From page 103 of the UNDP’s 2007 Report on Afghanistan:
There are currently roughly 62,000 police, or one for every 381 Afghans. This ratio is roughly comparable with the police to population ratio of 1:370 in England and Wales, or 1:374 in South Africa. While the ratio of police to the population is within normal bounds for civilian police, it may be low given the conflict status of Afghanistan, and the need to establish peace and security for all civilians.
So Afghanistan actually has a kind of normal number of police? What else could be the problem? In a word: corruption. Corruption is the primary driver of police and government ineffectiveness, and the primary concern most Afghans want addressed.
More importantly, from the gushing journalist accounts of the military police trainers, being uncorrupt doesn’t seem to enter it—they want to give them retinal scanners, or fingerprint databases, or M-16s, or Humvees. It would be baffling, but I get the sneaking suspicion we’re not really there for their sake.
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The problem is far more fundamental than numbers, equipment or corruption: it has to do with what the Afghan police are supposed to do. Andrew Wilder’s report from last year for AREU titled “Cops or Robbers . . . ” touched on the essential question of what mission the police are supposed to have, whether to be a para-military force to battle the insurgents or a more conventional law enforcement organization typical of a stable, western society. The donors can’t decide among themselves, and it’s not clear that the Afghans are having a serious discussion about this.
From the point of view of most Afghans, the presence of the police in their region has little to do with law and order. In their mind the police presence represents a manifestation of central authority power that in their experience contributes little positive to addressing local criminality and social order.
So there’s a tremendous amount of work that must be done to sell the Afghan society on the role that police should play, to establish a link between a codified system of laws and a judicial system that has something to do with that system of laws, and most importantly, to the concerns of the people themselves.
Without having these matters worked out and presented to the Afghan nation and accepted by them, they will be indifferent and wary of the police.
It is far from clear what an Afghan system of justice that has any relevance for the Afghan people would look like. This doesn’t stop donors for sponsoring efforts to write laws, to train judges, to build court houses but this all is happening apart from and without any broad consensus on what a system of justice that actually will be effective will be. One huge issue is how to integrate the local and traditional means for resolving conflicts and disputes with a formal, codified legal system. And then there’s the question of Shariah and how that’s going to be folded in.
The idea that police can be put out into Afghan society, even if they are squeaky clean and will be able to be effective at stabilizing the system disregards the absence of these other essential elements. They are still inchoate at best.
None of this slows down the training programs and the money being poured into police and equipment for them, but this is really just throwing away massive sums until something has been done to establish institutions in which the police have a comprehensible role and which has some understanding and support of the Afghan people themselves, not just the participants at international conferences such as the splendid one held in Rome last July.
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