Acknowledging Limits Police Advisors and Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

The role of the police is an important but largely overlooked aspect of contemporary counterinsurgency and stability operations. Although academic and policy specialists have examined the role of police in post-conflict environments, the question of how police should be organized, trained, and equipped for counterinsurgency campaigns has received little systematic attention.

Similarly, US military doctrine and the professional military literature, while not ignoring the subject entirely, do not consider it in any systematic way.2 This gap is particularly ironic, given the prominent role that soldiers and Marines have played in training indigenous police and other security forces in counterinsurgency campaigns from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

If the broader topic of police and counterinsurgency is under-examined, the subject of mentoring—that is, advising and training—foreign police forces is even more neglected. American Marines, soldiers, and other military personnel preparing to deploy to Afghanistan for the police mentoring mission have few sources of information and analysis available to them.

This monograph addresses that gap. Using a series of ten vignettes, this report examines in depth the experiences of individual American and British soldiers and Marines who served as mentors in Afghanistan during the 2007-2009 period.