Policing Afghanistan

[Jane Nice]

Shir Mohammed Akhundzada: former governor of Helmand.

He is from the Akhundzadas family in Helmand who played an important role from the very beginning of the conflict in the southwest. Belonging to main tribe of Helmand, the Alizais, they hailed from Musa Qala district in northern Helmand.

While in the new districts of Nad Ali and Nawa, where farmers tended to be immigrants from mixed tribal backgrounds and tribal rhetoric had little impact, in the other districts tribal networks remained much more solid, especially in the north. It was first Mullah Mohammad Nasim Akhundzada who became a prominent and leading Jihadi commander in Helmand. The information available on Nasim is contradictory. He appears to have been a relatively charismatic military leader, who could count on a large number of devoted fighters. He is still seen as having led many successful battles against the Russians and Afghan government forces, although the extent of his actual success has probably been exaggerated, particularly as far as the Soviet Army is concerned.

Consequently he was able to clear most areas of Helmand, Arozgan, Farah and Kandahar (Southern Afghanistan) from Red force and their partners.

After defeating the Red Forces his first step was to eliminate illicit poppy cultivation in the area that highly affected/encouraged the society to its top backwardness and this was the time Helmand diverted the focal attention of UN and other international organizations.

Lately he was selected Loy Drastiz (Top Commander) of Mujahidin transitional government and this was the time he had been called to Peshawar in order to conference gathering of all Mujahidin leaders.

Aforementioned poppy issues held and focused the oppositions of universal mafia and national warlord smugglers against him simultaneously he arrived to Peshawar and assaults for killing him were successful on 25-march-1990 with his strong commanders including Nazar Mohammad of Musa Qala.

The nexus selects alternatively his elder brother Star General Alhaj Mohammd Rasul Akhundzada as his army leader and was able to capture Lashkergah city center of Helmand and was selected as governor of this province in 13-June-1393 on the behalf of central (Kabul) government.

Besides pursuing the manner of Nasim Akhundzada and paying a special attention for the basis remained from previous governments, Rasul Akhundzada attempted for the gas pipeline projects going to Pakistan from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and could offer a special beneficiary to Afghan government and specially South West region of the country and this was all done by him because he had this region under the coverage his mandate but unfortunately he was died on 5-sep-1994 due to the cancer sickness he already had.

Instead of him his younger brother was selected as governor in 6th Dec- 1994.
18th march 2000 was date that he was died by unknown warlords in Quetta City of Pakistan as well.

Their family series has been disconnected from the government until the Talibans get defeated by present afghan government in support of foreign forces.

This was the time when son of Mohammad Rasul Akhundzada Alhaj Shir Mohammad Akhundzada came up with a strong tribal force to Afghanistan and became alternative of his father (Helmand governor) in the an occasion that Helmand was a strong base of support for the Taliban in previous years, so it felt to more need in order to accomplish.

And when he set as governor he had many outputs in educational sector and security which were prioritized requirements.

114,000 students were educating in various areas of the province from which an amount of 19000 generated females.

2500 teachers, who were teaching from which an amount of 260 were female teachers that was an unprecedented promotion seemed in education yet.

The third priority that diverted the attention of the world was narcotics hence he started his attempts for anti-narcotics that highly caused encourage him with preferential certificates requested by ministry of anti-narcotics from the side of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Generally the time of his government in Helmand covered all district with safe security except using the foreign forces due to keeping an organizational equality among various tribes in the province that strongly supported him.

Talking to journalists in Kabul, Shir Muhammad Akhundzada claimed that while he was governor of Helmand for four years, NATO did not drop a single bomb on the province, no civilians were killed, and no districts fell to the Taliban. “If I were still there, I am sure things would be the same as before.”



He had identified some fundamental projects to be implemented and applied in Helmand like constructing a canal from Kajaki dam to irrigate north Helmand and Zamindawar, constructing and intake on Musa Qala River, constructing Kamal Khan (Nemroz) intake and irrigate the unproductive farms that could basically sophisticate the power of life in the people with a huge amount of beneficiary.

Unfortunately nevertheless central government and UN didn’t notify these requests moreover gave the opportunity for international and national mafia for his blaming attempts and this is the cause today he is a member of Afghanistan Senate at present.

Besides all these a 5 years plan for Helmand reconstruction was shared with the UN but still it hadn’t been considered anyway what he did with lack of governmental facilities are more than which could be expected like electricity supply to the whole province that can change the life a moment.

Actually all this happened because the mafia never left him alone and the story is that ISI (Pakistan Intelligence) was in Arozgan (border province with Helmand) and they were interested to operate in Helmand because the natural background was more propitious in Helmand for them and they could never reach the target in Akhundzada’s presence, therefore they endeavored to blame/change him.

Since he left Helmand, the atmosphere has daily being scarier and precarious security situation covered 80% of the province.

Akhundzada is a powerful tribal leader in the area and Karzai is convinced his return would help the government reassert control.

“We removed Akhundzada on the allegation of drug-running, and delivered the province to drug runners, the Taliban, to terrorists, to a threefold increase of drugs and poppy cultivation,” he said. “Now there are hundreds of tons of heroin in basements across Helmand.”

Karzai believes Akhundzada’s powerful militia would beat back the Taliban, allowing British troops to focus on winning “hearts and minds”

Security analysts in the country say the situation has become “even direr”. While not taking territory, the Taliban is terrorizing the population, targeting roads and restricting the government’s ability to function.

 

[batmannow]

Corruption Undercuts Hopes for Afghan Police

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: April 8, 2009
The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

GHAZNI, Afghanistan — As part of his new strategy for Afghanistan, President Obama has announced plans to send 4,000 more American troops this spring to train the Afghan National Police and Army.
Graft has left the Afghan police ineffective and undersupplied. An officer in Ghazni Province, above, was issued only one magazine of ammunition for his rifle.
But a shortage of American trainers is only one factor hampering the Afghan police. If the experience of the American troops already training police officers in Ghazni Province is any indication, better policing may be impossible for Afghanistan unless government officials at all levels stop cannibalizing their civil administration and police force for a quick profit.

In two weeks of interviews in this mountainous region of poor farmers and shepherds, exasperated American soldiers said it was hard to determine which was their more daunting opponent — the few thousand Taliban who ruled villages through a shadow government of mullahs, or corruption so rife that it had deeply undercut efforts to improve the police and had destroyed many Afghans’ faith in government.

That lack of trust, coupled with the absence of security forces in almost all villages, further strengthens the hand of the Taliban as the only real power here. Ghazni’s experience shows the challenge that corruption presents to efforts to establish better policing throughout the country.

The list of schemes that undermine law enforcement is long and bewildering, according to American and Afghan officers who cite some examples: police officials who steal truckloads of gasoline; judges and prosecutors who make decisions based on bribes; high-ranking government officials who reap payoffs from hashish and chromite smuggling; and midlevel security and political jobs that are sold, sometimes for more than $50,000, money the buyers then recoup through still more bribes and theft.

In some cases the American officers requested that their names not be used when discussing specific allegations or that the titles of certain Afghan government and police leaders be withheld, since it would otherwise make it impossible to work with these officials, an important part of their mission.

But the frustration was palpable as they described the enormous corruption running the length of the civilian administration in this province of 1.3 million people, whose capital, Ghazni, lies 80 miles southwest of Kabul.

Referring to one corrupt and high-ranking government official he sees routinely, Maj. Randy Schmeling, a 43-year-old Army National Guardsman who commands the American police mentoring teams in Ghazni, said, “I’d like to break down his door, stomp on his chest, point my 9-millimeter at his head and say, ‘Stop what you are doing!’ ”

Some of the troops’ Afghan colleagues recognize the problem, too. “In every office there is corruption,” said Col. Mohammed Zaman, the departing provincial police chief. “It’s not only prosecutors and judges.”

“This is the reason no one accepts the rule of law,” he said, “because the government is not going by the rule of law.”

The result is an ineffective and woefully undersupplied Afghan police force and a frustrating lack of justice for Afghans. Worse still, by comparison with the government’s exercise of authority, the law imposed by the Taliban is far more certain — quick and clear, if ruthless.

“The appointed officials and elected officials, the people don’t trust them, and they don’t trust them with good reason,” Major Schmeling said. “They take from them and they give nothing back.”

He added: “Right now, there is no meritocracy here. It’s, ‘Hey, your sister has a pretty mouth — do you want to be a general?’ ”

That culture of corruption affects everything: promotions, assignments, the resolution of cases. As one example, Major Schmeling pointed to a police officer who a year ago was a lowly patrolman and gate guard. Then, he said, the policeman scraped together the money for a new job: a top noncommissioned officer on the provincial police force.

“As long as people are buying themselves into positions like that, the people will never trust the system,” the major said.

To those buying jobs, the payments are an investment they intend to recover, along with a profit. Jobs that bring more money, like posts near the Kabul-Kandahar highway that allow opportunities for extorting truckers and smugglers, sell for a premium, soldiers here say.

But in the process, honest officials are passed over or punished. “You could say that the corruption you are involved in is an investment in your future, and your family’s future,” said First Lt. Craig Porte, a military intelligence officer in Ghazni, who said it was “fairly common to buy your position” in government. “If you are not involved in corruption, you are seen as an enemy of those who are, which has a tendency to get you fired.”
Many soldiers question whether anything will ever change. “The corruption here is a bigger threat to a stable government than the Taliban,” said First Sgt. John Strain, the senior noncommissioned officer on the American unit training the Ghazni police.

“If we stay here another year, or another 50 years, I think it’ll probably only take two to three years after we are gone until it reverts to the way it was right before we got here,” he added. “To have to admit that when you look at these kids,” he said, referring to Afghanistan’s children, “it really breaks your heart, to think that what you are doing is probably not going to turn out to be a hill of beans.”

Extortion by police officers is common. But there is fraud and swindling up the chain of command, too. Several police officials are part of a group that has been stealing thousands of gallons of gasoline a month, a major reason some districts receive less than half their allotments, said American officers, who are mostly powerless to do anything but report corruption to their superiors.

As a measure of the corruption, the American officers said, one senior provincial official recently paid $50,000 to free a kidnapped relative — about five times his annual salary.

American officers described another Ghazni provincial police official who had a lucrative side business: coercing police officers to sign requisitions for far more weapons than they actually needed. Then the official would keep the extra weapons and sell them, sometimes to the Taliban. The official was killed recently, officers said.

In some places, government officials are believed to have paid off Taliban fighters to limit attacks, allowing smuggling that benefits provincial officials to continue without interference, several American and Afghan officials from Ghazni said.

In this swindle, provincial “bodyguards” demand protection money from smugglers, anywhere from $400 to $2,000 per truck, for safe passage through Ghazni, said a Ghazni police official recently forced out of his job.

“High-ranking officials in Ghazni have immunity from the law,” said the official, who feared retribution and agreed to speak only if he was not identified. Likening many provincial officials to a criminal mafia, he added, “People have no choice but to go to the Taliban to solve their problems.”

Indeed, in Ghazni’s impoverished villages, where the light brown of clay walls and mud homes is broken only by green plots of winter wheat, the Taliban exploit the widespread sense that the government does not serve people. When the Taliban were in power in the 1990s, corruption and official bribery were more limited.

The lack of competent civilian authority aids the insurgents. Afghan Army officers trained by Maj. Daren Runion “don’t like the Taliban,” he said. But some believe “that in some ways parts of their rule were better.”

Police officers from a handful of Ghazni districts have gone through an intensive eight-week training course and returned to their districts to be overseen by American mentors. Nationwide, more than 3,000 police officers have gone through the course, a linchpin of the American effort to expand the police.

The new training has helped the police on the ground. Patrolmen are more alert, with better weapons discipline and less absenteeism, American officers here say.

But with little support from the government, most police forces remain a trivial presence in villages, marshaling their meager resources just to protect district centers and their small outposts.

Even if the corruption were not so debilitating, American and Afghan forces would still face a sizable enemy. Major Schmeling estimates that there are 2,000 Taliban fighters in the province. “They still exercise the exact same control over these villages that they had up until 2001,” he said.

In Qarabagh, one of the largest districts, the Taliban use 40 villages as bases to dominate hundreds of other villages, said Qarabagh’s deputy police chief, Capt. Mohammed Younus.

Police recruits are easy prey. Twenty-four policemen have been killed in Taliban ambushes and roadside bombings in Qarabagh over the past year, Captain Younus said.

“We don’t have any presence with the civilians,” he said. “Taliban live with them 24 hours a day.” Residents take complaints to local Taliban leaders, not the police, he said. “They have a judge and prosecutor. The Taliban is active at the bazaar in each village.”

In Waghaz District, near Qarabagh, there are just 50 permanent Taliban members, among a population of up to 60,000 ethnic Pashtuns and 33,000 Hazara, said Abdul Azim, the subgovernor of Waghaz. Yet the Taliban do not need a large presence to dominate, he explained. Last year, he said, the Taliban took three men from their homes whom they suspected of helping the government.

“They burned the three men and chopped their limbs off with axes,” he said. “That’s why the 60,000 cannot beat the 50.”


Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.