Taliban turn gunsights to Afghan police
About 300 Afghan police officers have been killed in the past three months, making 2007 the worst year ever for the country's undertrained, underpaid police force.
from the June 25, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"What the police have to face them [with] are AK-47s, and, at the maximum, PKMs. That's it," Mr. Bashary opined, referring to a higher-caliber Soviet-made machine gun.
Critical posts in areas beyond the reach of multinational forces are harder to fill as a result, while many wearing a badge engage in graft and other criminal activities to make ends meet, eroding public faith.
In some districts with more than 100,000 people, there are just 25 to 30 police stretched thin by daily law enforcement demands – battling insurgents when necessary and lending a hand in drug eradication, something that makes them easy targets, say Afghan officials.
In what amounted to both a literal and symbolic blow to state authority, the June 17 bus bombing in the capital – the deadliest since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 – left at least 35 people dead on the doorstep of police headquarters – most of them police trainees.
In the span of one week earlier this month, a Taliban ambush in southern Zabul Province left 16 officers dead; a district police chief in eastern Paktika Province was killed when a roadside bomb exploded his vehicle; and militants attacked another officer's house in southern Ghazni Province and killed five members of his family, indicating the threat to relatives or those who cooperate with the police. Many officers have reported finding it difficult to return to their home villages because their police work has marked them as government sympathizers.
"Police working in remote places are in trouble. The ones here cannot feed their family or help themselves either," Hussein says, noting that the paltry $70 monthly wage policemen are supposed to earn is often $10 less once it passes through the bureaucracy. "A bag of flour costs nearly [$35]. How can we solve any problem with this?"
Such dire circumstances have the inevitable backlash of fueling drug-related corruption and predatory tendencies among police forces. The World Bank says low-paying police chief posts are bought and sold in bidding wars that allow the holder to tax poppy farmers and drug traffickers. In these situations, farmers who can't afford to pay bribes must often see their crops destroyed.
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