Security in Kandahar City: Afghan forces improving

1) A Canwest News story focussing on the Canadians:

Canadians working to make Kandahar City safe

Shah Noori/CanWest News Service
Eight suspects were arrested and their weapons seized last week in Loya Wala, a Taliban-infested neighbourhood in Kandahar city.

Behind the thick walls of a military compound, Maj. Frederic Jean strikes a self-assured pose. The new leader of Canadian force protection in Kandahar City exudes confidence, even though he's been here just five weeks and has already dealt with a string of high-profile suicide attacks and one political assassination.

He leads a company tasked with securing Kandahar City, "so that others can come here, relax, and do business," in his words.

A tall order inside a war zone where Taliban insurgents are said to move with impunity. Mr. Jean downplays it. The situation here is not as bad as recent events and headlines suggest, he insists.

He goes much further: "I don't think this is a dangerous town."

It seems an astonishing claim but Mr. Jean says he speaks from experience.

"I have no trouble walking in town. I have no fear. There are certain neighbourhoods where it's not advisable to venture out at night. But we have that in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto."

These are poor comparisons. There's not any city in Canada like this one. And Mr. Jean is a highly-trained, well-protected and well-armed Canadian soldier, not a war-weary Kandahari.

The local perspective is quite different than his.

Kandahar is not safe for elected officials on Taliban hit lists, for entrepreneurs and their families, for ordinary folk who can get themselves killed when shopping in a market or, like last week, when visiting a religious shrine near the provincial governor's palace.

Three suicide bombers tried to make their way past palace security and into the governor's compound; two of the attackers blew themselves up. The explosions killed two civilians and three Afghan police officers. Ten other people were injured...

With the training they've received since their Canadian mentors arrived, Afghan police officers and army soldiers are responding to violent incidents more quickly.

A year ago Canadian forces were often the first to arrive at the scene of a bomb blast, even if they weren't the nearest to it. Not so much now, says Mr. Jean.

"Now we're third responders [behind Afghan security forces]. Slowly but surely, we're being replaced by Afghan officers. But there aren't enough of them. [emphasis added]"

Helping Afghans reach the point where they can comfortably rely on their own authorities for protection is the Canadian mission's highest priority. Canadian soldiers are going to be redeployed from other areas of the province to help secure the city and its environs, but there's a delicate balance to be found...

The Taliban are known to make IEDs and to plot attacks inside Loya Wala compounds. Last week, thanks to good intelligence and police work, eight suspected terrorists were arrested there and a huge cache of weapons and explosives were seized.

Yet according to Afghan police stationed in the neighbourhood, civilians seem "indifferent" to the insurgents, and to security forces as well. In their minds -- and in their experience -- assisting either side can bring them trouble.

Members of Mr. Jean's team patrol the area frequently and are getting to know local residents. Trust is slowly building.

But some children throw rocks at the Canadians, something witnessed by this reporter firsthand on a recent patrol in Loya Wala with stability company troops and an RCMP officer from Surrey, B.C.

In general, however, the residents encountered seemed friendly, even welcoming...

2) A CP story focussing on Afghan security forces

Afghan forces win U.S. kudos
Police, army conduct successful raids on Taliban hideouts in Kandahar city

Afghan police and the Afghan National Army have earned guarded words of praise from their international mentors for a successful series of raids on Taliban hideouts across Kandahar city that netted weapons and insurgents.

But the U.S. military commander who oversees the establishment of Afghan police in the country’s six southern provinces says the encouraging signs don’t mean Afghanistan’s national security forces are quite ready to fly solo.

"This was a surprise to the coalition, which I think was great," said Col. Bill Hix, head of the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command South, who offered his congratulations when he met Wednesday with the architects of the raids.

The operation, which the Afghans conducted under their own power and of their own volition, is a sign of progress in the efforts to bring the country’s police officers and soldiers to the point where they can be left in charge of Afghanistan’s security.

"They are far more capable than we think or allow," Hix said. "That’s not to say that they’re ready to head off on their own [emphasis added]."

Hix, who has been in Afghanistan for 19 months, said the key will be whether the Afghans can maintain security in Kandahar city once they’ve completed their raids.

About 1,000 Afghan soldiers, 500 police and hundreds of members of the Afghan intelligence services have fanned out across the city this week, hitting several districts of Kandahar city where insurgents have been staging suicide bombings and assassinations.

The Afghan police have been designated as the spearhead for the coalition effort to stabilize crime-ridden Kandahar city and beat back the Taliban across the province. This week, they discovered several caches of grenades, detonators, AK-47 assault rifles and vests stuffed with explosives.

A dozen people were arrested, including three key insurgent figures — among them a leader who escaped from Sarposa prison during a spectacular and bloody Taliban raid last year.

Brig.-Gen. Shir Mohammed Zazai, commander of the Afghan 205th Hero Corps, was cautious about heaping too much praise on the operation as he attended a meeting to plan the second phase.

"I think the jury’s still out on this," he said. "I’m not going to make any predictions. We’ll see how the population responds."

While he considers the operation so far to be a success, Zazai said the outcome of the ongoing effort will be affected by the limited number of security forces available.

"Kandahar in the past was the capital of Taliban forces and there’s a very large-scale influence still existing here," he said. "Mainly, the terrorists are terrifying the local people."

And a good piece from Jessica Leeder of the Globe and Mail:

Mentoring pays off as Afghan forces hit insurgents

On top of a bedsheet-covered table in a guarded compound in central Kandahar lies a city map.

Sheathed in plastic, it has been scribbled over with erasable markers to divide the city into boxes, coloured according to their ripeness for police raids.

Blue is for those that have already yielded rich caches of weapons - raw explosives, AK-47s, suicide vests, rocket launchers, grenades - as well as dozens of insurgents themselves. Areas outlined in red represent even more glowing prospects: known Taliban hideouts that soldiers and police officers have their eye on, biding their time before they attack.

For a high-level coalition of U.S. and Canadian troops given the task of rebuilding Afghanistan's security forces, the map represents something more than an impending blow to the urban insurgency. It is a long overdue sign that years of mentoring senior Afghan officers is starting to pay off.

Afghan security forces - police and army - planned and executed the series of early-morning raids across the city over the past week on their own [emphasis added]. By the time coalition soldiers found out about the raids, the Afghan forces were already in motion. Left waiting in the wings were their bewildered but pleased North American and British advisers.

"It's true mentoring," a grinning U.S. Army Colonel Bill Hix said.

For 19 months, Col. Hix has been at the helm of the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command [they have a blog, not very up-to-date, but take a look; these regional commands are under the non-ISAF US Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, more here and see also the CF's Operation ARCHER] in the southern quadrant of Afghanistan. His job is to use U.S. and Canadian police mentors to rebuild Afghanistan's police force, which he said was "destroyed by 30 years of war."

During his tour, he has fought constantly to extinguish perceptions - even his own, on occasion - that his Afghan counterparts are corrupt and incapable of self-sufficiency.

So it was with a mix of glee and disbelief that he attended a planning meeting in Kandahar yesterday for the next series of counterinsurgency raids, which Afghan forces unilaterally deemed necessary. Their goal is to flush the insurgents out of the city and destroy their weapons caches before the summer fighting season and the August election. Then they'll choke off entryways into Kandahar city to prevent the Taliban from re-entering, thus achieving - and, ideally, maintaining - some semblance of security.

"This was a surprise to the coalition, which I think was great," Col. Hicks said. "They are far more capable than we think or allow," he said, pausing to add a caveat: "That's not to say that they're ready to be off on their own."

Senior Afghan security officials admit as much. During a three-hour meeting designed to map out the next and most difficult phase of the raids, the dominant subject was the scarcity of police, which threatens to jeopardize not just the operation, but its aftermath.

"They don't have the numbers necessary to sustain security [emphasis added]," Col. Hix explained...

Solving that problem is a dilemma facing both the Afghans and the coalition forces. The current police chief has already hired about 1,000 more officers than he is "allowed" under a cap put in place by a committee of international stakeholders who are financing the police. Some European nations believe that police should be kept at minimal levels.

But General Esmatullah Dawlatzai, a former police official who is now a high-level administrator for the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, said the size of the force has been limited by the amount of funding from donating nations.

"The enemy is equipped better than the Kandahar police," he told NATO soldiers listening in on yesterday's meeting. "They have better weapons. Police weapons, if it is not better than the enemy's, it has to be equal," he said.

If Col. Hix has his way, Kandahar city will soon have 3,000 police officers, about double the number it has now. And against the wishes of his European counterparts, they would all be trained in counterterrorism tactics and carry AK-47s, another bone of contention between U.S. forces and some NATO allies.

"They want them to be normal policemen," said Col. Hix, shaking his head and citing examples from a few years ago, when poorly armed police were routinely slaughtered by insurgents.

"Now when the Taliban come after these guys, they can give it back to 'em," he said, adding: "That's progress. It's ugly progress. But it's progress."..

Those Euros...excerpt from near the end of a July 2008 post:

*The police need to be paramilitary; in 2007 three times as many were killed as army personnel--but the Europeans are nonetheless uncomfortable with the paramilitary role (and have done nowhere near enough in training police).