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CIVPOL Diary: Graduation Day
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By Supt. Joe McAllister
Kandahar, Afghanistan — This week I attended the graduation of the Afghan National Police (ANP) from their eight weeks of Focused District Development (FDD) training. Over 350 ANP crowded into a hot hall. The event was full of pomp and ceremony, with each Afghan General getting up to make a speech which was accompanied by frequent applause.
I was impressed with the graduation class. Once their names were announced, they marched up to the presenting general, yelled something while saluting, turned around holding the certificate up to the crowd, yelled some more words and marched off.
We had two of our guys embedded at the school. This allows us to bond with the teams we will be mentoring out in the city, and it gives a civilian policing touch to the program. The guys did a great job and are very well respected at the school. So far, in the south alone, the school has trained over 1,200 students and the south only has 6,000 police.
click to enlarge
A Canadian CIVPOL congratulates an Afghan National Police officer at the graduation ceremony.
Photo courtesy of Lucas Robinson
The entire city of Kandahar, with 10 precincts and the headquarters are now all under police mentorship. All the police have been trained and issued new gear. This will be the critical six months we have been waiting for and hopefully with the new CIVPOL we are expecting in November, we'll be moving ahead in great strides.
We have also embedded our guys with the Police Mentoring Teams (PMTs) in the city. The PMTs have the counter-insurgency skills, we have the policing skills and we may even get DynCorp in with us sooner rather than later to work logistics. That is the ideal model I have been pushing with the PMT lead mentor. He gets it, so I think it will happen. Our guys will be living with the PMTs in bases around the city and that will be a good thing for team building and work schedules.
The big challenges with our ANP are still literacy and keeping them fully supplied, because the logistics chain is still somewhat challenged. In the past six months they have had over 50 trucks blown up by IEDs and not one replaced. We are also still having challenges getting fuel supplied down the chain as everyone seems to steal a little bit before it gets to the end user. So the 10,000 liters that is supposed to last a district for one month becomes 6,000 by the time it arrives. And then unless it is under strict lock and key, it goes missing. So we still have work to do there.
Recently through some good work we were able to get a corrupt district police chief removed. He had been falsifying attendance reports and collecting pay from officers who had been killed in action. So our guys, PMTs, and the Canadian Forces did a good job following the trails of evidence and I presented it to the chief.
We got a great number two guy into Panjwayi, but tragically he just got shot, so we may lose him. We are still losing over two ANP per day in this conflict, and unfortunately, we could be on track for a record year. The ANP, and many of us are asking for more robust training and better equipment for the police who are sent to the fighting districts. We will keep plugging away at it and putting pressure on, but there are numerous challenges to this at all levels.
Take care all and as always, thanks for your emails of support.
Joe
