BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- Call it mission creep or a vote of confidence -- Task Force Phoenix' embedded training teams are victim to their own success.
The U.S. military's lean, 1,300-man training arm in Afghanistan received a daunting new mission in January. In addition to training the 40,000-man Afghan National Army, it was given responsibility to straighten out the 62,000-man Afghan police force.
It does not have nearly the manpower it needs to pull the difficult task off, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan say. They have sent forward to U.S. Central Command and then the Joint Staff a classified "request for forces" that would dramatically increase the size of Task Force Phoenix. They do not expect to see new troops for at least four to six months. When additional forces do come, they could well be fewer than they need because of competing priorities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The police training mission is vital, but it is in direct competition for personnel with the Iraq "surge" and with the need for additional combat forces along the eastern border and south of Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces are in a daily fight against resurgent Taliban, the opportunistic warlord Hekmatyar Gulbadin, and al-Qaida forces.
Phoenix's plan is to "accept risk" in its ongoing program to train Afghanistan's army -- minimizing backsliding where it can - and split up its training teams and their equipment and vehicles into smaller cells to tackle the police.
It will be a major undertaking. The police force is slated to grow to 82,000 from its current level of 62,000. Of that amount, only about half are trained, equipped and on hand. And that is just an estimate, there are no good numbers as to exactly how many Afghan police are working on any given day. The numbers are unverified; they are currently tracked by Afghanistan's Interior Ministry by the salaries delivered to police stations according to the number of patrolmen listed on the rolls.
Task Force Phoenix's plan is to assess the hundreds of district police stations across Afghanistan's 34 provinces to determine how many police are on hand, the physical conditions in which they live and what equipment they have. Training is supposed to start within 90 days.
In Iraq the concern about the police is their divided sectarian loyalties and militia violence. In Afghanistan it seems to be garden variety corruption. Untrained police earn only $16 a month; trained police earn $70, according to Marine Lt. Col. Robert Manion, the officer in charge of training programs in central Afghanistan, comprised of 11 of 34 provinces.
Police, the majority illiterate like their fellow citizens, are known to solicit bribes, and senior police often skim money off the salaries of new recruits, according to a Defense Department inspector general's report issued in November. They are easily co-opted by their tribal leadership, and face difficulties being accepted if they are sent out of their hometowns. Afghanistan has 12 ethnic identities, five major religions and 30 languages and dialects.
"The police are so poorly paid that corruption will always be an issue. The people don't respect them because they don't look professional and have professional equipment. Thus they don't listen to them and thus they're ineffective ...(and) they don't have the fuel or numbers to leave the district center very often," a Marine officer told UPI.
That is a dangerous situation in a counter-insurgency where so much depends on an able, trusted police force. Ferreting out cells of suicide bombers and identifying incognito "anti-coalition militia," as the adversary here is known, is work best done by professional police who, ideally, have closer ties to the community than the national military. In fact, Kabul police were instrumental in the capture of "two-and-a-half" IED cells last fall after a deadly car bombing on Massoud Circle that killed two American soldiers and destroyed their Humvee.
The threat is growing. Roadside bombings doubled from 831 in 2005 to 1,625 in 2006, with 150 already this year, and most are technologically sophisticated. Car bombs more than tripled, with 34 in 2005 and 125 in 2006. This year there have been nine.
Suicide vest bombers have similarly increased, from 12 in 2005 to 47 in 2006, with seven so far this year. Many adopted a chilling new tactic -- jumping on the hoods of U.S. Humvees stopped by traffic and flattening themselves up against the windshield for maximum effect, a senior military official said.
It is into this breach that Manion's Regional Security Advisor Command-Central steps. The 452-man organization is one of five RSAC's across the country taking on police training mission. It is currently training about 9,000 Afghan soldiers, half of which are available for operations at any one time. Soon it will assume responsibility for training nearly 20,000 police, without additional trainers or equipment for the near future.
Manion will immediately field six provincial teams by pulling personnel off 18 existing "embedded training teams," parceling out the limited supply of up-armored Humvees among them. As he gets more personnel he will build to 11 provincial teams, focusing on improving the quality of police leadership, then ultimately disperse one and two-man teams to the individual police headquarters dotted throughout the 82,500-square-kilometer (32,000-square-mile) area.
Even the scope of the mission is unclear: At last count Manion believes there are 103 to 125 districts. An Afghan interior ministry official said Monday there are 101.
The police district headquarters -- often just lonely, unkempt outposts -- are the focus of much of the violence in Afghanistan. Just under 20 dot the fractious border area with Pakistan where Taliban, Hekmatyar and al Qaida are believed to be based. In RSAC-Central's area alone there are 10 road border crossings and 32 traditional passes used by smugglers.
Nearly every day, numerically superior and more heavily armed Taliban fighters cross the borders and use rockets and mortars, usually on timers, and crew-served weapons to attack mostly undefended police headquarters near the frontier. They are meant to project Kabul's authority but are poorly defended so mostly just get attacked, a Marine officer serving in the area told UPI.
"Observation posts (OP) sell at higher headquarters but we don't have the people to man them, so we stick a minimal force in there and hit the ACM with air and (artillery) when they mass to attack (a tactic we used in Khe Sahn and look how well that war worked for us). An OP without the manning to project presence is nothing more than a target," he said.
The police training challenge is major, admits Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the commander of Marine Central Command. He says it will be attacked the way one eats an elephant -- a little bit at a time, using whatever resources are at hand. He is encouraged by the progress of the Afghan National Army under the ETTs. They are schooled in the basics, fiercely loyal to their American trainers, have low AWOL rates and high retention.
"What you've pulled off out here is progress, even if it feels like Groundhog Day," Mattis told ETT staff Monday at the U.S. base in Pol-e-Charki just east of Kabul, where they are grappling with the new mission. "If you can infect the police (with the same professionalism taking root in the ANA) you are going to spell hell on earth for the Taliban."
The U.S. State Department has already spent more than $1.1 billion training Afghan police, primarily on a contract with DynCorp International. MPRI is also training police leadership. However, there are fewer than 500 police mentors in the country, insufficient for the 82,000 police meant to be trained.
The U.S. Defense Department assumed oversight of the police training mission in 2005 but it has been carried out primarily by the Afghan Interior Ministry and private contractors until now.
