MEHTERLAM, Afghanistan — In this city of 100,000, people are scared to wander out at night, the chief judge was recently fired for allegedly collaborating with insurgents, officials accuse each other of corruption and the police force is barely large enough to patrol the streets.
As of this week, Afghan forces are in charge of security, replacing the Americans who still keep insurgents from swarming into town through raids in the surrounding valleys of Laghman province.
The tenuous peace in Mehterlam shows the challenges Afghan authorities are facing as the U.S.-led coalition hands over responsibility for more parts of the country. The big question is whether Afghan forces are up to the job.
By the end of next week, seven spots on the Afghan map will officially be under Afghan control — a process that will continue until 2014, when the whole country will be in Afghan hands.
The first round of transition has so far been largely cosmetic, reflecting the worries over the readiness of Afghan forces. It’s hard to point to any new responsibilities that Afghans are taking on. NATO troops are not moving out of bases in the transition areas, they’ll just officially operate under the oversight of Afghan forces.
Many of the areas transitioning in this first group never had many NATO troops, such as Panjshir and Bamiyan provinces, along with the cities of Mazar-i-Sharif in the north and Herat in the west. The capital, Kabul, has nominally been operating under Afghan control for years. And the others — Lashkar Gah in the south and Mehterlam in the east — are cities that are still largely kept safe by the international forces surrounding them.
Of those two, Mehterlam is the one which most concerns international and Afghan officials. While the city is relatively safe compared with much of eastern Afghanistan, it is surrounded by insurgent havens and there’s very little local governance or security.
The city’s police force has just a few dozen officers. The chief can request officers from other areas if needed, but even the province-wide force has fewer than 1,000 police, according to U.S. military trainers.
“We do not have the numbers of police we need,” said city police chief Shah Mahmood. He said he was pushing his officers to their limit and stressed to them on Wednesday — the first full day of Afghan control — that they need to redouble efforts and cover the city with patrols. Others in the city said they were worried about understaffed checkpoints on the edges of town.
The commander of the Afghan army battalion for the area said a quick-reaction force at the army base composed of police officers, army soldiers and intelligence agents that is supposed to be on call for major emergencies is regularly missing all the police officers because the police chief pulls his members for routine work.
“They pull them off for searching a suspicious area or for a patrol. It’s like every day is an emergency for them,” Gen. Shirzaman Waziri said.
The police, in turn, are angry at the courts, because they say corrupt judges let the people they arrest go free. Provincial police chief Ghulam Aziz Gharani said he’s tired of arresting people only to have them back on city streets the next day.
“I don’t want to accuse the entire court and say they’re all bad, but there are certainly some very bad people among them,” Gharani said.
