Kabul, August 10: Afghan police recruits clutch their guns and leopard crawl across gravel under the noon sun. A teddy bear nearby is rigged up as a fake improvised explosive device — the favoured weapon of the Taliban.
In a brown tent to the side, a young man asks a First Aid instructor if police should help all the wounded at the site of an explosion when there is every chance one could be an attacker.
This Kabul fire station — a former Taliban jail, says the fire chief — is a classroom for a pre-election crash course in being a policeman in Afghanistan where the police have to be more soldier than community cop.
Some 14,800 recruits have been pushed through three weeks of training for the August 20 presidential and provincial council elections when police will be the first line of security for nearly 7,000 polling centres.
They will be backed by Afghan soldiers and international forces with the defence ministry saying the entire combined force of 300,000 men will be out on polling day to thwart any attempt by Taliban militants to disrupt voting.
Five more weeks of training after the polls will make the recruits — 4,800 for Kabul and 10,000 for the country’s most unstable districts — full policemen, US and Afghan trainers say.
“It is not just for elections, it is a down payment on the larger growth,” said Major General Richard Formica, commanding general of the Combined Security Transition Command – Afghanistan (CSTC-A) that trains Afghan security forces.
Boosting the Afghan forces, and the police in particular, is a priority in US President Barack Obama’s revamped plan to beat a spiralling insurgency that has this year seen record attacks.
It is an effort that has cost the United States, the biggest trainer of security forces, about 18.7 million dollars since 2005, according to figures provided by CSTC-A.
The police have come second to the army in the post-Taliban drive to rebuild Afghanistan’s war-shattered security forces.
But this is changing as the need for more police has become clearer with violence spreading and militants able to take over districts and get past checkpoints to carry out attacks in the hearts of major cities.
Without the men being trained for the elections, there are just 82,000 policemen for a country of between 25 and 36 million; close to 6,000 are in the capital, a city of four million.
Authorities have recommended an increase of near double, Formica said. The figure would be made clear in a strategy review by the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, due early September.
The 95,000-strong Afghan army is better trained and equipped than the police, who are characterised — sometimes unfairly — as hash-smoking and always on the look out for bribes.
Formica rejects the perception of “every policeman as crooked” but admits there are problems, which he is confident could be whittled out with more training.
The police also suffer the heaviest losses in the fighting with roughly 1,400 killed last year and three losing their lives for every Afghan soldier who dies, according to US military officials.
Entry-level salaries for both forces have been levelled out to 120 dollars a month but the calibre of recruits for patrol-level police is often poor.
“Compared to Europe and the United States, of course the quality is low, but compared to the quality all over Afghanistan, it’s average,” said Carl Erik Jensen from the European Union police training mission.
“Many of them, about three-quarters, probably cannot read or write, so this is a special challenge for our trainers,” said the deputy chief superintendent.
But this is what is available in one of the poorest countries in the world, ruined by war and with roughly 70 percent illiteracy.
Just weeks before arriving in Kabul for the elections crash course that covers weapons, ethics, First Aid and other basic duties, 18-year-old Nasrullah was a farmer in a remote valley in the rugged northeast.
Handling a gun is not a problem — he has carried one since he was 16. But he speaks minority Pashai and struggles with Dari, the language of the city where he will be deployed on voting day.
“I want to serve my country, to bring security to Nuristan,” he said.
The standard of recruits is far higher at the Afghan National Police Academy, a neat officers’ school where young men — all with high school diplomas — sit under trees awaiting their first day’s instruction.
One of them, 22-year-old Dur Mohammad, recounts how two rockets fired by Taliban had landed at his school in the southern province of Helmand but did not explode because they struck water.
It made him decide to join the security forces to defend his home and family. “I am ready to give my blood for my country,” he said.
–Agencies