U.S. Spent Over $21 Billion on Afghan Police, Got ‘Barely Qualified Mall Guards’ – By Fiona Harrigan (Reason) / June 10, 2022
New SIGAR findings shine a light on America’s dysfunctional efforts to train the Afghan National Police, which “actually contributed to increasing criminality” in Afghanistan.
After spending over $21 billion trying to train a national police force in Afghanistan, the United States splurged on equipment rather than focusing on institutional reform and churned out police trainees who were effectively “barely qualified mall guards,” per an international observer. That’s according to a sprawling new report published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that examines what went wrong in America’s costly and ineffective management of the Afghan National Police (ANP).
The SIGAR report notes that “two decades of conflict had left little to reform in Afghanistan” by the early 2000s. “The entire criminal justice system—from police to courts to prisons—had to be rebuilt, and with the help of a largely illiterate Afghan population.” The U.S. has no national police force and lacked any centralized standards or precedent to apply to the ANP. Training and advising fell to a piecemeal collection of departments and agencies, creating inefficient bureaucratic processes that butted up against deeply corrupt institutions in Afghanistan.
No effective, rights-protecting national police force has ever existed in Afghanistan. Both before and after U.S. involvement in the country began, the police had a reputation for arbitrary detentions, torture, and human rights abuses, which affected the Afghan population’s receptiveness to newly trained officers. But the Afghans trained in American facilities were ill-equipped to perform tasks necessary to their jobs. It was so bad that in 2007, one international observer remarked, many graduates of U.S. training facilities were like “barely qualified mall guards.”
