A Bigger Problem Than the Taliban?
Afghanistan's U.S.-Backed Child-Raping Police
By GARETH PORTER; July 30, 2009
The strategy of the major U.S. and British military offensive in Afghanistan's Helmand province aimed at wresting it from the Taliban is based on bringing back Afghan army and police to maintain permanent control of the population, so the foreign forces can move on to another insurgent stronghold.
But that strategy poses an acute problem: The police in the province, who are linked to the local warlord, have committed systematic abuses against the population, including the abduction and rape of pre-teen boys, according to village elders who met with British officers.
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Associated Press reporters Jason Straziuso and David Guttenfelder, who accompanied U.S. troops in Northern Helmand, reported July 13 that villagers in Aynak were equally angry about police depredations. Within hours of the arrival of U.S. troops in the village, they wrote, bands of villagers began complaining the local police force was "a bigger problem than the Taliban".
The brutality of the Afghan police toward the civilian population in Helmand was no surprise to Ambassador Ron Neumann, who was the U.S. envoy in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. Such abuses, including rape of pre-teen boys, "are part of the larger problem of repression and oppression" in Afghanistan, Neumann told us.
Neumann said the problem of police abuses against the population can be traced back to the creation of the national police after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in late 2001. The Afghan police were not created afresh by U.S. and NATO force, Neumann recalls but were "constituted from the forces that were then fighting the Taliban".
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http://mostlywater.org/afghanistans_usbacked_childraping_police
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