Of the many shortcomings of American strategy in Afghanistan, the trials and tribulations of Afghan police development represent a crucial, but often overlooked, piece of the narrative. When contextualized alongside monumental challenges and rare glimmers of hope, the legacy of Afghan policing also imparts lessons relevant, not just for the future of Afghanistan, but state-building and stabilization efforts the world over.

In 2001, the United States ejected the Taliban from power in Afghanistan without a plan to permanently fill the resulting power vacuum. Decades of warfare had badly depleted the nation’s human capital and already austere infrastructure while exacerbating fissures between its surviving political factions. International troops were neither equipped nor willing to permanently keep the peace, so the need for new Afghan security forces became impossible to ignore. Almost begrudgingly, the American-led coalition’s strategy expanded beyond short-term offensive actions against militants to include partner capacity building.

With the American-led coalition seeking to permanently prevent transnational terror groups from establishing a safe haven, the rationale for building Afghanistan an army of its own was clear. For the newly constituted Afghan state, delivering security and achieving legitimacy also necessitated an indigenous police force. However, due to the heavy burden of the insurgency that followed, the international coalition quickly pressed these would-be police into the role of a second-rate combat force.

Once thrown into the fight, Afghan police endured a punishing attrition that has seen approximately 37,000 Afghan police killed and made them the target of nearly 70% of militant attacks. Such losses greatly exacerbate the challenges of building and sustaining an Afghan law enforcement capability. All newly founded Afghan institutions have been plagued by dysfunction, but the Afghan Ministry of Defense and its army have at least proved capable of some improvement and even garnered public approval. Conversely, the Ministry of Interior has stood out as particularly dysfunctional, fit for neither the front-line nor the urgently needed task of policing Afghanistan’s communities and cities.

Despite extensive documentation of Afghan policing shortfalls from U.S inspector general reports and independent analysts, substantive reform has come at a glacial pace. This lack of progress is partly a result of internal Afghan political dynamics—particularly the administration of former Afghan President Hamid Karzai in adopting a clientelist model to high-level appointments and fiercely resisting counter-corruption measures.

Likewise, the American-led coalition deserves its share of the blame. The lack of forethought in building lasting Afghan security forces has left the overall training process in a constant state of catch-up, with the pivot to an advisory focus occurring as late as 2014. Instead, the first decade of international involvement overextended Afghan capacity by relying on large foot-print counter-insurgency efforts to expand the Afghan government’s influence with the aspiration of ejecting insurgents from all corners of the country.

In this phase heavy-lifting was done by international troops in hotly contested regions like Helmand, with the end goal of delivering the Afghan state a “government-in-a-box.” Once implemented, such an approach proved an anemic and unsustainable model that often collapsed after a draw-down of international forces.

During the hottest days of counter-insurgency, the decision to shift Afghan police from a law enforcement to a paramilitary role can be partly rationalized as a response to the threat the insurgency posed to any uniformed agents of the Afghan state. From its inception, an Afghan National Police force would need more than batons and badges to survive in a warzone.

Additionally, during the peak of offensive operations the high attrition of Afghan forces, and police in particular, made filling gaps a constant priority for international forces, who sought to one day extricate themselves from the conflict. This combat-heavy posture ultimately led to highly capable special operations forces, including in the Ministry of Interior. Additionally, even conventional police forces have shown valor in combat despite their lack of training and equipment. However, the overall emphasis on paramilitary capability left Afghan law enforcement woefully under-equipped to perform civil policing.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that a quality-over-quantity approach has been the most effective force structuring strategy in Afghanistan—as is the case with the Afghan army’s Commandos, Special Forces, Ktah Khas and Territorial Force, the Afghan Air Force’s Special Mission Wing, and the Interior Ministry's General Command of Police Special Units. When international military leaders are tasked with training and directing a police force, the tendency to revert to a combat-focused approach and get more personnel in the fight may be understandable, but it has proven manifestly counterproductive. If there’s any single mistake to learn from in the endeavor, it is that civil policing is not a second-order luxury that can easily be deferred.

When the decisive currency of Afghanistan’s future is the legitimacy of its government, crime is no less crucial an obstacle than militant activity. For the average Afghan, crime can constitute a far more immediate concern in everyday life. Afghanistan’s ongoing process of rapid urbanization has brought cities like Kabul from populations of 1.5 million in 2001 to more than 4 million by 2014. Such demographic shifts not only transform where and how Afghans live, but also their susceptibility to spikes in urban crime. These factors are even more destabilizing when police forces are themselves implicated in extortion or looting. Even when police act in good faith, reacting to robbery, violent crime, and land disputes requires more than an armed force; it requires criminal investigation and even mediation between the populace.

Attempts to meet the aforementioned demand for Afghan law enforcement capacity have been continuously disrupted by structural limitations of the international coalition, with the training mission repeatedly changing hands, from the German government to the U.S. State Department, and finally the Department of Defense. Whereas the Afghan military and anti-Taliban tribal forces benefit from a plethora of dedicated advisory assets, including U.S. Special Forces teams and Security Force Assistance Brigades, the low numbers of roughly equivalent expeditionary law enforcement advisors has often pushed the slack to private contractors with mixed results.

This shortfall indicates a yet unsatisfied need for a more responsive and restructured law enforcement advising capability—one which goes beyond the ad-hoc approaches of the past. Whether it is the United Nations or the United States in question, effective police training in nations at war, or transitioning from it, are continuously hamstrung by key deficits in cultural literacy, ability to operate under fire outside of secure areas, and the tension of civilian-military cooperation.

Effective civil policing also relies on the development of a functioning judiciary, which is no easy task to deliver in a country where geographic division and decades of warfare have greatly degraded the formal judiciary in favor of traditional and informal systems. As with the Afghan police, building the judiciary has fallen to numerous organizations including the United Nations, private contractors, and U.S. diplomatic efforts.

Although corruption and lack of capacity continue to gall Afghanistan’s judiciary, years of effort have yielded some improvements, raising Afghan perception of government accountability and of fundamental freedoms to figures on par with the average for other South Asian countries—a regional benchmark that provides a more applicable standard than direct comparisons to western nations. Even amidst their mixed performance, Afghans themselves demonstrate an outsized preference for state courts in cases of serious and violent crimes, indicating the potential for a division of labor between formal and informal judicial systems.

Enormous challenges notwithstanding, there is an upshot for the future of Afghan law enforcement. Embarking on a future road-map for Afghan security forces, the administration of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has taken steps to reassign paramilitary law enforcement, as the Civil Order- and Border Police, to the Ministry of Defense, while reinvesting in the core civil mission of the Ministry of Interior.

Greatly expanded biometric enrollment of personnel, as well as oversight programs like the use of Inherent Law, have also allowed the Ghani administration to spear-head mass dismissals of falsely enrolled, corrupt, or underperforming officers and appoint a new generation of senior police officials. These include younger, but high performing officers from special operations backgrounds, like General Khoshal Sadat, taking up the highest Ministry of Interior offices, as well as veterans of the Afghan intelligence service, like Massoud Andarabi becoming acting Minister of the Interior, along with Colonel Aryan Faizy, being tapped to head and reform Kabul’s Criminal Investigations Department.

Taken alone, retasking distinguished leaders from special operations and intelligence backgrounds is not sufficient to ensure development in civil policing. However, these measures do break a degree of dead-lock. Rather than double down on experience in offensive operations, officers like General Sadat have reinvigorated the Afghan police by tackling long-standing logistical issues and engendering an enhanced degree of accountability throughout the force.

Unfortunately, the cut-throat dynamics of the Afghan political elite present an ongoing threat to these reform efforts. In the case of General Sadat, a politically disastrous raid against Nizamuddin Qaisari, a strongman with great influence in the Uzbek population, precipitated his dismissal as Afghanistan’s highest police leader and reassignment to head a Ministry of Interior force tasked with security contracting.

As the winds of political fortune can quickly change in Afghanistan, the now marginalized General Sadat is far from out of the fight. However, this inherent volatility is itself the source of many endemic problems. Counter-corruption and the infusion of new leadership can only improve Afghan policing capabilities alongside the political will to apply the rule-of-law to all Afghans, regardless of their status. With international commitment uncertain, hope rests on Afghanistan’s next generation of reformers, who hold the key to developing civil policing along with all Afghan institutions that have been so long neglected at great cost.

Karl Nicolas Lindenlaub is an independent researcher with a thematic focus on asymmetric warfare, security force assistance, and sub-state militant groups.

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Header Image: Students at the Afghan National Police Academy in 2011 (Petty Officer 2nd Class Ernesto Hernandez Fonte/U.S. Navy Photo)