Panel I of a Hearing of the Middle East and South Asia Subcommittee on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs

Statement

Panel I of a Hearing of the Middle East and South Asia Subcommittee on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs - Counternarcotics Strategy and Police Training in Afghanistan

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

REP. COSTA: Yes. You made reference to it in several of your comments about the level of improvements with the police force. And I had all sorts of anecdotal stories when I was there two years ago about the level of corruption, the lack of a payment system, passing the uniform on from a brother to -- you know, when someone wouldn't show up. What level -- because it seems to be, as you talked about the integrity of eradicating the poppy force (sic), having a police force that historically has been kind of "to the victor goes the spoils" and has not had a great level of integrity; given the tribal nature, whether it's Tajik or Pashtun, in the areas you're working on, are the police reflecting the tribes that are in those rural regions and gaining some level of credibility and respect?

MR. SCHWEICH: I think I can easily answer the questions yes, and that would be an accurate answer. But I think I'd like to give you a more complete answer than that.

The challenges to training police in Afghanistan are huge. And they're very different from the challenges we face in training Iraq police, which our bureau in the State Department also assists with.

You start with a recruit -- first of all, they've never had a national police system, so they don't really know how to do it, and they need a lot of education on how to establish a federal police system. But the recruits -- 75 percent are illiterate. When they come in the door, they aren't first trained to be police, they're trained to turn on lights and use plumbing and things like that. So you start from a very eager and enthusiastic group of people who have no background at all.

So the training has to be much more comprehensive than you would find in other countries where we train police. So you start with that.

The second piece is that the salaries are so low that they're susceptible to bribery, everybody at all levels. And the pay and rank reform process that's going on now -- which reduces the number of generals, colonels and majors but increases their pay; and then increases the number of sergeants and patrol people and increases their pay as well -- we think, will really be a major factor in rooting out corruption because it makes them less susceptible to bribery.

The final piece is you still have in provinces in remote areas not enough of an international monitoring presence to make sure these police are on the job and that their police chiefs aren't taking their money, and the (CSTC-A ?) (for ?) the military authority that we work with out there is planning to deploy more mentors out into the field to police stations to use this automated pay system we have and these national ID cards to monitor where these police are --

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source