Interpreting | 2010.01.30
Irish officer attacks 'tribal' Afghan police
Army captain condemns conflicting loyalties and mistakes in war on heroin
An army officer who won the Military Cross in Afghanistan has branded many local police in the war-torn country tribal militias rather than a national crime fighting force.
Captain Douge Beattie, who once fought off Taliban fighters with his bayonet in Helmand province, also said the "war on drugs" was winning support for al-Qaida\'s allies in Afghanistan.
In an interview with the Observer 24 hours after the international conference in London on Afghanistan\'s future, Beattie said that deploying police officers from the same tribal areas they originally came from was leading to deteriorating security in the country.
Speaking in Belfast prior to a private lecture about the war against the Taliban, the officer, who has spent 27 years in the military, said: "In contrast with the police, the Afghan army with all its problems is doing a fantastic job. They have logistical problems, they lack air power, good equipment and medical evacuation facilities, and that is why the British should stay there to help them with that."
Beattie said he worked as a mentor with the police in 2006. "I am really disappointed with the plan for policing in Afghanistan. The problem with the police in Afghanistan, particularly in Helmand, is that they are drawn from their own communities.
"So you have, say, a Pashtun Alizai tribesman who is recruited into the police and trained by the likes of us who then ends up serving in the Alizai area of Helmand. If that officer is now manning a checkpoint and Alizai aligned to the Taliban who have known him all his life come up to him, what is he going to do?
"It\'s more than likely that officer is going to let that particular Taliban through the checkpoint with their guns and their explosive devices. That officer will be more loyal to his tribe in his own tribal area than his police force or indeed the government."
The Royal Irish Regiment officer drew an analogy with Northern Ireland. "This would be like taking a police recruit from Crossmaglen in south Armagh, then getting him to patrol in Crossmaglen. Imagine all the local pressures he would be under from republican dissidents he might have gone to school with, or who knew where he or his parents lived. That is taking place in Afghanistan, and we, the west, are facilitating it.
"The failure of policing in Afghanistan is a critical reason why the Taliban are scoring so many successes, why they are getting more support. The people like the Afghan army in Helmand, yet the army don\'t come from Helmand, but from other parts of the country. Yet the people don\'t trust the police – the relationship with them is truly horrendous." Plans to raise the Afghan police to more than 130,000 would not work unless the recruits were vetted and not deployed in their own tribal regions, he added.
The Northern Ireland-born officer also said that instead of destroying poppy crops – the staple that ultimately produces heroin – it should be bought off by the west and transformed into medical morphine. "On my tour of duty in 2006, I once stumbled across a farmer tending his poppy crop," Beattie said. "Through my interpreter, I said to him, \'Do you not realise that the extracts from your poppies are ending up on the streets of my country, where children as young as 10 and12 are destroying their lives with drugs?\' He replied: \'At least you in the west have the choice to take heroin or not. I have no choice but to grow the poppy. If I don\'t grow the poppy, my family and I will starve.\'
There were two approaches needed, Beattie said. "You need to carry on the alternative livelihood programme that encourages farmers to grow other crops, while at the same time buying the opium off the farmers and turning it into morphine, because if we continue the war on drugs those farmers will be driven into the Taliban\'s arms. That farmer thinks we are targeting him in this policy, and that is why he is willing to pick up a rifle and start firing at us. Many of the contacts we have that we say are engagements with the Taliban are in fact with farmers who believe we are eroding their way of life and their means of sustaining their families."
Beattie was awarded the MC after he led a 17-strong British army patrol backed up by Afghan forces that fought a 14-day battle against the Taliban in September 2006. During the engagement, which began on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks on America, Beattie had to fight off Taliban fighters with bayonets and hand grenades.
His patrol has been the most highly decorated unit of the British Army since SAS soldier Andy McNab and his Bravo Two Zero unit were awarded medals for valour in the 1991 Gulf war.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/31[...]r-attacks-tribal-afghan-police
