The truth about the Afghan police we are 'training' 'They take drugs, sleep, have sex with each other' By Benedict Brogan 34 Comments Comment on this article I’ve been out all day so have just caught up with this. The Independent today carried an extraordinary account from an anonymous soldier serving in Afghanistan on the horrors of training Afghan police recruits. Compare this to the quality of the five British soldiers who were murdered on Tuesday by an Afghan “policeman”. Is it any wonder the public is turning against this war? Here’s the key extract:“They had no understanding of the basics of what it means to be a policeman. We expected to be teaching adults at a certain level and then realised we would be changing nappies. Give them 20 rounds and they will hit the target once. The first time I saw them I realised that they had almost no training; some of them had very little ability. Their uniforms were dirty and didn’t fit. Their weapon-cleaning was non-existent.“They certainly didn’t have a concept of being upstanding members of the community. They had no loyalty, esprit de corps or cameraderie. That should have been incorporated in their training. They did have pride – because of the power and status they felt.How do you train this band of idiots and turn them into a force to be reckoned with if they have no sense of loyalty, no sense of belonging? The biggest problem was that we didn’t know who we were getting. There were no security checks – they were literally allowed to come into the compound and we had to rely on the local chief of police, who recruited them. We kept a close eye on them because we didn’t know or trust them – it was for our own security.“Perhaps half of them genuinely wanted to try to make the community safe: they had the right intention but the attention span of gnats. Twenty would turn up one day, none the next, then 15, then suddenly a new face would appear.“It was difficult just getting them to a basic level, to do things like man a post. They would take drugs, go to sleep, leave their post, have sex with each other. Very few were vigilant or alert.”   

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