Afghan police face drawback — lack of pay

KABUL:

Outgunned by the Taliban and often derided by some as little more than uniformed thieves, police officers in Afghanistan do not have an easy job. But in recent months, their lives have gotten even tougher: Afghanistan’s police officers have not been paid since November, and some have not seen a paycheque since October.

The government has the money, which comes from the United States and its Nato allies, but the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, missed a deadline for filing the necessary forms with the Finance Ministry, said Afghan officials interviewed on Sunday. The back salaries will be paid in the next few days, the officials said, playing down the issue as a minor administrative mix-up.

Missed deadlines and late paycheques are small problems compared with a festering insurgency, endemic corruption and a thriving illicit opium industry. But the case of the unpaid police officers exemplifies another glaring and often overlooked failure in the US-led nation-building effort here: weak government institutions staffed by officials who are often unqualified or, in some cases, incompetent.

Western officials, in this case, were caught off guard. Despite the billions of dollars their countries spend to pay the police, many US and European officials were not aware that the police had not been paid for nearly two months. They first heard about it when contacted by a reporter last Sunday.

Keeping track of billions in aid money was a problem when Western officials basically ran the Afghan government, and the challenge appears to be getting only worse as the US and European roles diminish.

The few foreign officials who did know about the pay problem said that they had found out about it only in recent days, a month after the last salaries were supposed to be paid, and that they were still trying to figure out what had happened.

Concern

It appeared to be a genuinely bureaucratic issue, they said. There were no indications that the money had been stolen or misspent, which is a concern in Afghanistan.

“The money is in Afghanistan’s treasury,” said Basil Massey, who runs the UN trust fund through which the police salaries are transferred to the Afghan government from donor nations. The trust fund was only now becoming aware of the problem because it was reconciling its books from the past quarter, which ended in December.

Some Afghan and Western officials noted that missing or late paycheques had been a problem across the Afghan government for years. But the problem tended to affect one department at a time, not leave roughly 150,000 armed men unpaid in a country with a history of police corruption and factional violence.

In interviews across Afghanistan, nearly two dozen police officers, including rank-and-file constables and senior commanders, said the delay had cut across all the forces.

— New York Times

News Service