Police into some thing you or I might actually recognise as a police force.
I mean, only 10 months ago Stuart and I were in Sangin watching these lads calmly loot the bazaar. It seemed they were particularly keen on mobile phone equipment and any computer gear to be had.
Well, 10 months on things are really not going that much better. They came out one morning on patrol with the British Royal Marines. The Marines invited them to do a bit of compound searching. First, they got the wrong door. They smashed it in, ran in, and started searching the place end to end.
Only then did it become clear they'd actually got the wrong house. Worse, the man of the house was not in. So they'd disturbed the women and children.
I cannot quite get over in words just how big an insult this is to Pashtun people. I mean it's not exactly tea and cakes back in the UK is it? Well here the insult is a lot worse, believe me.
I'm reminded of the French official who once remarked in the colonial days of Algeria that kicking someone's door in, in the morning, is no way to build bridges with him in the afternoon.
And they need to build some pretty strong bridges around here and fast. So a lot of work to be done with the ANP here.
They call it mentoring. But the cops here still thieve and loot. Not solely because they are bad men. They scarcely get paid enough or regularly and have been notorious among Afghans for years as being little more than gangsters and desperadoes with AK47s. So mentoring is a word you hear a lot of.
Politick, almost genteel sort of a word, isn't it? Well, as you can imagine the Marines and British cops sent to do the job around here often end up blending a little British bollocking with the mentoring bit.
Those prissy Foreign Office types you get out here would blench, but out on the ground, sometimes it's the only way to try and get some kind of discipline into the dudes from the ANP.
