A DIFFICULT ROAD TO AFGHAN SECURITY

Marines Face a Huge Challenge in Training a Reliable Police Force.

It's only his second day on the job after graduating from a police
academy sponsored by U.S. Marines, and Khair Muhammad is stopping
cars along the main road to the Nawa market to check for explosives.

An ancient Toyota rolls up, jammed with four men, five boys, a woman
fully covered in a burka and, against the back window, a small goat.
In a friendly but firm voice, the 20-year-old police officer orders
the men and boys out of the vehicle for a pat-down search.

Then he checks the glove box and underneath the floor mats -- as well
as under the goat. He waves the car on its way.

From 20 yards away, Marines express satisfaction over how Muhammad
is handling himself. "He's pretty squared away," Lance Cpl. Mitchell
Romero says.

He's also still an exception among Afghan police.

Plagued by corruption, questionable loyalties and incompetence, the
Afghan national police are a huge question mark as President Obama
dispatches an additional 30,000 troops to try to crack the Taliban
insurgency. Five thousand of them will be assigned to train Afghan
police and soldiers, reflecting the seriousness of the challenge.

In Kandahar, the main city of southern Afghanistan and the heart of
the Taliban movement, Mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi said he was outraged
recently to find out that some police were allowing Taliban fighters
to sleep in their barracks. Here, officials say they gave police
recruits drug tests. They excluded anyone who tested positive for
opiates, but acknowledge that they were lenient about hashish and
marijuana -- lest the district be unable to meet even minimal
recruitment goals.

Western trainers complain that Afghan police slip away from their
posts, spend their time taking naps or tea breaks, and malinger when
called to dangerous duty.

And they have a bad reputation among many Afghans -- bad enough that
the district governor wasn't happy to see the police in Muhammad's
group arrive back late last month from a nine-week training course in
the provincial capital run by the U.S. military and Virginia-based
DynCorp International.

"As you know, in the past, the police were corrupt and there were bad
things," said Haji Abdul Manaf. "Nobody wanted to help the government
as the result."

The arrival of the police in Nawa from the training center was not
entirely reassuring. Of 160 graduates from the Nawa district, 50
disappeared as soon as they got back. After a few days it was still
unclear where they had gone.

The police who returned were empty-handed. The Helmand provincial
government was unable to coordinate their return and the delivery of
weapons, vehicles and other gear they will need. Across the country,
Afghan police are almost completely dependent on Western troops for
weapons, fuel and other supplies.

The Marines here, eager to get the police to the four checkpoints
ringing Nawa, lent each officer an AK-47 assault rifle. As the
weapons were being handed out, many officers immediately checked to
see if there was a round in the chamber by squeezing the trigger, to
the dismay of Marines.

A dispute immediately broke out about plans by Afghan police brass to
replace one of the Nawa commanders. The commander told Marines he
feared he might be killed by police if sent to a new district.

Most of the police are illiterate. Much of the Nawa district force,
as was true of Muhammad, has been recruited from outside the area,
lured by a starting salary of about $180 a month. Muhammad hails from
Oruzgan, the next province to the north. Although no ethnic or
regional differences were immediately apparent in Nawa, officials and
trainers are aware of the danger.

There has yet to be much interest among the young men of Nawa in
joining the local police force, officials said.

The risks are considerable -- here and in many parts of Afghanistan.
In Nawa, police recruits expect to do battle with the Taliban. Much
of their training focuses on how to repel Taliban attacks and how to
launch a counteroffensive, tactics that are much more akin to those
of a military force.

Standing in line to get his AK-47, bayonet, and 120 rounds of
ammunition, 25-year-old Zahir Turkman, whose wife and young son live
in Pakistan, said proudly, "I have killed three Taliban. I will kill more."

Muhammad, decked out in his new gray uniform, plus weapon and crash
helmet, has yet to exchange fire with the enemy. He's sure he'll be
ready when the time arrives.

In many areas, particularly rural provinces such as this, there are
no Afghan army units. Isolated, lightly staffed and poorly armed
police posts are magnets for insurgent attacks. Casualty rates for
police are considerably higher than for Afghan soldiers.

"We don't have the army here, so the police have big security
responsibilities -- trying to keep the highway safe -- and sometimes
they engage in direct fights with the enemy," said Ghulam Dastagir
Azad, governor of Nimruz province, which borders Helmand in far
southwestern Afghanistan.

Seven regional training centers, with 800 military personnel and 700
DynCorp employees, are training the police on a district basis. The
process is expected to take several years. Army Gen. Stanley A.
McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan,
has said he would like to see the number of police increase from the
current 93,000 to 160,000.

Training begins at the basic level: Don't steal from people, don't
demand bribes, don't be brutal. Ethics training precedes even weapon
instruction.

"We focused initially on just being a decent human being," said Staff
Sgt. Donnie Hoskins, one of the instructors at the training center in
Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand. "Only later did we get into
tactical issues of how to be a cop."

A couple of days later, the Kentuckian was bawling out a police
commander for a number of transgressions, including failing to hand
out blankets to his unit that the Americans had provided, and not
telling the Americans where he was deploying his force.

While the Nawa unit was at the training center, a group of fill-in
police took its place, mentored by soldiers from the Army's 82nd
Airborne Division. With their return, the fill-ins and the U.S.
soldiers moved to another district to free up police there to go for training.

For the present, the new police will live in tents in the Marines'
austere outposts. Marines such as Romero, the lance corporal, who
learned rudimentary Pashto during a two-month course sponsored by the
Marines at San Diego State University, will watch them at checkpoints
and do joint patrols. The Marines have civilian advisors, mostly
retired U.S. police officers, to offer advice. There are also plans
by the U.S. and Britain to build police stations.

"We have learned to serve the people, help good people, not to cause
problems for people," said Abdullah Mohammed, 28. His new colleague,
Agha Mohammed, 24, agreed: "This is our country, we want to help."

Two days after the return of the police to Nawa, Helmand Gov. Gulab
Mangal came to the village to preside over a giveaway of rice and
cooking oil, a tradition of the Eid al-Adha festival. In a speech, he
called the police the cornerstone of his effort to rid the region of
Taliban and win people's trust.

Before Mangal's speech, several police officers had to be discouraged
from taking bags of the gifts meant for the poor.

"There will be some problems" between the police and the villagers,
Mangal said. "But there will be far fewer than before, now that they
are trained and professional."