Discovering the Soul of Policing in Afghanistan
named Hamid. His story, like thousands of others like his
throughout Afghanistan, is one of family, friendship, dedication, sacrifice, and the ongoing challenge of operating in spaces
where the risks and rewards are not always clear. But this is
more than Hamid’s story alone. It is also a story of leadership and policing development in an immensely challenging
environment. For NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan
understanding Hamid, and the experience of others like him,
is critical to finding the soul of the Afghan National Police.
A 2008 article in Time magazine summarized the state of policing in Afghanistan: “A long history of corruption has reduced
the image of Afghanistan’s police to little more than uniformed
thieves, which in turn fosters a general distrust in government
and a powerful propaganda tool for militants.”1 To address
the problem, NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan was
established in late 2009 with the mission, in coordination with
NATO nations and partners, international organizations, donors and NGOs, to support the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in generating and sustaining the Afghan
National Security Force, developing leaders, and establishing
enduring institutional capacity to enable accountable Afghanled security.2 The task, however, was easier said than done as
NTM-A was confronted with the reality of reforming a largely
illiterate force that was riddled with drug use, corruption and a
glaring lack of Afghan leadership.
To compound the difficulty, fewer than half of the Afghan
Uniformed Police (AUP) was thought to be trained, although
at the time, NTM-A had no way of knowing the exact numbers.
More than 60,000 Afghans had entered the force since 2003,
but there were no personnel records, no training records, and
no way to determine whether those who had received training were even still in service. What NTM-A knew for sure,
however, was that if Afghanistan was