Afghan National Police
Afghan National Police
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Afghan National Police

The Afghan National Police (ANP; Pashto: د افغانستان ملي پولیس; Dari: پولیس ملی افغانستان), also known as the Afghan Police, is the national police force of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, serving as a single law enforcement agency all across the country. The Afghan Border Police, which had stations along the nation's border and at major airports, was a separate component of the force. The ANP is under the responsibility of the Ministry of Interior Affairs in Kabul, Afghanistan, and is headed by Sirajuddin Haqqani. It has nearly 200,000 members as of April 2023. Furthermore, the GDI are also a part of the secret police agency of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul in August 2021, and the GCPSU are the special police forces.

The Afghan police traces its roots to the early 18th century when the Hotak dynasty was established in Kandahar followed by Ahmad Shah Durrani's rise to power. It became a strong organized force after 1880 when Emir Abdur Rahman Khan established diplomatic relations with British India. In the 1980s it began receiving training and equipment from the former Soviet Union.

During the presidency of Hamid Karzai, several government agencies from the United States as well as Germany's Bundespolizei (BPOL) and the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence Police began providing training. In 2007, the EU-led mission (EUPOL Afghanistan) was heading the civilian policing in Kabul while the United States began establishing training programs in all provinces of Afghanistan. The Afghan police have received basic training from U.S.-led NATO forces. After the fall of Kabul in August 2021, the Afghan police was reorganized and Taliban militants including members of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan's secret police were integrated into its ranks.

The national police force of Afghanistan has its origins in the Hotak and Durrani empires in the early 18th century, which had jurisdiction over parts of neighboring countries until the 1893 Durand Line was established between Mortimer Durand of British India and Abdur Rahman Khan of Afghanistan.

In the 1950s, a group of army officers were reassigned to the police forces to develop a new cadre and modernize the police organization. And in the early 1960s, six of the top police students from the Kabul police academy were sent to Munich, Germany to get their master's degrees in criminology and police work. Among those were Abdul Latif Wared, Farouq Barakzai, Farouq Yaqobi, Assadullah Ahmadzai, Sidique Wahidi, Saadullah Yusufi, and some others.

The Afghan police force remained strong throughout the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, with West Germany building a police academy in Kabul in 1989. The police force began disintegrating during the Battle of Kabul which lasted from 1992 to 1996, with the German-built academy also shutting down. The country at that point descended into civil war and then came under the heel of the Taliban government.

After the collapse of the Taliban government in late 2001, there was little in the nation resembling a functional police department as private armed militias of warlords quickly filled the vacuum left behind by a lack of central governance. The Ministry of Interior in Kabul, under the new Karzai government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, exercised little control over provincial police structures and was unable to effectively secure the remote provinces. Most of these problems had originally started after the Soviet-backed government of Mohammad Najibullah fell apart in 1992 and the country entered into a civil war. From 1978 to 1992 the Afghan police had firm control over the country, much thanks to the Soviet Union and other factors related to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan or the Soviet war in the country. Traditionally, police officers were poorly paid, recruited or conscripted from the poorest classes of society and frequently held in contempt by the communities they served. Compounding these factors, over two decades of unrest had also resulted in an illiteracy rate conservatively estimated at over 70% for police recruits.

Although early efforts had trained 35,000 officers in basic recruit schools during 2003 and 2004, this training was insufficient to strengthen the structures and senior command levels needed to create an effective police force. Germany, as lead nation for police under the Bonn II Agreement, concentrated its efforts on setting up the Kabul Police Academy and drafted the long range blueprint for restructuring the police services. Except for Kunduz Province which had a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), Germany's program had only limited reach into the provinces. As the US Department of State International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Bureau's (INL) activity at this time was limited in resources and scope, the US Departments of Defense and State, in 2005, decided to shift the implementation of the police training and equipment program to the Office of Security Cooperation-Afghanistan (OSC-A), under the authority of the Commanding General, Combined Forces Command (CFC-A). In 2006, OSC-A became the Combined Security Transition Command – Afghanistan (CSTC-A) keeping the OSC-A mission.

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