When Australia departs Afghanistan, security forces made up of a number of police and army forces will take over their responsibilities in Uruzgan Province. It’s a mixed bag of capabilities and personalities.
When Prime Minister Tony Abbott made his surprise visit to the Australian base at Tarin Kowt to declare mission almost over, your correspondent caught a fleeting glimpse of Brigadier General Matiullah Khan in the background of one television clip.
Not shown - although it may have happened - was the PM in collegiate chat with MK, possibly because he was warned this would not be a good look, even though this tall thin Afghan is perhaps the most powerful individual in Uruzgan Province and central to ensuring progress achieved at the cost of 40 Australian lives and several billon dollars is sustained once everyone leaves.
MK could probably use the services of a good PR professional as his rep is that of a bona fide warlord, adept at tribal politics and patronage, a ruthless crony of Afghan president Hamid Karzai and among the richest men in Afghanistan.
Rich he certainly is, thanks to what a US Congressional report termed a vast protection racket whereby his private militia, the KAU (Kandak Amniante Uruzgan or highway police battalion) provided security against insurgent attack for NATO supply convoys travelling along Route Bear between Tarin Kowt and Kandahar.
According to one report, the going rate for safe passage was US$1,200 per large vehicle. Considering that most of what’s at Tarin Kowt got there overland - including fuel and building materials - that was a serious income stream of several million a year. However, with everyone leaving by year’s end, that’s mostly dried up.
In their time in Uruzgan, the Dutch would have nothing to do with him. By one story that stemmed in part from an incident in which Dutch soldiers died in an IED attack, allegedly a result of failure to pay the going rate for convoy protection on Route Bear.
The Dutch departed in August 2010 and a year later, Karzai appointed MK provincial police commander. The local police now number some 5,700, including around 1,100 KAU who are set to be absorbed into the police force.
Where the Dutch wouldn’t touch him with a pole, Australia and the US have been guided more by Afghan realpolitik than principle, have enthusiastically embraced this colourful character, helping cement his high place in the province power structure.
The Afghan National Police (ANP) aren’t quite what Australians would regard as police - a (mostly) disciplined organisation whose members enforce the law, arrest drunk drivers, investigate murders and much more, according to the requirements of an advanced western society.
The ANP is more a para-military force, embodying a variety of different specialisations. The primary group is Afghan Uniform Police who wear grey uniforms and carry AK-47s. Then there’s Afghan National Civil Order Police, an elite unit which is a cross between the riot squad and a counter-terrorism unit.
Then there’s border police, providing border security, and Provincial Response Companies (PRC), basically a SWAT squad with a counter-terrorism role. Australia’s Special Operations Task Group has worked closely with the Uruzgan PRC whose members often spearhead their operations.
At the bottom of the food chain are Afghan Local Police (ALP), a US-funded village level militia whose members receive basic military training, weapons and modest pay but no police powers.
They were formed to guard their areas against insurgent attack and to man checkpoints and as such are at the very frontline, taking substantial casualties. ALP members have also been responsible for a number of insider attacks directed against coalition forces and their own colleagues.
In terms of development, ANP are regarded as a couple of years behind the ANA and there’s a couple of reasons for that. From the outset, vast resources were thrust at the ANA, which has only recently started to demonstrate real capability.
As has been discovered in plenty of other missions, it’s much easier to build military than police capability because police, far more than soldiers, tend to reflect the faultlines of their society. In the case of Afghanistan, those include tribal loyalties, venality, corruption plus low levels of education and literacy.
Australia has done its bit, with Australian Federal Police officers training around 500 ANP since 2007. In Uruzgan, that training was done inside the wire of the main base at Tarin Kowt. A US Security Force Assistance Team has performed the actual mentoring, visiting remote police posts to assess how they’re performing.
It sure seems MK has created a loyal power base and being rich helps. For example, as a gesture for the Islamic festival of Eid, he outfitted his entire force with new uniforms.
For a traditional Afghan male - he has three wives and 13 children - MK does not come across as your typical Afghan warlord. For one thing, there are 24 women in his police force, few in number sure but he obviously sees they have a place. He also claims to treat prisoners nicely.
Uruzgan has its own police training centre designed to turn out a better class of plod. This was the subject of something of a power struggle between MK and the Ministry of the Interior in Kabul which wanted to transfer all initial training to Kandahar. That will now happen but Uruzgan will continue to provide specialist training in skills such as logistic, counter-IED, evidence collection and medical.
Under MK, there’s a sense that the police across Uruzgan aren’t doing too badly at all, although there’s clearly a big distance to go and pretty soon they’ll be on their own.
Out in the valleys, police posts are occasionally overrun, though Australian commanders say that means lightly armed police simply withdrew.
With ANA help, no police post has stayed overrun for more than 48 hours and that help is now more readily available thanks to the Afghan-run Operations Coordination Centre Provincial (OCCP) which coordinates security activities across Uruzgan.
Clearly the insurgents would prefer MK gone. A suicide attack on the KAU facility in Tarin Kowt in July was apparently aimed at MK, who wasn’t there. Australia clearly has a very significant interest in ensuring MK stays alive and effective.
“You can’t sugarcoat these things,” Major General Gus McLachlan, the senior Australian officer in the International Security Assistance Force, said. “This is a land of survivors, of tough people, of hard men and women and at the end of the day what we need are people who bring stability and security to the population. Matiullah Khan is one of those people.”
