American MP's in Kandahar.

Real World: Kandahar

The soldiers of the 372^nd MP Company have one of the toughest jobs in Afghanistan: fixing the Afghan National Police.

By Christopher BeamUpdated Monday, Oct. 18, 2010, at 8:14 AM ET

Training host nation security forces is a slow and painstaking process. It does not lend itself to a 'quick fix.' Real success does not appear as a single decisive victory. —The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

The Americans found the artillery shell in early August. It was sitting on the wall of a police station on the east side of the city of Kandahar. No one was sure how long it had been there or who had brought it. All they knew was, someone had to do something about it.

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The 1^st Platoon of the 372^nd MP Company had just rolled into Police Substation 5, where the couple dozen military police would be spending the next nine months sleeping, eating, defecating, and standing guard alongside their Afghan counterparts, the Afghan National Police. Sgt. Matthew Montag, a noncommissioned officer with the 372^nd, was finishing a routine search of the station when he spotted the shell, right there on the wall, next to one of the American trucks. Montag walked over to Staff Sgt. Ronald Ketterman, who was sitting in the truck.

"Look out your window," Montag said. "What is that?"

"Oh, that's an artillery shell," Ketterman said, as if identifying some local fauna rather than a bomb 10 feet away. The explosive device in question was a 155 millimeter projectile round. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps have used 155s for decades to shell enemies at distances of up to 30 kilometers. Packed with TNT and launched out of a howitzer, it's not the most accurate weapon. But with a blast radius of 100 meters and a kill radius of 50 meters, when it hits, it hits. The fuse of this particular round was still intact. Look at it the wrong way, and it could wipe out the whole police station.

Sgt. 1^st Class Joe Baird, the platoon leader, got on the radio to Explosive Ordnance Disposal, also known as the bomb squad. They're the guys you call when you find an improvised explosive device on the side of the road—or, say, in a police station. Usually they come out, defuse the ordnance, and maybe take their picture with it. In this case, though, EOD didn't come. Their rationale: The Afghan police found it; it was their responsibility.

Baird got off the radio. "What the fuck," he said. One of the Afghan policemen smiled at the MPs. "Boom," he said, miming the word with his hands.

The shell became a hot potato of responsibility. An Afghan villager had apparently found it and brought it to the cops, expecting them to take care of it. The ANP expected the American MPs to take care of it. The MPs expected EOD to take care of it. And EOD expected the Afghans to take care of it.

In the end, the ANP did—sort of. The Afghans laid it on the ground near the wall and piled a half-dozen pillow-size sandbags around it. If it had exploded, the sandbags might as well have been cotton balls. But at least it made everyone feel like they'd done something. When I left Afghanistan four weeks later, it was still there.

By then, the mix of miscommunication, buck-passing, and lack of resources that characterized the 155 incident was no longer surprising. The 372^nd MP Company, a Maryland-based military police unit operating under the 504^th MP Battalion, had arrived in Kandahar city in June. Its task: to train and mentor the Afghan National Police. Since then, MPs had witnessed incompetence of all kinds and at all levels. Their job wasn't so much to improve life in their slice of Kandahar as to create the conditions for improvement—in this case, a competent police force.

That job had previously fallen to the 82^nd Airborne Division, an active-duty unit from Fort Bragg, N.C. To foster trust between the Americans and Afghans, the 82^nd would spend maybe two nights a week at the police station where the ANPs sleep (most of them are from outside Kandahar). When the 372^nd arrived in June, military leadership wanted to expand the experiment, with MPs living at the station five nights a week. The Americans had been occasional visitors, training the ANP in police tactics, helping them set up checkpoints, and accompanying them on patrols. Now they would be dorm mates: The Real World with AK-47s.

The ANPs could use the help. They have a reputation as the delinquents of the Afghan National Security Forces. Schooling levels are low. Corruption abounds. Drugs and misbehavior are commonplace. It's no secret why: When the Taliban fell to coalition forces in late 2001, the new government's priority was national security, which meant beefing up the Afghan National Army. The ANA thus got its pick of Afghanistan's best warriors. Unlike the Army, which has a long pre-Taliban history, the ANP was starting from scratch. And in many ways, it still is.

The Taliban have had little trouble infiltrating the Afghan forces. In 2009, five British soldiers were killed when a Taliban infiltrator opened fire at a police compound in Helmand Province, where the British had been living with the ANPs. A similar incident occurred in August, when an Afghan trainee shot and killed two Spanish soldiers and their interpreter in Badghis Province. The 372^nd was thus encouraged to get comfortable around the trainees—but not too comfortable.

The stakes could not be higher. The coalition can't stabilize the country without securing population centers like Kandahar. It can't stabilize Kandahar without a strong police force. And it can't create a strong police force without proper training. To say the fate of the war hangs on the MPs of the 372^nd Company would be an exaggeration. But if the 372^nd can't succeed, it's hard to see how Afghanistan can.