Canadian police working with Afghans in Kandahar City/EU police Update

Out in the mean streets--more good stuff from Mitch Potter of the Toronto Star:

Walking the beat with Canadian police in Afghanistan

When the paramount concern is death by Taliban suicide attack, the little things go unnoticed.

So small wonder that nobody – not the Canadian police, nor the American MPs [from the 97th Military Police Battalion, more here and here], nor even the Afghan cops – was aware of the pungent little plant at their feet Tuesday afternoon as they stepped with considerable relief back inside the bomb-pocked walls of the Afghan Provincial Police Headquarters in downtown Kandahar.

Together, they had just completed an extended foot patrol through the heart of the city the Taliban vows will soon be theirs again. They rubbed shoulders with hundreds upon hundreds of Kandaharis – everyday people far more accustomed to soldiers barging through town in hermetically sealed armoured vehicles.

And from the Toronto Star’s vantage, a good three-quarters of Kandahar was happy to meet them face to face, eye to eye. Better this than being run off the road by a convoy of LAVs. There were many smiles, waves and friendly “Salaams.” Bakers handed out flatbread fresh from the oven to the passing patrol. One woman even reached beneath her burqa, wagging a hand of welcome...

...crucially, there were newly minted Afghan police in the mix, all graduates [more here] of the Canadian-led training program at nearby Camp Nathan Smith, where RCMP, OPP, even Toronto cops still toil in relative obscurity...

...For several days now, the small gaggle of reporters here at Camp Nathan Smith have been subjected to bit of a dog-and-pony show on the wonders of police training – well-intentioned Canadian police officers leading us from the classroom to the firing range, assessing with carefully scripted enthusiasm the six-week course that currently is transforming some 50 young and job-hungry Afghan men into fully fledged policemen.

And truth be told, things look better than they did some two years ago, when Kandaharis complained the then payless and endemically corrupt police were robbing them blind. For starters and most importantly, pay reform is starting to work for the cops of Kandahar City (if not the outlying districts) – the rank and file now receive regular monthly stipends of 12,000 to 15,000 Afghanis ($260 to $325), more than enough to live on without shaking down the citizenry for their daily bread.

What is especially striking is the extent to which the Canadian police mentors [more here] have extended their own footprint – volunteers from cop-shops across Canada now are venturing out regularly to all 12 Kandahar police substations to monitor the progress of their newly minted trainees. In so doing, they are taking chances far beyond what the rest of the NATO civilian police mentors do.

A case in point: Toronto Police Service Const. Amir Butt (one of 11 Toronto police in the program [in Kandahar and Kabul]) two days ago ventured out to dangerous District 9, a transient-filled patch of the city, when word came that a batch of his graduates had uncovered an IED...

Two years ago a chronic Kandahari complaint was the lack of Pashtoons in a police force dominated by Afghanistan’s more northern ethnicities – Uzbek, Tajik, Hazara. The current crop of trainees includes 33 Pashtoons in a class of 50 [emphasis added]. The other 17, all Dari-speakers, learn in their own language – thus two sets of teachers offering guidance in both languages...

But now the caveats. For all the Canadian bravado – there was even a Mountie from Ottawa walking alongside the Afghan police in Tuesday’s precarious foot patrol – the reality is a full 50 per cent of the police trainees are illiterate, incapable of reading or writing in either language...

Privately, one senior Canadian development official here told the Star he feels disgust at how the detainee saga has consumed every molecule of oxygen on Canada’s role in the country [more here]. “It’s the only f—king story and it makes me sick. People have put their lives on the line to do so many other things that have gone completely unnoticed. It has made a lot of us bitter and twisted.”..

Now I find that ability to walk the streets significant in view of recent reports on the Talibs' growing grip on the city. See also Mitch Potter earlier on the CF in the city.

Update: Meanwhile, up in Kabul, the Euros are at work (great uniforms):

Buildup of top Afghan police seen as key for NATO
...
Fifty cadets became lieutenants last week in the Afghan National Civil Order Police, the first alumni of a 22-week program to train a force modeled on European police services such as French gendarmes and Italian carabinieri.

Officials say the graduates of the European Gendarmerie Force program [more here and here will play a key role as the elite of "Afghanistan's finest" in a country badly in need of reliable, competent and respected police.

The ANCOP, one of six categories of Afghan police, is considered the brightest spot in what is largely an otherwise troubled force beset by an array of ills including corruption, drug use, illiteracy and desertion...

...the class was all male [surprise?] and most were ethnic Tajiks...

Via GAP at Milnet.ca. Here's the site of the broader EUPOL Afghanistan.