OVERHAUL OF AFGHAN POLICE IS NEW PRIORITY

American military officials are carrying out a sweeping $2.5 billion
overhaul of Afghanistan's police force that will include retraining
the country's entire 72,000-member force and embedding 2,350 American
and European advisers in police stations across the country.

The new effort is a vast expansion of the current American program and
is the third significant attempt to bolster the country's feeble
police force since the American-led invasion in 2001.

Improving the police force is a key to defeating the Taliban and
salvaging the credibility of the central government, which is widely
viewed as corrupt, according to Western officials.

Maj. Gen. Robert W. Cone took over the Afghan effort in July after
revamping the training of American troops bound for Iraq and
Afghanistan. "I want in every district in this country the same kind
of full-court press," the general said in a recent interview in Kabul.
"I want to break the corruption."

Some current and former American and Afghan officials warn that
corruption, drug trafficking and rising lawlessness pose graver
threats to the government than even the Taliban.

Without a serious Afghan-led drive to end the corruption, they say,
any effort to improve the police force may well fail -- and many
hundreds of millions of dollars will have been wasted. But that is
something President Hamid Karzai has so far largely failed to carry
out.

One example they point to is Mr. Karzai's January appointment of
Izatullah Wasifi, an Afghan-American convicted of selling heroin in
Las Vegas 20 years ago, as the head of the government's new
anticorruption body. In news interviews Mr. Wasifi, whose father
supported Mr. Karzai against the Taliban, has called the conviction a
youthful mistake.

Also, a widespread public perception exists that Mr. Karzai's brother,
Ahmed Wali Karzai, is involved in drug trafficking. So much so that
Western officials say they have long urged Mr. Karzai to have his
brother leave the country, though they acknowledge that there is no
definitive proof of wrongdoing.

Rooting out the corruption in the force is a gargantuan task. After
leaving police training to Germany for the first two years after the
fall of the Taliban, the United States has steadily increased what it
spends on the task.

In 2005, the military took over from the State Department and spent
more than $2 billion on equipment and increased pay for the police.
Now, entire police units will be pulled out of districts, trained as a
group for eight weeks and then sent back in a top-to-bottom effort to
eliminate corruption.

Police corruption has contributed to Afghanistan's becoming the
world's largest producer of opium, according to United Nations
officials. Last year, after another bumper crop, it produced 93
percent of the world's supply.

The international effort to train a new police force, meanwhile, has
been beset by infighting, inconsistency and a slow pace. For the first
two and a half years after the fall of the Taliban, no systematic
police-training program existed outside of the capital, Kabul,
according to American and Afghan officials.

The United States focused on training a new multiethnic army and paid
little attention to the need for a capable police force. Germany
pledged to train a new force but sent only 40 police advisers to Kabul.

In 2004, the State Department hired a private contractor to train the
Afghan police. Afghan officials complained that the training program
was only two weeks long. The State Department said there was an urgent
need to train large numbers of police.

In April 2005, the Pentagon took over the training. At first, it
dispatched 300 advisers to the provinces, a small fraction of the
2,350 it now says are needed.

Some Afghan and American officials have complained that the Defense
Department is trying to militarize the police and use the officers to
fight the Taliban.

Military officials say that lightly armed Afghan police officers need
strengthening. Across the country, the military can drive the Taliban
out of areas, but the police cannot hold those gains.

The scope of the challenge that American officials face was on display
during a recent military operation in Paktia Province. In a village
outside the city of Gardez, Afghan police officers monitored by
American trainers searched mud-brick houses for weapons.

As they moved from compound to compound, one eager young Afghan
policeman searched diligently. Another was caught trying to steal a
pair of binoculars by an American adviser.

"Hey," said Maj. Craig Blando, plucking the binoculars from the young
officer's chest. "These are theirs."

In January, General Cone ordered 800 American soldiers to shift from
training the Afghan Army to training the country's beleaguered police.
Major Blando, a native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, leads a team of eight
American police trainers based in the town of Zurmat.

As in other areas, the police were far below staffing levels, with
only 24 officers patrolling an entire district, the Afghan equivalent
of an American county. Plans exist to post 108 policemen in the
district, Major Blando said.

He and other trainers said progress was possible and Afghan recruits
quickly "catch on" when closely supervised; but, they said, far more
trainers are needed.

"It's a good mission," said Lt. Steven Amandola, a 26-year-old Army
reservist and police officer in the Bronx. "But it's going to take
time."

Evidence of high-level corruption, though, was commonplace. During a
meeting between the top American and Afghan security officials in
southeastern Afghanistan last month, American officials said a survey
had found only 1,200 officers at work in an area where Afghan
commanders claimed 3,300 officers were serving. Collecting the
salaries of nonexistent "ghost officers" has been a long-running
practice of senior Afghan police commanders.

General Cone said progress was being made. Long-awaited changes are
already under way, including an increase in the pay of the Afghan
police, the depositing of paychecks directly into officers' bank
accounts and the reduction in the size of the force's bloated senior
officer corps.

After months of wavering, Mr. Karzai named a new attorney general and
allowed the removal of 11 of 14 senior police commanders that
international officials said were involved in drug trafficking or corruption.

Ronald E. Neumann, the former United States ambassador to Afghanistan,
said bold action, not more half-measures, was needed from both Afghan
and Western officials. Decades of war and insecurity have warped the
country's culture, he said. Unsure about the future, many Afghans
believe they must look out for their families first and take what they
can.

"You have a corruption of the entire culture of Afghanistan by 25
years of war," Mr. Neumann said. "It needs reform, but it has to be
societal as well as juridical, and that takes time."