A to Z Guide to Afghanistan Assistance 2012 - the Afghanistan ...

The A to Z Guide to Afghanistan Assistance
• Other units–including personnel assigned to the MoI, the Criminal Investigation Division, the
Counter Narcotics Police (with a strength of approximately 2,500), and training, intelligence
and fire department units; combined strength of 21,082.
• In addition, 7,840 recruits were undergoing training.
The Afghan government has experimented with several local defence programmes, seeking to
augment the ANP by finding non-official, community based security solutions. The most recent
iteration of these is the Afghan Local Police (ALP, p. 5).
The 2006 Afghanistan Compact (p. 12) established as a benchmark for 2010 a fully constituted,
professional, functional, and ethnically balanced ANP force of up to 62,000 members. In April 2007,
in response to increased insurgency in southern Afghanistan, the Joint Coordination and Monitoring
Board (JCMB, p. 47) raised this number to 82,000. The authorised size of the ANP was again
increased to 96,800 in the run-up to the 2009 elections. In January 2010, the JCMB approved a
further increase to 109,000 by October 2010 and to 134,000 by October 2011. In June 2011 this was
again revised upwards to 157,000. Some donors have raised concerns about the fiscal sustainability
of increasing the size of the ANP; others are concerned that the focus of police reform is shifting from
the establishment of a civilian police force to that of a paramilitary or counterinsurgency force.
Reform of the police sector, one of the five pillars of the Afghan government’s Security Sector Reform
strategy (SSR, p. 71), has focused primarily on training and mentoring, provision of equipment and
infrastructure, and institutional restructuring such as pay and rank reform. The Law and Order
Trust Fund for Afghanistan (LOTFA, p. 51) has primary responsibility for coordinating donor support
for ANP salaries. The police sector in Afghanistan has been supported by approximately 25 donor
countries, with Germany taking the coordinating role of “key partner” until 2007. In June 2007,
the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan (EUPOL, p. 39) subsumed Germany’s primary
role in police reform with the aim of consolidating different approaches among EU members; the
mission was originally mandated until June 2010. In May 2010, the Council of the European Union
extended the mandate of the mission until 31 May 2013.
The United States has been by far the largest overall contributor of human and financial resources
to support the police sector. Since 2005, the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan
(CSTC-A, see Coalition Forces, p. 32) has led police reform efforts by the US, along with the training
and development of the ANA. CSTC-A has several thousand personnel and contractors dedicated
to its ANP mission.
Approaches to police reform varied widely among donors and efforts to consolidate and integrate
these approaches were slow to emerge. In early 2007, donors and the Afghan government
established the International Police Coordination Board (IPCB) aimed at consolidating and
integrating international police reform efforts and enhancing Afghan ownership of the reforms. By
late 2007, the IPCB Secretariat was operational, its members meeting regularly and engaging with
CSTC-A, EUPOL and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF, p. 45). In June 2009, the
NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTM-A) was established to train the ANP. NTM-A cooperates
with CSTC-A in a single headquarters.
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