Afghanistan’s Boys in Blue. With cops like these, who needs robbers?

[laststeamtrain]

Afghanistan’s Boys in Blue
With cops like these, who needs robbers? Our diarist meets one of Afghanistan's finest.
BY ANNA BADKHEN | APRIL 24, 2010

There have been so many police chiefs in the district of Sholgara in recent years that the people who live in this granitoid bowl of smooth mountains tapering toward the Balkh river valley in a mellow polychrome of fields have forgotten to count them. All that anyone can tell you is that Captain Ghawsuddin Tufal has been chief of Sholgara police for five months.

Who knows how long he will last?

The Taliban is not known to operate in Sholgara, but someone claiming to be a member of the Islamist militia has already called his cell phone twice to threaten to kill him if he doesn't quit. To protect a population of 100,000 he has a police force of 45 men. And three cars. And a sole police station on the edge of downtown Sholgara: a gravel-strewn compound suffocating in the sun where the men, wrapped in impressive bandoliers of 7.62 rounds, stand and squat along low walls all day, swatting at flies, while the chief chain-smokes in his tiny office.

<snip>

The 120 villages in his charge are a dizzying kaleidoscope of ethnicities, political alliances, family and village feuds so old that the sides cannot quite remember how they started. There is a lot of bad blood here; there is a lot of spilled blood. In the last three decades, everyone has fought everyone in Sholgara: The mujaheddin fought the Soviets; the Tajiks fought the Uzbeks; the Hazaras fought the Pashtuns; the Taliban fought the Northern Alliance; various Northern Alliance warlords fought each other.

<snip>

Generally, though, people here don't look to police for security. Anyone here will tell you: They don't trust the police. And why should they? En route from Sholgara to Mazar-e-Sharif today I watch a policeman at a checkpoint demand a bribe from a pickup truck with a camel and some burlap sacks tied to the bed with rope.

<snip>

From whom are you defending yourselves? I ask.

The farmers study me for a moment, trying to understand whether I am being deliberately obtuse.

Then, one of the men shrugs, and they say, in unison:

"Everyone."

<more>

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/24/afghanistan_s_boys_in_blue

[kenny blankenship]

1. yeah but Foreign Policy is one of those far left of the left magazines staffed by potsmoking hippies

nobody takes their pacifist mewlings seriously. They just want to embarrass America and deliver her on a silver platter to the communist Islamic terrorist Nazis.

I mean, pick any paragraph at random, read it aloud and the fictitious nature of the thing will jump out at you:

The fighting continues today: A few months ago, in the riverside village of Siaub, one former anti-Taliban warlord killed another. Provincial police drove down from Mazar-e-Sharif to arrest him; five days later, the prosecutors set him free.

"Let's put it this way: He has powerful supporters," Captain Tufal says, tweezing another cheap Korean cigarette out of the pack. "If I were to arrest him, I wouldn't last a day. This is Afghanistan, not America."

And here's another:

Generally, though, people here don't look to police for security. Anyone here will tell you: They don't trust the police. And why should they? En route from Sholgara to Mazar-e-Sharif today I watch a policeman at a checkpoint demand a bribe from a pickup truck with a camel and some burlap sacks tied to the bed with rope.

"Too little," the officer tells a careworn Uzbek driver offering, through a rolled-down cab window, a soiled, sweat-drenched green bank note: 10 Afghanis, or about 22 cents. A line forms. Men stuck behind the camel truck relax the grip of their steering wheels and rummage in their pockets for bills.

This kind of shaggy dog tale, full of fanciful happenings and preposterous names, is plainly calculated to make the United States government look like the world's biggest fool for backing these people with billions of dollars of borrowed money and with the lives of our young people. I can't believe it. I won't believe it. No, it is too far-fetched, too outlandish to be real! Foreign Policy has been smoking some good opium laced hashish - I wonder where they got it? It is a pipe dream, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, not a report of journalism.

[laststeamtrain]

2. The children are the future. Make it easy on them. Put in the :sarcasm: thingie.

The big backers of Af/Pak madness all have 'neo' in their name, neocon or neolib. Same difference.

There's your 'meme' right there. Run with it.

[saulmart]

3. It really is pathetic