Analysis: EU police mission troubled

BERLIN, Sept. 14 (UPI) -- The European Union’s Afghan police-training mission is running into severe problems: Its commander has been sent home just months after his appointment, and Germany has refused to send its police trainers to the volatile southern provinces of the country.

On Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer asked the German government to allow for its police trainers to be deployed in southern Afghanistan, where the international troops are waging intense battles against the Taliban and local warlords.

The German government refused, stressing it would continue to focus on the northern provinces.

The failed request comes as the Kabul-based commander of the police training mission, Germany’s Friedrich Eichele, has been sent home for unknown reasons some three months after his appointment.

German news magazine Der Spiegel said in its latest issue that Eichele’s ousting comes as a result of an internal row with Francesc Vendrell, the EU's special envoy to Afghanistan. Vendrell reportedly wanted political control of the mission, something Eichele opposed.

Der Spiegel cites the German Embassy as saying that Eichele was “simply overburdened.”

The German Interior Ministry, however, said Eichele, a former commander of the elite German commando unit GSG-9, is needed in Berlin, where he will run the special anti-riot police unit.

The European Union earlier this year took over from Germany the main responsibility for training Afghanistan's police. The mission, called Eupol Afghanistan, consists of some 195 police, law enforcement and justice experts from 21 member states deployed at central (Kabul), regional (the five regional police commands) and provincial levels (deployment in provinces, through Provincial Reconstruction Teams). It builds on previous efforts by Germany, which has trained police in Afghanistan since 2002 -- with only 40 instructors.

Experts have in the past criticized the EU mission as too small (the U.S. police training mission consists of roughly 500 experts), poorly planned and underfunded. Moreover, the mission has been off to a rather slow start: Of the 195 officers, only 60 have so far arrived on the ground. Earlier this week, NATO's top civilian official in Afghanistan, Daan Everts, blamed the EU for not living up to its promise in Afghanistan by not delivering the necessary funding and personnel for the mission.

Others say the EU simply isn’t ready for the job.

“It seems that the EU was not really properly prepared for such a complex mission," Ronja Kempin, an Afghanistan expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a Berlin-based think tank, earlier this week told the International Herald Tribune. NATO officials have also urged nations like Germany to give up its national caveats when it comes to deploying its troops around Afghanistan. Germany has some 3,000 troops stationed with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, mostly in the relatively stable northern provinces of the country, where the Germans are leading reconstruction efforts. But Berlin is wary about the worsening security and the rising death toll in Afghanistan: Last month, three German police officers responsible for protecting the German ambassador to Afghanistan died and a fourth was injured when their vehicles were blown up near Kabul.

And on Friday, after a week filled with criticism, the Germans got backing from Victoria Nuland, the U.S. ambassador to NATO.

“Germany is doing a lot in Afghanistan and it's important that we keep the organizational structure as it is,” she told German news channel n-tv.