Die in Großbritannien angesiedelte Nichtregierungsorganisation Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) [im Internet: www.areu.org.af/], die u.a. von der EU, von diversen UN-Einrichtungen, von skandinavischen Regierungen und von der britischen Regierung finanziert wird, hat im Juli eine brisante Studie vorgelegt, die sich mit dem Ausbildungsstand der - zivilen - afghanischen Sicherheitskräfte befasst. Kritisiert werden insbesondere die fehlenden Konzepte der Besatzungsmächte und der EU (einschließlich der Bundesregierung, die sich der Ausbildung der afghanischen Polizei besonders verschrieben hat) sowie die Durchsetzung der einheimischen Polizei mit Parteigängern diverser Warlords der ehemaligen "Nordallianz" sowie mit (Drogen-)Kriminellen und Opportunisten. So steht zu befürchten, dass die gigantischen Beträge, die von internationalen Geldgebern zur Reform der Polizei in Afghanistan aufgewendet wurden und werden, im Korruptionsdschungel Kabuls versickern.
Wir dokumentieren im Folgenden -
einen Artikel aus der Wochenzeitung "Freitag", der wichtige Ergebnisse der AREU-Studie zusammenfasst,
-
die offizielle Zusammenfassung der Studie selbst einschließlich der wichtigsten politischen Empfehlungen (englisch).
Taleban-Jäger in zehn Tagen
Elitesoldat oder Krimineller? Bis heute gibt es kein klares Konzept für die afghanische Polizei *
Ein souveränes Afghanistan, das ohne Besatzungstruppen auskommt, braucht eine funktionierende Polizei, doch davon ist das Land weit entfernt. 2007 wird eine größere internationale Hilfe für die dortigen Sicherheitskräfte aufgebracht als zwischen 2001 und 2006, denn der Zustand der vorhandenen Formationen ist beklagenswert, wie eine Studie der britischen Nichtregierungsorganisation Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) zeigt. Cops or Robbers? (Polizisten oder Diebe) ist der Report betitelt, aus dem wir Auszüge dokumentieren.
Afghanistan besaß nie eine starke oder effiziente Polizei. Als die Taleban 2001 besiegt waren, nutzten Kommandeure der Nordallianz schnell das Machtvakuum und besetzten zahlreiche Bezirks- und Provinzeinheiten mit ihren Privatmilizen, die über wenig oder keine Erfahrungen im Polizeidienst verfügten. Als dann im Frühjahr 2002 eine Reform anstand, war die Lage mehr als prekär: Es gab kaum ausgebildete Einheiten - und wenn, dann unterstanden sie rivalisierenden Kommandeuren, verfügten über wenig Equipment oder Infrastruktur und sahen sich - wenn überhaupt - schlecht bezahlt.
Laut Bericht der afghanischen Zentralregierung von 2006 sollten die Sicherheitskräfte 62.000 Mann umfassen. Als im gleichen Jahr die Aufstände im Süden des Landes ausbrachen, wurde "vorübergehend" auf Drängen der USA über dieses Limit hinaus aufgestockt. Es entstand eine als Spezialeinheit ANAP bezeichnete Struktur, deren 11.270 Polizisten lokal rekrutiert wurden, ein zehntägiges Training absolvierten und danach umgehend ihren Dienst in den sechs südlichen Provinzen antraten. Regierungen aus dem Lager des Afghanistan-Hilfscorps reagierten darauf mit unverhohlener Kritik, weil sie fürchteten, statt einer zivilen Polizei werde eine paramilitärische Kraft oder Aufstandsbekämpfungseinheit heran gezüchtet.
25 Staaten kümmern sich seit 2002 unter deutscher Schirmherrschaft um den Aufbau interner Sicherheitskräfte, wobei die größten Zuwendungen aus den Vereinigten Staaten kommen, die allein 2007 etwa 2,5 Milliarden Dollar bereitstellen.
Trotzdem gibt es nach wie vor weder eine gemeinsame Strategie der Helfernationen noch eine landeskompatible Sicherheitsphilosophie für die Polizei: Soll sie zivile Gesetzeshüterin sein, wie Deutschland vorschlägt? Soll sie als mobile Kampfeinheit eine bedeutende Rolle bei der Aufstandsbekämpfung spielen, wie das die Amerikaner wollen? Dramatisch steigende Opferzahlen unter Polizisten zeigen: Schlecht ausgebildete und mangelhaft ausgerüstete Kräfte können auf Dauer gegen den bewaffneten Widerstand nur verheizt, aber keinesfalls erfolgversprechend aufgeboten werden.
Dennoch ist eine Polizeireform kein vorrangig technisches Problem, solange die Polizisten mit dem Innenministerium einer notorisch korrupten und in Grabenkämpfe verstrickten Behörde unterstehen, die auch in der Drogenökonomie ihren Part spielt. Bislang lag das Hauptaugenmerk beim Aufbau der Polizei auf Ausbildung und Equipment - selten wurde gefragt, wer dort wen trainiert und ausrüstet. Ein Provinzpolizeichef nennt das unumwunden "Diebe in Uniform stecken".
Natürlich haben oft drängende Ereignisse wie Präsidentenwahlen oder Aufstände zu Schnelllösungen verleitet. Nur verhindert - wer hastig und überstürzt den Polizeiapparat aufstockt - auf lange Sicht eine effektive Behörde. Noch schlimmer, viele Beamte vor Ort sind korrupt und schaden mehr als sie nützen. Steht die Polizei aber weiter in dem Ruf, bestechlich und kriminell zu sein, leiden darunter die Legitimität der Regierung wie auch die innere Stabilität.
Es ist allgemein bekannt, dass Afghanistan in naher Zukunft nicht die nötigen Mittel aufbringen kann, um seine Sicherheitskräfte allein zu unterhalten. Warum unternimmt dann die internationale Gemeinschaft so wenig, um die Kosten mit mehr Realitätssinn zu kalkulieren? Ein solches Vorgehen kann zu einem Zusammenbruch der innerafghanischen Behörden führen, sobald die externen Mittel versiegen.
* Aus: Freitag 32, 10. August 2007
The Struggle to Reform the Afghan National Police
by Andrew Wilder
(Full text: www.areu.org.af/)
Executive Summary
This paper provides an overview of the police
sector in Afghanistan, assesses reform efforts
since 2002, and identifies five key issues that
must be addressed if the objective of creating
an effective Afghan National Police (ANP) is to
be achieved. The resurgence of the Taliban in
southern Afghanistan since 2005 has contributed
to a belated realisation of the importance of an
effective police force, and resulted in an exponential
growth in resources for police reform
efforts. 2007 is likely to see more money committed
to the police sector than the previous
five years combined. This makes it an important
time to assess and learn from past efforts, and
to take advantage of the opportunity these additional
resources will provide to develop a
more comprehensive and effective approach to
police reform in the future.
Overview of the Police Sector
Afghanistan has never had a very strong or effective
civilian police force. Whatever progress
was made in developing a civilian police force
during the 1970s was lost during the more than
two decades of conflict that followed. Following
the defeat of the Taliban in the fall of 2001,
anti-Taliban Northern Alliance commanders
were quick to exploit the power vacuum and
filled many of the district and provincial police
forces with private militias who had little or no
police training or experience. The daunting
challenge confronting police reformers in the
spring of 2002 was to create an effective civilian
police force from an untrained force
manned primarily by factional commanders and
their militias, who had little or no equipment or
infrastructure, who were unpaid or under-paid,
and who operated within the corrupt and factionalised
institutional structure of the Ministry
of Interior (MoI).
The Afghan National Police (ANP) is Afghanistan’s
over-arching police institution, which
consists of the following forces: Afghan Uniformed
Police (AUP) who are responsible for
most day-to-day police activities; Afghan Border
police (ABP); Afghan National Civil Order Police
(ANCOP); and the Counter Narcotics Police of
Afghanistan (CNPA). In 2006 a temporary force,
the Afghanistan National Auxiliary Police
(ANAP), was established separate from the ANP
to support counter-insurgency operations. The
ANP operate under the authority of the Ministry
of Interior (MoI), which is also responsible for
overseeing provincial and district administration
and for implementing the government’s
counter-narcotics policies.
The 2006 Afghanistan Compact authorised a police
force numbering 62,000. The increase in
insurgent activities in southern Afghanistan in
2006 resulted in several “temporary” measures
to increase the size of the police force beyond
this authorised level. One controversial quick-fix
measure was the creation of ANAP, a force of
11,270 who are recruited locally, given 10 days
of training, and then deployed initially to six
southern provinces most directly affected by
the Taliban insurgency. By late 2006, the US began
strongly advocating for an increase in the
authorised ANP size from 62,000 to 82,000,
which was subsequently approved at the JCMB V
meeting in April 2007. The decision to increase
police numbers, largely as a result of the growing
insurgency, is not fully supported by all
other international police reform actors. Some
are concerned that the focus of reform efforts is
shifting away from establishing a civilian police
force to a paramilitary or counter-insurgency
force, while others have raised concerns about
the fiscal sustainability of increasing the size of
the ANP. An area where there is consensus is
the need for more policewomen — of the 63,000
police in 2006, only 180 were women.
International Actors and Police
Sector Coordination
The police sector in Afghanistan is currently
supported by approximately 25 countries and
several international organisations. The main
police coordination bodies are the Interagency
Police Coordinated Action Group (IPCAG) and
the recently established International Police
Coordination Board (IPCB). The UNDP-managed
Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan
(LOTFA) has primary responsibility for coordinating
support for police salaries. The European
Commission (EC) has been the single largest donor
of police salaries, contributing nearly half of
the $330 million channelled by donors through
LOTFA between 2002 and 2006.
From 2002 to 2007 Germany was responsible for
coordinating international support for the ANP
as the “lead donor” or “key partner” for the
police sector. During this period it contributed
approximately $80 million to support police reform
activities, mostly implemented by the German
Police Project Office (GPPO). In 2007 Germany’s
key partner role will be subsumed within
the overall umbrella of the newly established
European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan
(EUPOL). The EUPOL mission is expected to consist
of 160 police advisors, trainers and mentors,
contributed by 23 nations (including some non-
EU nations like Norway, Canada and Australia)
and deployed throughout the country.
Since 2004, the US has been by far the largest
overall contributor of human and financial resources
to support the police sector, with its
2007 contribution alone expected to be $2.5
billion. The US police programme is implemented
by the US Department of Defense’s
Combined Security Transition Command — Afghanistan
(CSTC-A), which is also responsible for
training and developing the Afghan National
Army (ANA). The main coordination challenges
in the police sector are:
- Achieving effective strategic coordination in
the absence of a common vision on the role
of the ANP and a common strategy on how
to achieve that vision. This makes it difficult
to extend coordination beyond simple information
sharing.
- Strengthening weak coordination between
the different security sector “pillars”, especially
between the police and judicial sectors.
- Managing the inherent tensions in a situation
where a very high percentage of overall human
and financial resources are contributed
by one donor, which effectively enables it to
dominate decision-making.
- Strengthening weak coordination between
Kabul and the regional and provincial levels.
- Strengthening the government’s ability to
govern and coordinate the security sector,
including improving government-donor coordination
and intra-government coordination
among competing ministries.
Police Reform Activities
Training and Mentoring
The main focus of police reform from 2002 to
2005 was police training. The central component
of the GPPO programme in Kabul was to
rebuild and re-establish the Kabul Police Academy
(KPA), which trains commissioned officers
in a three-year course, and non-commissioned
officers in a nine-month course. US support has
focused on providing basic training to fresh recruits
and serving patrolmen at a Central Training
Centre (CTC) for police in Kabul, as well as
at seven Regional Training Centres (RTCs). The
main police training challenges are:
- High rates of illiteracy and semi-literacy
among ANP patrolmen and recruits, which
makes it difficult to provide effective training
and severely limits the policing tasks
that can be performed.
- Weak or non-existent recruiting and vetting
systems resulting in little attention given to
who is trained, and little follow-up to determine
what happens to those who have been
trained. In some areas this has had the perverse
effect of strengthening forces opposed
to the central government.
The focus of reform efforts is now shifting from
police training to reinforcing this training
through mentoring programmes. The largest
mentoring programme is the US-financed programme
implemented by DynCorp, which by the
end of 2006 employed approximately 500 international
police trainers and mentors. Most
the 160 EUPOL mission personnel will also be
given mentoring responsibilities. The main police
mentoring challenges will be:
- Finding sufficient numbers of highly qualified
international police mentors, with an
appropriate mix of political as well as technical
skills, who are willing to work in remote
and often inhospitable areas of Afghanistan.
- Ensuring commitment to police and MoI reform
> from the top levels of the government
and MoI. In the absence of comprehensive
MoI reform, large-scale mentoring programmes
to strengthen the capacity of individual
police officials are unlikely to have a
major impact on improving the overall effectiveness
of the ANP.
- Ensuring that effective assessment systems
are established to determine whether the
mentoring programmes have enough of a
positive impact to justify their enormous
expense.
Equipment and Infrastructure
Inadequate police equipment and infrastructure
are important contributing factors to the ineffectiveness
of the ANP, as well as to the large
number of police casualties. Large amounts of
donor funding are now going into building and
renovating police infrastructure and donating
police equipment. The biggest challenges to
equipping the Afghan police are:
-
The lack of internal controls and accountability
systems in a notoriously corrupt institutional
environment.
- Finding the funds to operate and maintain
all the donated equipment, vehicles and infrastructure.
This problem is exacerbated by
the fact that 95 percent of donated police
equipment is non-standard, and some is substandard.
Restructuring and Reforming
By 2005 there was a growing realisation that
simply providing more training and equipment
to individuals who then returned to work in the
unreformed institutional environment of the
ANP and the MoI was having limited impact. At
the same time, the escalation of the insurgency
in southern Afghanistan led to greater appreciation
of the need for a more effective police
force. These two factors have resulted in more
attention and resources now being given to institutional
restructuring and reform of the ANP
and the MoI. The most important institutional
reform initiatives in the police sector have been
pay and rank reforms, which began to be implemented
in late 2005. The major objectives of
these reforms are: 1) to restructure a top-heavy
police force by reducing senior officer positions;
2) to institute a rigorous process for testing and
selecting officers based on merit rather than
personal and factional connections and bribery;
and 3) to increase pay to facilitate recruitment
and retention and reduce corruption.
The most important component of pay and rank
reform was instituting a merit-based process for
selecting police officers for the greatly reduced
number of officer positions. The selection process
ran into serious trouble when President Karzai
disregarded the recommendations of the selection
committee, and instead appointed 14
police chiefs who, among many serious shortcomings,
had failed the qualifying exam. After
an unusually strong international reaction, and
the establishment of a probation board to review
the appointments, 11 of the 14 police
chiefs were replaced. A major challenge that
remains is ensuring that merit-based appointments
and promotions are not circumvented in a
similar manner in the future.
Key Issues and Recommendations
If police reform is to succeed in Afghanistan,
and the big increase in resources to reform the
ANP is not to be wasted, the major actors —
especially the government, the US, and the
EUPOL mission — will need to address five key
issues.
1. Develop a shared vision and strategy for the ANP
The most fundamental issue that must be resolved
for police reform efforts to succeed in
Afghanistan is the need for a shared vision of
the role of the ANP, and a shared strategy on
how to achieve that vision. In particular, there
is a need to reconcile the “German vision” of
the police as a civilian law and order force, and
the “US vision” of the police as a security force
with a major counter-insurgency role. These
two visions, shaped in part by the US focus on
defeating the Taliban-led insurgency in southern
Afghanistan and the German focus on relatively
peaceful areas of northern Afghanistan, need to
be reconciled and consensus reached on a
shared vision that addresses the policing needs
of all of Afghanistan.
Given the alarming increase in police casualties,
urgent attention must be given to developing
alternatives to using poorly trained and
equipped police (especially ANAP) as a counterinsurgency
force. The role envisioned for the
ANP has major implications for how police
should be recruited, trained, equipped and deployed,
as well as for the composition and size
of the police force. The differing German and
US visions, combined with the government’s
lack of vision, are seriously undermining police
reform efforts.
2. Replace SSR pillars with an integrated and comprehensive rule of law strategy
The failure of the government and the international
community to develop and implement an
effective strategy for reforming and strengthening
the judicial sector is a potentially crippling
flaw of current police reform efforts. A civilian
police force, no matter how well trained and
equipped, will have little ability to uphold and
promote the rule of law in the absence of a
functioning judicial system. The failure to adopt
a more integrated approach to strengthening
the police and justice sectors is related to the
failed policy of maintaining separate Security
Sector Reform (SSR) “pillars” headed by “lead
donors” or “key partners”. This separation has
made success within each pillar hostage to the
enormous differences in the planning, funding
and implementation capacities of each lead donor.
The separate pillars also created barriers to
developing a comprehensive and integrated rule
of law strategy that would provide a coherent
overall framework within which the individual
sectoral strategies could be developed and implemented.
For police reform efforts to succeed,
there is an urgent need to develop and
implement a comprehensive and integrated rule
of law strategy, within which reform of the judicial
sector should be prioritised equally, if not
higher, than reform of the ANP and ANA.
3. Make donor assistance conditional on comprehensive MoI reform
The most consistent theme that emerged in interviews
for this paper was that without com-
Photo: Ministry of Interior
prehensive reform of the MoI, police reform efforts
will fail and the money spent on reform
will be wasted. The MoI is notoriously corrupt,
factionalised, and an increasingly important actor
in Afghanistan’s illegal drug economy. Since
2005 there has been a belated recognition that
the focus on training and equipping the police,
with little regard for who was being trained or
equipped (a process that one provincial Chief of
Police described as “putting uniforms on
thieves”), will not have much positive impact
unless the overall structure within which the
police operate — the MoI — is also reformed.
While significant progress was made in 2006 to
reform ANP pay and rank structures, a much
more comprehensive approach to reforming the
entire MoI, not just the police section, is necessary
if reform efforts are to be effective and
sustainable.
There has been a tendency to address police
reform as a technical problem requiring technical
solutions, rather than recognising that MoI
reform is first and foremost a political task requiring
a carefully designed political strategy
supported at the top levels of government and
the international community. A major failure of
reform efforts for the past five years has been
the lack of political will to proceed beyond recognising
and talking about the problem of a corrupt,
factionalised and criminalised MoI. Donors
should make their assistance more conditional
on comprehensive top-down reform of the MoI,
without which their contributions toward police
reform efforts are likely to be wasted.
4. Prioritise quality of police over quantity
There has been a damaging tendency to let immediate
issues, such as the presidential elections
and the growing Taliban insurgency, result
in “quick fix” solutions that prioritise the quantity
of police over the quality. A recent example
was the 2006 decision to create the ANAP to assist
in counter-insurgency operations. Such
measures to quickly increase police numbers are
undermining the longer-term objective of creating
an effective police force. While too few police
may indeed be a serious problem in some
areas, a more serious problem is that the local
police that are present are often corrupt and
ineffective, and as far as the public are concerned
do more harm than good. The reputation
of the police (as well as other local government
departments) as corrupt and criminalised is
eroding the legitimacy of the government, and
is one of the important destabilising factors in
Afghanistan today. Increasing the quantity of
police will only have a positive impact after
more progress has been made in improving the
quality of the police through measures such as
comprehensive MoI reform, more careful recruiting
and vetting, better training, strengthened
internal control systems, and stronger
links to a reformed judicial sector. As long as
the police are viewed as part of the security
problem rather than part of the solution, hastily
increasing the number of poorly trained police
to work in a corrupt institutional environment is
more likely to have a negative rather than positive
security impact.
5. Prioritise fiscal sustainability of the security sector
It is widely recognised that in the foreseeable
future Afghanistan will not have the resources
to independently sustain the security sector institutions
that are currently being developed.
Despite this knowledge, few concrete measures
are being taken to address the problem, and
few decisions are being made to bring security
sector costs more in line with what Afghanistan
can afford. Failure to act soon to prioritise the
fiscal sustainability of the security sector is
likely to have a crippling effect on the development
of other public and private sector institutions.
It may also have a negative impact on the
development of democratic institutions, and
could result in the destabilising collapse of security
institutions once external resources dry
up.
International donors must make more of an effort
to assess the fiscal implications of reform
initiatives such as the massive investments in
police equipment and infrastructure and the
decisions to increase the size and salaries of the
ANP. They must ensure that the planning and
approval of such initiatives are not just based
on narrow sectoral perspectives that are negotiated
with self-interested ministries, but involve
the Ministry of Finance and are based on a national
perspective that balances the often competing
priorities and demands of different sectors.
Prior to the JCMB VI meeting in the autumn of
2007, and prior to the recruitment of additional
police, the affordability of the JCMB V decision
to increase force numbers from 62,000 to
82,000 should be reassessed. Even if major costcutting
measures are introduced, international
donors will still need to make medium- to longterm
commitments to continue financing a major
percentage of the ANP’s recurrent costs.
Conclusion
Despite some notable achievements, the overall
result of police reform efforts during the past
five years has been disappointing, and many Afghans
still perceive the ANP to be part of the
security problem rather than part of the solution.
If the key issues that undermined past reform
efforts are not addressed, the major increase
in human and financial resources directed
towards reforming the ANP are likely to
be wasted. It is troubling that these issues are
all very self-evident, and for the most part have
been widely recognised as serious problems for
several years. The failure to address them, despite
the recognition of their importance, highlights
the serious inadequacies of the international
community when it comes to institutionbuilding
and state-building.
Afghanistan is unlikely to ever again have the
levels of international attention and resources
devoted to reforming the police that it has today.
There is now a unique opportunity to move
away from the multitude of individual police
reform projects toward a more coordinated,
comprehensive and longer-term approach that
stands a much greater chance of effectively addressing
the complex and difficult task of reforming
the ANP. It is time to clarify today’s
blurred vision on the role of police in Afghanistan,
and to achieve consensus on a common
vision and strategy for developing a police force
that will operate as “cops” rather than robbers.
Source: http://www.areu.org.af/
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