In my experience, this contrasts with parts of the Afghan police and military. Generally, they are not as well paid, trained, or led, as their Afghan partners in the intelligence units, and may turn to corruption, extortion, or collusion; often merely to survive. In a case mentioned in the article, a CIA-trained unit allegedly killed the senior law enforcement officer in Kandahar in an effort to free a colleague that had been detained on criminal charges. Another perspective on that story may be that the soldier had been kidnapped by the police for extortion. When the CIA-trained unit arrived to negotiate his release, one of the nervous and poorly-trained police officers fired accidentally. In the exchange that followed, several police were killed and the strike force left without a wounded man. To consider that the cause of the soldier’s arrest may have been corruption, and the deaths of the police may have been the result of extremely poor judgement and marksmanship, even after years of training and investment, is a far greater embarrassment for (nearly) all concerned than a tidy narrative of rogue Afghans trained by knuckle-dragging CIA contractors.
On Nobility and the CIA’s War in Afghanistan
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