The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [120]
The song “Bad to the Bone” came on. The gunner tapped his boot. Within the hour, we pulled up to the police station at Mir Bacha Kot. Two Afghan officers guarded the road into the parking lot. Neither had a weapon or gloves. One had the wrong boots. The American soldiers first took an inventory of the weapons to make sure none had been sold. They had already seen the corruption here—in another district, U.S. military discretionary money had bought a powerful generator for the police station. The district governor then took the generator to his house.
In the parking lot, basically a pile of rocks, the Americans then lined up fourteen Afghan officers. With all their equipment, the Americans looked like superheroes. The Afghans looked pathetic. Six did not have weapons because they were not qualified to have weapons. Of the other eight, only three said they had been to the main police-training center. And one was probably mistaken; he grinned wildly and raised his hand to every question.
The Afghans mimicked the Americans raising their weapons. The Americans ducked.
“They’ve had training, right?” one soldier asked. “They could have shot everyone.”
The police officers without weapons aimed their fingers and laughed hysterically. They leaned back as they pointed their guns and fingers. A U.S. soldier started going apoplectic because an Afghan soldier wouldn’t bend his knees. Another police officer stuck his rifle butt between his knees, pointed the weapon at his head, and started yanking on something inside his empty cartridge.
“Tell him, never stick his hand in his weapon,” a U.S. soldier said. He turned away and muttered, “Takes every fiber of my being.”
One Afghan officer jumped over razor wire, his finger on the trigger. Another, finger also on the trigger, leaned on his loaded weapon, muzzle on his boot—in years past, I knew of at least one Afghan police officer, nicknamed “Crazy Eyes” by U.S. soldiers, who had shot a hole in his foot that way. On a walk through the village, an Afghan police officer waved his gun at a baby. Another held his gun upside down with his finger in the trigger loop.
At one point I had to turn around, I was laughing so hard. The photographer was laughing.
“These guys are the best Afghanistan has to offer?” he asked.
“The Afghan police make me laugh,” I admitted.
Probably not the best attitude, but it was true. I also kept a video of the Afghan army trying to do jumping jacks, which resembled a really bad dance or an incurable disease. I often showed the video to Americans who thought we could train the Afghans quickly to take care of their own security and then get out. The Illinois soldiers would visit this police station once every few weeks for a couple of hours at a time. And then, in another nine months, they would leave.
The soldiers gave the police some concertina wire—apparently, they had done a good job—before heading back to Kabul, listening to Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning.” At a debriefing back at Camp Phoenix, some of the Illinois soldiers were frustrated. Training was inconsistent; none of the fifteen rolls of razor wire donated the last trip had been used; new AK-47s were still in boxes; all the police demanded flashlights. The police officers had to share the district’s only pen, that is, the ones who could write.
“What struck me is how these guys are supposed to be trained,” one soldier said. “Are you kidding me? These motherfuckers can’t even pivot. Don’t they all have jobs to do? I know at the last police department, we asked them, ‘Do you ever arrest anybody?’ ‘No.’ ‘What do you do?’ They’re like, ‘Eating, sleeping, nothing.’ I mean, what are they policing? This is another brick wall we’re running into. They aren’t doing anything.”
Everyone griped. Then the first lieutenant made a proposal.
“I was able to talk to the chief. He wanted to take one kilometer of wire up to the cell-phone tower. Then they can have twenty-four-hour electricity.”
Everyone looked at him, silent.
“You can’t do that,” the DynCorp guy finally said. “We’re trying to teach them about corruption.