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  The Discount War: ISAF Is Failing in Effort to Secure Afghanistan on the Cheap

The Discount War ISAF Is Failing in Effort to Secure Afghanistan on the Cheap

By Ralf Beste, Konstantin von Hammerstein and Alexander Szandar

Part 4: 'Like a Band-Aid on a Chest Wound'

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.

General Dan McNeill, the American commander of ISAF, likes to entertain visitors to his headquarters in Kabul with small anecdotes from the everyday lives of the Afghan police. He recently instructed his Afghan underlings to set up 20 checkpoints along the road between Kabul and Kandahar. "Which police checkpoints?" a wide-eyed Afghan asked McNeill a few weeks after the initial order. "Oh," the Afghan quickly realized, "you mean the new tollbooths."

Wherever one looks in Afghanistan, officials are busy skimming off their cuts. In fact, police officers often exist only on paper. Local police chiefs line their pockets by collecting funds from the international community's coffers to pay the salaries of nonexistent officers. To add insult to injury, the officers that do exist are paid miserably to perform their life-threatening jobs. At the paltry salary of $70 a month, many police officers complete basic training and then promptly desert to join the private militias of wealthy warlords and drug barons, or even the Taliban. At $400 to $600 a month, the competition pays a lot more than the police.

The situation is hardly any better in the military. According to NATO statistics, 38,000 soldiers have already been trained with Western assistance, a process that will take years and is expected to eventually produce 70,000 soldiers. But these figures do not reflect the real situation.

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."

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.

This explains why Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak tells every Western visitor that what he needs most are weapons. A few Leopard 1 tanks would be nice, the portly general told CDU parliamentarian von Klaeden two weeks ago in an effort to solicit more German support, but the modern Leopard 2 wouldn't be so bad, either.

For NATO officers, Wardak's tank fantasies are nothing short of ridiculous. The general, they complain, only wants the expensive combat machinery so that he can stage an impressive military parade. Besides, they add, experience has shown that most Western weapons deliveries to the Afghan army quickly end up on the black market.

The results of the international community's reconstruction efforts have been so sobering that many, including Foreign Minister Steinmeier, are calling for a rethink of Germany's commitment in Afghanistan. Berlin cannot afford to continue its current policy, he explained in the summer. He called for a stronger German commitment, saying that more troops, more police officers and more development aid are necessary.

But such calls for action have done nothing to change the situation. The state of the police training effort remains miserable, while Defense Minister Jung is obstructing efforts to increase the Bundeswehr contingent from 4,000 to 5,000 men -- a move both the Foreign Ministry and the Chancellery have endorsed. The team of 400 military trainers Steinmeier wants to see sent to Afghanistan will likely be reduced to no more than 180. But he does see progress in reconstruction aid: The German government has increased its annual funding of the program from €80 million to €125 million.

For Bruce Riedel, a member of the National Security Council at the White House until 2002, all of these efforts, including those of other Western nations, are a disgrace. "We have tried to rebuild a country devastated by a quarter century of wars, invasion and terror on the cheap," he said in a recent interview. "Instead of a massive economic reconstruction effort akin to the Marshall Plan of the 1940s, Afghans have gotten less economic aid on a per capita basis than Haitians or Bosnians."

His verdict on the Bush administration's approach? "Like trying to put a Band-Aid on a chest wound."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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