A pessimistic German piece on Afstan

Especially about the police (no wonder the CF have taken over distribution of their pay).
Excerpts from a long Spiegel Online article that's worth reading:

Germany's parliament votes this Friday on whether to extend Berlin's participation in the military mission in Afghanistan. The country is on the brink of disaster, but German politicians have chosen to ignore Afghanistan's real problems.

Italian Brigadier General Fausto Macor is the ideal star witness to make the situation in Afghanistan dramatically clear to German politicians. The wiry general from the northern Italian city of Turin has been in charge of the Regional Command West of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan since July. He and his men are deployed in what is considered the quietest and safest part of the country.

Macor and his men are barricaded into an area near the airport in Herat, an old trading city of 250,000 inhabitants that has long served as a gateway to nearby Iran. Heavily armed Albanian soldiers guard the entrance to the camp, which is protected against enemy fire by a 1-meter-thick wall of boulders.

On Tuesday of last week, the general met with Eckart von Klaeden, the foreign policy spokesman of Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Von Klaeden had traveled to the city with the German ambassador to Afghanistan, Hans-Ulrich Seidt.

The general is slightly delayed, having attended a memorial service for two Spanish soldiers who were killed the day before in a bomb attack 80 kilometers (50 miles) to the south. The service was broadcast live on Italian television to a distressed nation. NATO troops have just liberated two kidnapped Italian intelligence officers from Macor's contingent. One of the Italians suffered serious injuries during the raid.

The commander sits in a chair, his back to the television set, and points to a military map on the wall. "You see," he says, "I am responsible for an area half the size of Italy." Then he rattles off the relevant statistics. Of the 1,800 soldiers under his command, only 270 can go on patrol. If he sends two units out on patrol, they can easily find themselves operating 400 kilometers (249 miles) apart. "It's as if one of them were in Turin and the other in Venice," says the general.

He can expect little support from the Afghan army, which has only 400 armed troops in the western sector. As a result, the general is left to his own resources as far as entire regions are concerned. He has no illusions. There is no power vacuum in Afghanistan: Taliban fundamentalists, armed tribal warlords or criminal gangs control the areas where there are no international troops.

In fact, the rule of law ends only a few hundred meters from Macor's headquarters, where the commander of the Herat airport complains about his situation. Outside, the warm late autumn sun shines on the Italians' gray Hercules transport aircraft. The mustachioed police colonel keeps his office cooled to a chilly 19 degrees Celsius (61 degrees Fahrenheit). The law requires that no armed soldiers be allowed on the airport grounds. The police colonel complains that his men, armed with only 30 old Kalashnikov automatic rifles, are poorly equipped to uphold the law at the airport...

This Friday, Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, will vote on whether to extend two of the three German military mandates in Afghanistan, currently the Bundeswehr's most dangerous mission. Twenty-one German soldiers have already lost their lives in Afghanistan, and last Friday three Germans were lucky to escape from a suicide attack with only minor injuries. The Bundestag will decide the fate of up to 3,500 soldiers and six Tornado reconnaissance aircraft operating in Afghanistan under the auspices of NATO's ISAF force.

Parliament's approval of the mission is considered a done deal [emphasis added], with a broad majority in both the ruling grand coalition and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) likely to vote in favor of keeping the troops in Afghanistan. Even a number of Green parliamentarians intend to support the measure, despite the party's recent decision not to. Only the Left Party is strictly opposed to the Bundeswehr's Afghanistan mission.

The future of Germany's more controversial [special forces] involvement in the US-led antiterrorism Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) will not be decided until November...

Faced with a difficult situation, the allies are now placing their hopes on the plan to train 70,000 soldiers and 82,000 police officers by the next parliamentary election, in three years. The new mantra of the NATO member states, says Scheffer, is "training, training, training." "Those who do not invest in training now," says German General Egon Ramms, who runs the ISAF mission from the NATO command center in the Dutch town of Brunssum, "will have to stay that much longer."

The Germans are eager to distance themselves from the United States in public debates, insisting that, unlike the Americans, the Germans are mainly involved in civilian reconstruction assistance. But this is precisely where Germany has failed miserably -- in developing the Afghan police force (more...), for example, for which Berlin has assumed primary responsibility. After visiting Afghanistan in the summer, a delegation of members of the Bundestag concluded that the work of the German contingent has been disastrous.

Germany, supposedly a "lead nation" in ISAF, has taken a leisurely approach to the Afghanistan effort. In January 2002, a team of high-ranking experts traveled to Afghanistan and recommended sending three German officials to Kabul to serve as advisors to the Afghan interior ministry. The German team, apparently convinced that this would be sufficient, envisioned the trio developing courses for senior bureaucrats and helping the Afghans improve their police academy. It recommended a one-year stint for the three officials. Aside from that, the experts concluded, the Afghans lacked equipment, cars and, most of all, weapons.

But weapons were precisely what the Afghans eventually acquired in abundance. It was an "absurdity," said FDP parliamentarian Elke Hoff, that Berlin planned to supply Afghanistan with up to 100,000 firearms while denying the Afghan police simple equipment like handcuffs. Germany's interior and foreign ministries refused to provide countries that fail to fully satisfy German constitutional standards with equipment designed to "exercise direct coercion."

This defect is only being remedied now -- a full five years after Germany launched its Afghan police training program. According to an internal report by the German foreign ministry, "500 officers of the Kabul riot police will soon be equipped with body armor, helmets, shields, gloves, batons and pepper spray."

Even when the German team of advisors was later expanded to include 60 officials, generally only 40 of them were actually at work at any one time. In the wake of this embarrassing staffing debacle, officials at the interior ministry and chancellery are now quietly examining the possibility of developing a permanent team of specially trained police officers, federal prosecutors and administrative experts that could quickly be deployed to failed states to deal with similar crises. But this is little more than a pipe dream at this point.

Besides, the Americans aren't interested in waiting for Germany to get its act together and have already taken over from the Germans in many respects. While Berlin agonized over the "further training of mid-level and senior officials" and "salary and rank reforms," Washington deployed 2,500 troops as police trainers, backed up with hundreds of contractors working for DynCorp, a private security firm [see here for Canadians]...

In the wake of their failures, the Germans are now trying to shift the responsibility for police training to the EU and distribute it among more countries. In May the EU formed its own police training mission, dubbed EUPOL, which has been managed so far by Friedrich Eichele, a German police general. Eichele, the former head of GSG 9, the counterterrorism unit of the German federal police, is a man of few words. His command of the English language is rudimentary and his diplomatic skills are considered limited.

Given such leadership, within only a few months EUPOL has already deteriorated into a directionless tangle of bureaucracy and financial weakness. EUPOL's 195 EU police officers from 17 countries are not even scheduled to assume their new posts until next March. According to officials, this is the earliest possible date, since the group must first build new, and appropriately comfortable, lodgings for its officers.

All of two German police officers are currently assigned to assist the German reconstruction team in the provincial city of Kunduz, which includes more than 400 soldiers. EUPOL plans to replace the pair with five of its team members soon. The new team will be responsible for the training of 7,500 Afghan police officers in two provinces. In the face of such realities, Guido Westerwelle, the head of the FDP, couldn't help but comment sarcastically on the program while visiting Afghanistan two weeks ago: "Well, that certainly takes care of police development."

Despite the efforts of German and British advisors, the interior ministry in Kabul is considered a hotbed of corruption. It costs up to $150,000 in bribes to secure a position as a district police chief. But the investment is worthwhile. Once on the job, a police chief can easily recoup the money from his subordinates...

Last Wednesday, for example, the US commander in charge of training gave a memorable performance at the NATO Council in Brussels. The NATO ambassadors attending the meeting asked Major General Robert Cone, who was in Kabul but was taking part in the session via videoconference, how many men in the Afghan army are now ready for combat.

The general responded that while the goal was to train 70,000 men, 50,000 are already being paid. But, he added, many of these men are simply AWOL ("absent without leave"). In other words, they are either deserters or men who occasionally choose to stay at home instead of appearing for duty. Besides, Cone added, he is having trouble retaining the men who have been trained. The actual force, he told the NATO officials, presumably consists of about 30,000 men, but he was unable to provide them with a more precise figure.

But the ambassadors were insistent. How many of those men are ready for combat? "I really can't say," the general said. Finally he admitted the truth: "To be perfectly honest -- zero [? emphasis added, see this just in--more on police too]."

In fact, Cone continued, not a single Afghan unit is capable of independently running an operation. According to Cone, the Afghan military lacks everything from artillery to helicopters, military hospitals, reconnaissance equipment and support personnel...