Germany doubles police-training fund

The German government has decided to double the amount of funding it provides for equipping and training the Afghan police, just as Germany finds itself in the middle of a contentious debate on its military deployment in Afghanistan.

The move was agreed at a cabinet meeting last Wednesday (19 September), according to sources in Berlin, and forms part of Germany’s direct assistance to civilian reconstruction in Afghanistan, independent of the EU police mission, Eupol Afghanistan, which Germany heads.

The German government is upgrading its bilateral assistance under a new concept it approved earlier this month. But the funding boost also appears to follow a more comprehensive policy shift under way in Brussels and Berlin for the troubled EU police mission.

Germany needs the mission to succeed as confirmation of its leadership role in civilian EU operations and to counterbalance its ambivalence about military deployments. Germany’s contribution to NATO operations in Afghanistan is very unpopular domestically.

Many EU and member state representatives have doubts about the US military strategy in Afghanistan and elsewhere and believe that the civilian component of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) is a superior tool for crisis management. They want to see Eupol Afghanistan succeed as much as the Germans do.

The German funding decision, which does not need parliamentary approval, means that Berlin will provide €24 million in equipment, infrastructure and training for the Afghan police in 2008.

The sudden resignation earlier this month of Friedrich Eichele, the German police general in charge of Eupol Afghanistan, underlined the need for an urgent review of the mission’s strategy and operations.

An EU source suggested that the outspoken Eichele was removed because of tensions with the EU’s policy apparatus, which takes a more gradualist approach towards persistent problems at Kabul’s interior ministry, including corruption and involvement in drug trafficking.

A former commander of the crack GSG 9 unit, Eichele may not have been the most astute choice to deal with the political intricacies of the Afghan mission. His successor, Brigadier-General Jürgen Scholz, led the EU’s police deployment in Macedonia and is thought to be better attuned to the EU’s way of doing business and perhaps also to the complexities of Afghan politics.

But sources in Brussels emphasise that the myriad problems plaguing Eupol have more systemic roots and were not Eichele’s fault. They stress the need to go beyond finger pointing and to prop up the mission by giving it an adequate strategy.

Eupol currently has some 70 personnel on the ground, including more than 40 Germans who were taken over from a German training mission that started in 2002 and was put under the ESDP this June. When fully deployed next March, the mission will consist of 195 police and legal experts.

The United States Department of Defense, by contrast, runs a police training programme in Afghanistan involving several hundred US personnel (including contractors from private security firm DynCorp) focusing on short-term courses for the national police. It also provides training to an auxiliary police force that was set up last year at the request of President Hamid Karzai to co-opt various militias; the force is suspected of containing a fair number of Taliban operatives and sympathisers.

The German government is now reportedly trying to convince its European partners to give Eupol the mandate to set up a national gendarmerie in Afghanistan, partly in a bid to convince the Americans to drop the auxiliaries. The paramilitary gendarmerie would take over security functions that are too dangerous for the regular police.

The training programme was also on the agenda of a meeting between German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in Washington on Monday (24 September), but no new developments were announced.

In addition to getting the international training programmes aligned, reforming the Afghan interior ministry is also seen as a key element of any successful longer-term strategy for the pacification of the country. Afghanistan is further proof that any complex crisis management strategy needs civilian as well as military components, a focus on governance and rule of law as well as on security.

The Afghanistan mission is a major test case, far beyond its modest size, for the civilian crisis management component of the ESDP, just as the EU is about to embark on a much larger police mission in Chad and the Central African Republic. A similar task will fall to the EU once the final status of the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo has been determined, a development expected towards the end of this year.

The German government has decided to double the amount of funding it provides for equipping and training the Afghan police, just as Germany finds itself in the middle of a contentious debate on its military deployment in Afghanistan.