Justice 101: A colonel’s push to revamp Afghan police

The World

Not 500 feet outside the wire of Camp Nathan Smith in the middle of Kandahar City, Lt. Col. John Voorhees stopped his convoy to send his medic to treat a child hit by a civilian car.

A baby-faced 19-year-old, Pfc. Nikki Hamilton applied sterile bandages to the scrapes on the seven-year-old boy’s face and walked his neck and clavicle with her fingers, feeling for fractures.

But he appears more shaken than hurt. When his mother arrived to take him home — Voorhees pulled the Afghan equivalent of $20 and handed it to the boy — “for ice cream.”

While it seemed the perfect display of a benevolent fighting force — the awesome might of the U.S. military, halted for the welfare of one Afghan child — there were consequences for the delay.

Voorhees missed a meeting of Afghan elders, known as a shura, intended to help diffuse the mounting anger over the U.S. military buildup in Kandahar province.

But the stop reflects the very gospel of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy as personally penned by its new commander, Gen. David Petraeus: Respond to critical human needs first.

So while helping the boy was an easy call for Voorhees — “I have children myself,” he sid, “I would hope that if I wasn’t there someone would stop to help one of my children” — what he sees as his real mission here will be more difficult.

“I want to go beyond security,” he said. “Security is not enough — we need to help establish the rule of law and the way I see it, that’s a three-legged stool of enforcement, prosecution and punishment.”

As a military police commander, Voorhees’ obvious role is to help set up a more effective police force in Kandahar. And while that will be a monumental task in itself — Afghan National Police are widely considered corrupt and unreliable throughout the country — Voorhees said he sees an even bigger void in the Afghan judicial system, the actual investigation and prosecution of crimes.

That void, he said, is sometimes being filled by the Taliban, which come into towns and villages at night, or during the day where there are no government or coalition forces to oppose them, and convene shadow courts, meting out their own form of justice.

This is how the Afghan Taliban first built a support base — capitalizing on the frustration and decadence of corrupt warlords by offering a “rule of law” alternative — Islamic Law.

Now Voorhees believes the United States and coalition partners have to find a way to offer an alternative to the Taliban, by reforming a corrupt system and making it work.

“We need to make the people understand that the government is an alternative to these shadow courts,” Voorhees said. “And that it’s the right alternative.”

That challenge couldn’t have been clearer when Voorhees met with Shirali Farhad, Kandahar’s newly appointed criminal investigation division chief. Voorhees learned from Farhad that out of the 150 criminal investigators for Kandahar Province — only 45 are literate. The vast majority of police detectives, Farhad said, can neither read nor write.

“I sent a letter asking Kabul for 10 more temporary professionals,” said Farhad. “But I’m not sure what will come of it.”

Voorhees looks over at one of his aides.

“Do we have any money?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. We do have money,” the officer replied.

Voorhees told Farhad he’ll not only push the request through — but he’ll also pay for the 10 professionals until they can figure out a long-term solution. Within moments he began riffing on that problem too, tossing out the idea of hiring literate people from the community who aren’t already police officers and don’t have investigative skills but that can be taught.

In another meeting over lunch with the provincial head of police, General Sardar Mohammed Zazai, and his section chiefs, Voorhees discussed reform within Afghanistan’s national police.

“The yesterday police is not the police of today,” Zazai said. “There’s a big difference. They’re getting training. They feel responsibility that they didn’t feel before. Day by day they get more professional.”

Zazai also said salaries for new officers have doubled from 6,000 Afghanis a month to 12,000 — a modest but livable wage in Afghanistan of about $240. The number of officers has also increased by 900, making the total for the province, which is one of Afghanistan’s largest, about 6,500 serving a population of just under a million people.

Today some of his men found a large cache of ammonium chloride, which can be used as an ingredient in explosives — a small victory for his beleaguered force.

But despite these advances, Voorhees said the Afghan police have a long way to go before they regain the trust of the Afghan people.

A tireless pitchman, he has ideas for that as well. Prior to deploying to Afghanistan he and his officers spent time with the Portland and Seattle police departments to determine how they developed community relationships. One of the ways was through service projects like delivering turkey to families over the holidays.

Voorhees wants Kandahar cops to do the same thing — delivering food to people in their precinct neighborhoods for the celebrations that end the fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

He’s confident that lessons from American systems of justice can be effectively applied here — in fact, he sees western cops, investigators and even prosecutors playing a role in mentoring their Afghan counterparts in a kind of “Justice 101” course that can begin the long slow process of putting the Afghan system back on course.

Voorhees said he knows he can’t rehab the entire Afghan judicial system, but he believes the human desire for justice is sometimes as strong as the desire for the basic elements of our survival.

At the end of the day, back at his office at Camp Nathan Smith in the middle of Kandahar City, Voorhees is still working late into the night. And while he may not know exactly how to deliver it yet — he knows what he wants his contribution to be when he leaves here a year from now.

“The rule of law,” he said. “If we’re going to leave the Afghans something — we have to leave them that.”

Afghan police officers find a stash of ammonium chloride, which can be used to make explosives, in Kandahar Province. (Photo by Kevin Sites for GlobalPost)
Afghanistan War, War Photos
An Afghan police officer in Kandahar Province. (Photo by Kevin Sites for GlobalPost)
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