Afghan police: The world's most dangerous job?
If Afghanistan has any hope of becoming a truly stable nation, it's going to need a top-notch police force. For the better part of a decade, the U.S. military has been training afghan officers. This year alone, American taxpayers will spend nearly a billion dollars on the program.
CBS News correspondent Seth Doane reports that, over the weekend, 12 Afghan police died in Laskhar Gah.
It's a dangerous job. Nationwide 140,000 police serve on the force, many propped up by coalition forces. In Kabul, they've stood mostly on their own for the last two years.
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While out on patrol, the Kabul police could face insurgents, IEDs, even the Taliban. Policeman Khan Mohammed, 22, says he's afraid of suicide bombers.
Being a police officer in Afghanistan is one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet. Every day across the country, between five and 10 police officers die on the job.
A top target is the Kabul police chief, General Mohammad Ayub Salangi. He oversees nearly 14,000 police.
"The 30 years of war (here) have caused a lot of damage. I accept we do have some problems, but we're improving with every passing day," Salangi says.
Along with drug use and inadequate training, he admits illiteracy is still one of the biggest challenges, plaguing roughly 80 percent of Afghan police nationwide. In Kabul, the chief encourages education, and even allows studying at checkpoints.
U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Kamyar Pashnehtala, who shadows the police chief, says there are more serious problems.
"At the end of the day General Salangi's job here is the security and the safety of the Kabul people. So what would you spend your time thinking about? Did drug use go down half-a-percent this last quarter, or did the number of suicide attacks go down?" Pashnehtala ponders.
Checking for explosives in the thousands of trucks entering Kabul every day is nearly impossible without high-tech tools. And even the equipment they do have doesn't always work.
Policeman Azmullah, 23, points to his Hungarian-made AK-47 and says: "After firing (once), it's useless."
Pashnehtala worries that the policemen are soft targets.
"This is a dangerous place. For his police to be effective, they have to interact with public. They can't be ten meters away from their constituents," Pashnehtala says.
Their job places them on the front lines, ill equipped as civilian police, but forced to fight in a war-zone.
