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Gendarmen oder Räuber / Cops or Robbers?
Der Kampf um die Reform der Afghanischen Nationalpolizei / The Struggle to Reform the Afghan National Police
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
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
Cops or Robbers?
The Struggle to Reform the Afghan National Policeby 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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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