Anthony Loyd
May 1, 2010

The battle was brief — a sudden stab of tracer fire into the remote police post from the surrounding mountains that left a US staff sergeant bleeding from his face, hit by a ricochet or fragment of flying rock. “It’s like shooting at ghosts,” the soldier beside him complained, staring into the silent darkness after the shooting had stopped.

At least the two soldiers knew which way to face — outwards from their gun position on the roof of Police SubStation 7, on the western outskirts of Kandahar. In the sleeping quarters below, a pair of Canadian police officers, sent there to help to mentor the Afghan National Police (ANP), had trained their guns inwards, on the door of their own accommodation.

“I don’t mind admitting it,” one said. “I thought the firing was coming from inside the post. I thought it was one of the ANP, a little unhappy with the way I spoke to him on the patrol today, turning his gun on us.”

For coalition troops working with the Afghan police, life has its unique strains and dangers. Five British soldiers were killed last year by a renegade Afghan police officer they were mentoring. American soldiers have died in similar circumstances. Afghan law enforcers, regarded as part of the key to stability, include the dregs of society — heroin addicts and common criminals — as well as professional officers. A word of criticism at the wrong moment, a perceived slight, a loss of face, can have fatal consequences.

Furthermore, corruption at the top of the Interior Ministry continues to ensure a system of appointments whereby many senior police commanders buy their positions for as much as $50,000 (£30,000) — and pay a monthly bond to maintain them to exploit opportunities for extortion and bribery along prime drug-smuggling routes.

“That system cascades down to the lowest of police levels,” admitted a senior coalition army officer in Kandahar, “so that we often find that the commanders of small ANP checkpoints have, effectively, bought their post.”

An extra 30,000 US troops are expected to arrive this summer in an effort to halt the violence in and around the city where a combination of weak governance, poor policing, a deep-rooted insurgency and drugrelated violence has grown.

For now, though, the situation for the 20 US troops in Sub-Station 7, members of the 293rd Military Police Company, remains typically complex. Their area of operations straddled two big vegetated areas used by the Taleban to infiltrate Kandahar. They had to juggle combat missions with police mentoring tasks in a slice of territory that included at least ten villages over an area of more than 35sq km (15sq miles). At least 30 of the 170 Afghan police they were training, spread among 14 small checkpoints, had been killed or wounded and 15 had deserted in the eight months since the MPs arrived in August. Most casualties were the result of roadside bombs, though one officer was shot in the arm yesterday morning only hours after the attack on SubStation 7.

Last week the Taleban used two children riding a pack-laden donkey as unwitting bombers to attack a police post in the neighbouring district. “They detonated the device at the checkpoint right outside the house of Fazluddin Agha, a famous elder,” police Lieutenant-Colonel Abdul Qadir said. “The children would never have known they were riding aboard a bomb.”

As well as attacks on the security forces, a wave of killings — by insurgents as well as drug gangs — has plagued the western edges of the city. “We found two more bodies by the roadside just a few days ago,” Lieutenant-Colonel Qadir said. “They were both well-dressed men, shot in the head and chest. One had a phone number in his pocket, the other a voter registration card.

“We worked out that one was from Kabul, the other from Uruzgan. But what they were doing here, and why they were killed, we may never know.”

Reflecting on the nine months of his tour to date, half an hour before Taleban gunfire split his cheek, Staff Sergeant Schaffer considered the various bombings, dead policemen, murder victims and a double beheading that had occurred during his time mentoring the Afghan police.

“I guess the weirdest thing I’ve seen here was the investigation into a missing farmer from Korcaran village,” he concluded. “It was the closest thing I’ve seen to normal police work. Last December a local family came here and told the police the man was missing. The police took a description, filed a report and looked for him. Beside everything else that happens it almost seemed normal — a missing persons investigation.

“Not that they ever found him.”

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