US blocks visit from Malalai Joya

Malalai Joya at London's Frontline Club with Sue Turton in 2008

Pictures by Glyn Strong 

Just nine days after International Women’s Day internationally acclaimed Afghan human rights activist Malalai Joya has been refused entry to the United States – allegedly because she is ‘unemployed and living underground’.

Joya -  an author, former member of the Afghan parliament and one of TIME magazine’s ‘100 most influential people in the world in 2010’ - was due to begin a three week book tour to promote an updated version of her memoir ‘A Woman Among Warlords’ on 20th March.

At the age of 27 she was the youngest woman elected to Afghanistan’s parliament in 2005. Because of her harsh criticism of warlords and fundamentalists in Afghanistan, she has been the target of at least five assassination attempts.

Sonali Kolhatkar of the Afghan Women’s Mission (AWM) said “Malalai has never before been denied a visa to the US. She has come to the US several times at our invitation with no problems. AWM is a lead sponsor for this latest tour – we sent her the formal invitation letter for the visa and bought her air tickets to and from the US. Frankly I’m shocked that she would be denied. What are the immigration authorities afraid of? I can only speculate that they are afraid of the effect of her words at a time when the US war in Afghanistan is more unpopular than ever – in fact a majority now favor withdrawal.

“The reason Joya lives underground is because she faces the constant threat of death for having had the courage to speak up for women’s rights – it’s obscene that the U.S. government would deny her entry.”

Kolhatkar, co-author of the book ‘Bleeding Afghanistan’ continued “Malalai’s visa denial also exposes the hypocrisy of the US’s stated desire to liberate Afghan women. What does liberation mean when in reality the government is busy silencing Joya? I hope they do the right thing and allow her into the country for the mere three weeks she was scheduled to be here. Audiences in 13 different US states have worked so hard to organise a national tour so that she can shed light on what’s really happening in Afghanistan.”

Malalai Joya with MP Jeremy Corbin (left) and 

Derrick O'Keefe outside Portcullis House, London.

Ms Joya has twice visited London – first in 2008 to receive the RAW in WAR annual Anna Politkovskaya Award and again in 2009 to promote her book, published in the UK by Ebury Press. During that visit she met MP Jeremy Corbin and Baroness  Warsi who warmly commended her efforts to get justice on behalf of her people, particularly its oppressed women and girls.

Her calls for NATO troops to withdraw from Afghanistan have made 32-year-old Ms Joya a controversial figure outside her country. Internally she has dangerous enemies  - but also many supporters .

On 21 May 2007 Joya was indefinitely suspended from parliament after she criticised it for failing to accomplish enough for the Afghan people, saying, "A stable or a zoo is better [than the legislature], at least there you have a donkey that carries a load and a cow that provides milk. This parliament is worse than a stable or a zoo."

She had no faith in the recent electoral process and declined to stand for re-election. In 2009, at the wedding of a young rape victim to one of her bodyguards,  Joya confided that she planned to channel her energies into activism on behalf of her people.

Alexis Gargagliano, at US publisher Scribner said of the visa decision “We had the privilege to publish Ms. Joya, and her earlier 2009 book tour met with wide acclaim. The right of authors to travel and promote their work is central to freedom of expression and the full exchange of ideas.”

‘A woman among warlords’ has been translated into over a dozen languages and widely acclaimed. Ms Joya has toured widely – to  Australia, the UK, Canada, Norway, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands – to promote it and state her case.

Colleagues of Joya report that when she presented herself as scheduled at the U.S. embassy, she was told she was being denied because she was “unemployed” and “lives underground.”

Organisers of the latest US tour argue that the denial of Joya’s visa appears to be a case of what the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “Ideological Exclusion,” which they say violates Americans’ First Amendment right to hear constitutionally protected speech by denying foreign scholars, artists, politicians and others entry to the United States.

Events featuring Malalai Joya are planned, from March 20 until April 10, in New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington and California. Organizers of her speaking tour are encouraging people to contact the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Joya’s visa immediately.

Why this war is about women - and one in particular.

Reprinted from UK Progressive - 15 February 2010

by Glyn Strong

Inter-Parliamentary Union: Committee On The Human Rights of Parliamentarians. (Case No AFG/01 – Malalai Joya – Afghanistan)

The Inter-Parliamentary Union’s Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians holds its next session from 27 March to 01 April, in Bangkok. That will be its last chance to call for the reinstatement of suspended Afghan MP Malalai Joya whose term of office ends in September.

Joya has been in an administrative wilderness since her expulsion in 2007, but has not been silent – and as news broke that NATO’s much-publicised Operation Moshtarek had already claimed the lives of 12 Afghan civilians, she repeated her claim that ‘defenceless and poor people’ would be its principal victims.

Parliamentary sketches are fun and functional. They remind us that politicians are human and shouldn’t take themselves too seriously - or the electorate too lightly. Recently one of them targeted the Commons Defence Select Committee for making the plight of Afghan women “one of its chief concerns.” The Committee was berated for avoiding any mention of equipment, casualties or logistics . . . while fretting about “the burqa-clad memsahibs.”

A point nicely made by its (male) author, perhaps, but one that struck a jarringly discordant note.

There is nothing funny about having to wear a burqa. And those same ‘memsahibs’ are the mothers and widows whose disaffected offspring make it so easy for the Taliban and other private militia to recruit.

Sixty percent of Afghanistan’s population is under the age of 25; anecdotally, around 70,000 widows are believed to be begging on the streets of Kabul and more than half its 37,000 street children have widowed mothers.

These children have grown up knowing nothing but the grinding poverty or abuse that Afghan women without a male protector have to endure.

The unintended consequences of ignoring these women are legion and frightening. What the Afghan Government, NATO and a plethora of NGOs operating in Afghanistan fail to address, others will.

It’s hard to grasp the bigger picture, or make informed lifestyle choices, when you are homeless and starving.

Far from ridiculing MPs for “raising worries about Afghan wimmin” (sic) with the CDSC, parliamentary sketch writers might be better occupied reflecting on how effective ‘asymmetrical targeting’ of the country’s youth and female population might be - if addressed strategically.

Malalai Joya is one of the more notable ‘memsahibs’; a woman whose polemic speech in the 2003 Loya Jirga made her both a marked woman and a thorn in the flesh of the unreconstructed warlords and drug traffickers she would join in Parliament just two years later, as the country’s youngest MP. She despises the burqa and wears it only for her own safety.

Joya may have been the people’s choice for Farah Province, but her persistent attacks on her fellow parliamentarians earned her only death threats and, in May 2007, suspension from Parliament.

Three years later she inhabits a dangerous limbo, despite repeated calls by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) to reinstate her. During that time, many of the things Joya predicted have come true: civilian and military casualties have mounted and corrupt elections have further eroded Afghans’ faith in the democratic process.

Apparently only one Afghan woman was invited to the recent London Conference, an event that Joya dismissed as a meeting of vultures hovering over the prey that was Afghanistan.

She said afterwards “The Afghan Government begs for funds from the so-called international community in the name of Afghan people, but the billions of dollars poured into the country are looted by warlords, drug-lords, national and international NGOs and government officials, and much of it goes back into the pockets of the donor countries.

“According to US Government sources, since 2001, over $60 billion in aid has been given to Afghanistan. Such a huge amount could change Afghanistan into a paradise if it was properly spent. However, little of it reached the needy people, so I am sure any other amount sent to Afghanistan in the future will have no impact on poor Afghans. Instead it will only widen the gap between rich and poor.”

Joya is a controversial woman. A correspondent from the IPU asked her Defence Committee if she planned to stand for re-election in September adding “This would certainly be a very perilous exercise for her.”

Against the wider background of the war on terror, elections, conferences and troop surges the fate of one woman may well seem irrelevant, but the ‘Joya effect’ is seismic. She is a bellweather for Afghanistan’s future and those who have mocked or ignored her would do well to consider this.

Many of the women who have put their heads above the parapet have been threatened; others like activist Sitara Achakzai and policewoman Malalai Kolkhar have already paid with their lives. Women are much needed in the Afghan National Police force (ANP) which, alongside the Afghan Army, is seen as a key element of post-Moshtarek ‘re-building’.

Joya’s views on this are, as ever, unequivocal “They are very weak and ill-equipped. And more importantly the former warlords are the main actors in both forces, so in fact this is an army of warlords. The Chief of the Afghan, Army General Bismullah Khan, is a former Jehadi commander - a key man in the Northern Alliance who has placed many former Jehadi warlords in key Army posts. And recently (President) Hamid Karzai reassigned the infamous Rashid Dostum as the Army’s Chief of Staff.”

She describes a scenario where ANP members watch helplessly while historical artifacts and drugs are trafficked into Pakistan – too ill-equipped or corrupt to intervene. “The Afghan police force is the most corrupt institution in Afghanistan. Bribery is common and if you have money, by bribing police from top to bottom, you can do almost anything. In many parts of Afghanistan people hate the police more than the Taliban. In Helmand, for instance, people are afraid of policemen who commit violence against people and make trouble. The majority of the police force in this province is addicted to opium and cannabis.”

RIGHT TO SPEAK

Whether people support Malalai Joya, or passionately disagree with her, few would challenge her right to speak – and it is this right that is being ignored, with impunity, by an administration whose actions indicate no will to respect the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which it is a party.

Publication of her book (‘Raising My Voice’), where she characteristically ‘names names’ at international level, has sparked a new wave of threats and anti-Joya articles. If assassinated she will become a martyr, if allowed back into parliament she will once more have an official platform from which to accuse.

Many feel it is far better hobble the process of reinstating her until her appeal is timed out.

The IPU’s exhortations to expedite Joya’s case have achieved little. Over the period of her suspension they have:

Recalled - that parliamentary colleagues who called her a prostitute and a whore and called for her to be raped or killed were neither suspended nor asked to apologise to her.

Drawn attention - to the fact that Article 34 of the Afghan Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and that, in accordance with Article 101, members of the assembly should not be prosecuted on account of opinions they express.

Deplored - the fact that she has not been reinstated. In failing to do so the House of Representatives has prolonged a situation that infringes its own Standing Orders and continues to violate her right to exercise the mandate entrusted to her by her constituents and their right to be represented in parliament.

Some Afghan MPs have gone on record in media interviews saying Joya’s suspension is illegal and contrary to the rules of the house. Among others she cites Ramadan Basherdost, Gul Pacha Majidi, Dr. Mohammad Ali Stegh, Saima Khogeani, Shukuria Barakzai, Ahmad Behzad, Mir Ahmad Joenda and Sardar Rahman Ogholi.

Quietly confident that media coverage of one woman’s appeal will have no chance of deflecting attention from wider NATO activity, all Joya’s enemies have to do is sit and wait. And most Afghans are good at waiting; even Joya, whose impatience and frustration frequently erupt into passionate outbursts.

In Paragraph Three of its January summary the IPU expresses its fear that “her prosecution has not so much to do with a quest for justice, but rather the forthcoming election campaign and effort to eliminate her from the political process in Afghanistan.”

So what does the future hold for Malalai Joya? Supporters in Afghanistan urge her to her to stand for re-election and she says she will announce her decision soon.

She is resigned to the fact that her reinstatement is highly unlikely and is contemptuous of the recent presidential election - “A game full of fraud and double-dealings.” She fears the parliamentary election will be the same: “Warlords are much more powerful and have the upper hand in all official posts of the State so they will strongly influence the votes and there will be large scale fraud in the coming election.”

If Joya is not re-elected she will continue her fight for justice and against the warlords in other ways. Many of her Afghan supporters ask her to form an organised party in Afghanistan so they can formally join it and work together.

“Whatever it is,” she insists, “I want something practical not just something existing in name only.”

Republished with the permission of Glyn Strong © January 2010.

The Female Face of Afghanistan - Edited by Glyn Strong and Fiona Hodgson

http://www.glynstrong.co.uk/files/The%20Female%20Face%20of%20Afghanistanf.pdf

(*Please be patient - this 60 page booklet may take a while to download)

Launched at the House of Commons on Human Rights Day - 10 December 2009.

“Discrimination lies at the root of many of the world’s most pressing human rights problems. No country is immune from this scourge. Eliminating discrimination is a duty of the highest order.”

Navi PillayUnited Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights


“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. These first few famous words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established 60 years ago the basic premise of international human rights law. Yet today the fight against discrimination remains a daily struggle for millions around the globe. Nowhere is this more evident than in Afghanistan where the international community is actively and publicly involved.

A tribute to Natasha

Malalai Joya was the second recipient of the RAW in WAR Anna Politkovskaya Award in 2008. The first recipient, Natalya Estemirova who handed it on to her, was assassinated just a few days ago (July 15th).

A courageous human rights defender and freelance journalist from Chechnya, 'Natasha' was kidnapped and murdered because, like Malalai Joya, she refused to keep silent or abandon her commitment to exposing injustice in her country.

Since 2000 and throughout the armed conflict in Chechnya, she worked for Memorial, Russia’s biggest human rights organisation. Natasha was Anna Politkovskaya's close friend and colleague. She was Anna’s most frequent companion during travel and investigations in Chechnya. They investigated a number of cases together – about which Anna wrote for “Novaya Gazeta” . Natasha wrote for Memorial’s website and for local newspapers.

Half-Russian, half-Chechen she also acted as Anna's interpreter in Chechnya and went everywhere with her. After graduation Natasha taught history in Chechen schools, then in 1991 she became one of the leaders of a teachers’ strike demanding better pay and better conditions.

During the armed conflict between the Russian Republics of Ingushetia and North Ossetia in 1992, Natasha helped bring refugees to safety and helped free hostages. During the first war in Chechnya in 1998, she collected testimonies from civilians who were tortured by the Russian forces in unofficial detention facilities, the so-called “filtration camps”. She produced a TV series and wrote articles in the Chechen newspapers about the prisoners in those camps.

Her last published article in the UK, on the abductions and abuses still going in in Chechnya under President Ramzan Kadyrov, appeared in The Independent on Friday 17 July, 2009. It was written in August 2008 but never published.

Policing the Poppy

Eleven hours after retiring from his post as Head of The Serious Organised Crime Agency’s Tactical Firearms Division Dave Wright, 50, was on a plane to Afghanistan, bringing 31 years experience as a British policeman - and looking for a “last great adventure”. He ‘retired’ as a Superintendant; today he works at the most basic levels to support and develop Helmand province’s fragile police force.

As the man charged with mentoring the Counter Narcotics Police - Afghanistan (CNP-A) Wright’s daily battle isn’t about bombs, bullets and airstrikes. It’s about creating a force for law and order that people can trust and respect. In Helmand that means seeing that police officers are paid, literate, trained, drug-free . . . and equipped with uniforms.
He says: “Nothing could prepare you for working in the Afghan environment, it doesn’t matter how much you read or what people tell you – until you come out here you can’t begin to understand the country, the people and the conditions they live in.
“I had the opportunity to do something completely different to my old job, but still use all the skills I had learned over a long career. Some of my former SOCA colleagues would like to follow me, many are curious - some think I am mad!”
And it’s a view his wife of 23 years, Christine, has some sympathy with, although she, too, was a career police officer: “We weren’t keen on the idea of him going at first. It was an important year for the girls with University and GCSEs coming up. I suppose you could say we weren’t exactly supportive! And we thought, why there; why Afghanistan?”

With 8,000 troops in Afghanistan the UK is the second largest military contributor to the international community’s efforts in the country and the second largest bilateral donor. International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander, talking recently about the move from stabilisation to state building, praised the soldiers and civilians, like Wright, who are involved in that process. He said: “They take those risks in pursuit of one shared mission: to help Afghans to secure, govern and develop their country, for themselves.”

And the last seven years have seen real progress towards that goal as Wright explains: “We have recently had huge successes with opium recoveries. In the last month we recovered 750kgs, 1,600 kgs, 1,420 kgs and last week another 650 kgs. These were by British Army-mentored Afghan patrols operating in the desert. The prisoners and samples of the narcotics are flown back to Lashkar Gah where they are collected by the CNP-A who interview and process them through the criminal justice system. The remainder of the narcotics, and the smugglers vehicles, are then blown up by explosives to ensure they are destroyed.

“ Last week the CNP-A operating in Lashkar Gah City raided a house and recovered 48kg of pure heroin together with over two tonnes of precursor chemicals in a drugs laboratory. It takes 10kg of opium to manufacture 1kg of heroin. This was an example of intelligence-led policing - a totally Afghan initiated and led operation. “It is things like that which make it all worthwhile.”


Squaddie graffiti, scrawled on the inside of a suffocatingly hot portaloo at Kandahar Airfield says: “Afghanistan is an illusion caused by lack of drugs and alcohol”. And while it may not rank among the most uplifting of sentiments about Afghanistan – it does reflect certain truths about the country.

The irony is that while there is definitely a lack of alcohol (the British military bases are ‘dry’ in every sense of the word) the surrounding countryside suffers from no shortage of drugs.
Adjacent Helmand Province produces up to 90 percent of the world’s heroin. According to Wright a number of the police are drug ‘users’ of some description. He says that until recently 6ft cannabis plants grew on the doorstep of many police posts and corruption was rife.
This sounds depressing, but Wright is upbeat and optimistic. Aided by his mentoring, root and branch reform of the force is well in hand and he claims with authority that the CNP-A are “100 per cent clean.”

They are also 100 per cent male.

Helmand has a police ‘tashkeil’ or establishment of 2,000 - just six of them are women. There would have been a seventh, trained as a counter-narcotics specialist, but she was kidnapped on Lashkar Gah’s east-west Highway 601 earlier this year and murdered. Her assassins cut her throat, in front of her son, and then they shot her in the face.
Like many other women who put their heads above the parapet in Helmand, she had received threats and warnings, but with 90 per cent of her training completed, she was determined to finish it.

Wright, who hails from Washington, Tyne and Wear, and still bears traces of his North East accent, is reluctant to talk about her. It’s a painful issue. “She was a very brave woman, but don’t take it from me; ask her colleagues.”

The role of Afghan women in the world of counter narcotics is new. “We’re helping to move the Counter Narcotics Police from a static, reactive role to one that is intelligence led,” he explains. Historically featuring only in the poppy harvesting process, women also appear on the drugs landscape as addicts or prisoners. In both roles they are largely victims of poverty, fear and a male dominated society. Now operating as police officers and prison guards they are beginning to become part of the solution as well as the problem. But there’s a long way to go.

It is a cultural paradox that while male officers are unable to search women for arms and drugs, Afghan men discourage the recruitment of females who could fulfill this role. Wright introduces me to one of Lashkar Gah’s best female officers who has had singular successes and is keen to tell her story. “It was at a checkpoint, a year and a half ago. One woman had an AK-47 under her clothing (burqa) and 250 rounds of ammunition. Another had a grenade and explosive material. This lady tried to attack me, and then she bit me!”

A wrist is offered, showing scars of what are unmistakably teeth marks.
I was asked not to name the officer and no photographs of she or her colleagues were allowed. We met at a literacy class. Joining the ANP provides access to education as well as income, something the women particularly value.

Wright comes from a household of women: his wife, Christine, is also a retired police officer; the couple’s daughters Amy, 18, and Sophie, 16, are used to his absences. “He’s always worked away,” says Christine. “I suppose we’ve become very independent – but we knew that if there was a problem he could always come home.
He is supposed to work a rota of six weeks on and two weeks off, but it doesn’t always work out that way and there are inevitable trade-offs. “He came home on (GCSE) results day, but that meant he wasn’t able to be here when Amy went up to university,” says Christine .

“When I was with SOCA I worked in London during the week, traveling from Durham to Kings Cross on a Monday morning and returning for the weekend,” explains Wright. But ‘coming home’ from Helmand is a bit different. “I fly by RAF helicopter from Lashkar Gah to Camp Bastion, then by C130 Hercules to Kabul, then a flight to Dubai, then an Emirates flight home. It can take 5 or 6 days to get in and out – they are epic journeys!”

Another downside for his family back home is the fear. “We worry every time something comes on the television news” admits Christine. “Just recently there was something about a suicide bomber infiltrating a police unit and until we found out where it was, it was difficult.”
Wright’s admiration for the brave Afghan women taking on the difficult role of policing in Helmand is obvious.

“They travel to work in burqas” he explains. “When I first arrived I asked about uniforms. They said they would be proud to wear uniforms, like female police officers in Kabul, but they had never been offered any.”

The police command posts are like small forts and although the women are not armed, the men they work alongside are. Wright arranges for us to visit one and, with the obligatory armed guards, we leave the military base to meet two female officers on duty.
It ends in frustration; despite painstaking arrangements to catch them on shift, neither is there. Wright although clearly annoyed, is unfailingly diplomatic.

These check points, east and west of Lashkar Gah, are unprepossessing. Men with glazed eyes and ill fitting uniforms share a room with sacks of potatoes, RPG launchers, AK-47s - and a single wooden crutch resting against a wall .Yet in the last 12 months more than 1,000 members of the ANP have lost their lives fighting for their community and to gain some respect for their tarnished profession.

The rewards are poor and the risks considerable. The country’s 82,000 police are a popular target for militants; less well armed and trained than the Army, they travel in small groups in hostile territory.

In 2008 the numbers killed nationally represented half the size of Helmand’s entire establishment. Earlier Wright has admitted how much he would love to see a ‘bobby on the beat’ system in Helmand, but with police officers responsible for many crimes, and public signs urging people to report mistreatment at checkpoints, it will take time to build trust. Or what Douglas Alexander describes as both short-term stabilisation and long-term state-building.
Minister for Education Hanif Atmar described Afghanistan’s four great problems as narcotics, poverty, insurgency and weak governance. The UK, currently the lead nation of the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) of which Wright as a EUPOL officer works alongside, is actively involved in addressing all these issues.

DFID is the lead UK Department on development; it has provided £7.2 million since April 2006 to support the implementation of projects to provide immediate and visible benefits to the people of Helmand. And increasingly it is being recognised that specialists like Wright have a unique contribution to make. Engagement with the local community is a key element of counter-insurgency which cannot not be won by force and ‘quick impact’ ventures alone. Douglas Alexander said: “They have brought much-valued civilian skills to the job . . . of identifying immediate priorities with the local population. Their military colleagues are not only providing reassurance for local communities by patrolling areas that have been subjected to attacks and criminality, but also working with civilians to train hundreds of Afghan soldiers and police to take charge of security themselves.

These Afghan-led operations, acting on Afghan intelligence, are making real headway in improving security for local citizens.” It’s this element of the job that give Wright most satisfaction. He describes its rewards as ”Seeing the Afghan Police achieve spectacular results through their own efforts, witnessing their will to learn and understanding that the average CNP-A police officer wants to do a good job, wants to have the respect of the public and despite all the obstacles in his way still attempts to achieve this.”

Wright walks a tightrope Helmand, as do so many of the British civilian and military staff involved in long-term reconstruction. Offend cultural sensitivities and you are back to square one. Several times I see Wright reign-in impatience, but he is an experienced copper supported by an MBA and ears of experience on regional and national special squads.
He’s been at the top of his profession in the UK – here he argues patiently for women officers to be allowed to fill in data-capture forms and get their wages on time. Does he miss anything I wonder?

“Obviously my wife and family. And when you have had a bad day at work a pint of beer always helps!” he observes wryly. Helmand is dust-bowl dry in the summer and despite having air-conditioned accommodation, the heat is energy sapping.

Sickness is a constant headache for UK troops and civilians and before each meal at Lashkar Gah diners, without exception queue to wash and then sanitise their hands. Food is good and plentiful, but the hygiene regime is strict.


One senior civil servant who has been in Helmand for a year tells me that while the issues are “massively complicated” she is “continually optimistic”. “The national drug control strategy is a good thing and an integral part of establishing the rule of law.”
British military units have also been involved in drug raids, but that is not their primary role. Earlier this year Royal Marines from 40 Commando destroyed a drugs factory in the Upper Sangin Valley along with 1.5 tonnes of morphine base. The operation’s purpose was to deny Taliban groups a possible safe haven and to prevent them regaining the ability to mount attacks against the town of Sangin.

But in terms of enduring reconstruction, Wright echoes Douglas Alexander; it is about enabling Afghans to do things for themselves.
The HQ of Lashkar Gah’s counter narcotics unit is sweltering; most of the time there is no electricity. This is not unusual. There is not enough oil or diesel for the vehicles and no cash to repair the broken window in the detention cell. Computers with English keyboards gather dust until Dari/Pashtu replacements can be found.

Helmand Province’s drugs busters have no body armour and travel in soft-skinned vehicles. An IED recently destroyed the front of one but left the occupants unscathed – they were lucky. If it had been travelling faster they would all be dead.
Wright takes me to the office of Colonel Abdul Qadir, a genial, bearded family man who offers melon and thanks me for my interest in his problems. Somewhere in this compound 142 kilos of heroin are secured - the fruits of a recent raid in the Marjah area of Helmand
Outside he has shown us sacks of chemicals used in the process of heroin production, drums and tanks confiscated from a home laboratory.

This is heartening in a region where many people believe that the police are corrupt. The basic wage for an officer is $100 per month, rising to $130 for a sergeant. There is no pension scheme and no medical insurance for those injured on duty. Later Wright points out an officer who was shot through the neck and side only a week earlier. He is not in uniform but is attending police literacy classes that attract a further $20 a month “as an incentive”. The entrance and exit wounds below his hairline are healing well, but plain to see.

Wright explains how rigour is being injected into the training system through introduction of an eight week Focused District Development course. It teaches standardised police skills, law, ethics, survival training and use of equipment. (It also guarantees that those with a drug problem go cold turkey for two months!) All ranks go through the process.

The opium-centric economy has made Helmand unstable and unsafe. The vicious circle of poverty and fear is perpetuated by narco-traffickers who advance money to farmers to buy seeds, then guarantee farm-gate purchase of their crop. Wheat, chillies or other legal crops would be just as easy to grow, but the dangers of getting them to market, paying bribes on the way and securing a buyer make them hazardous and unattractive alternatives. Building a strong police force won’t solve anything overnight – but it’s a significant step in the right direction.
Wright’s tour was fixed term, but Afghanistan gets under the skin. Will he stay I ask? “That depends very much on my family. I have a one year contract and I am now more than two thirds of the way through it. However I feel I have now reached a position where I have gained the trust of the local Afghan Police and the results I am achieving now are by far and away greater than in my first 6 months. Continuity and trust is vital in this policing environment.”