The Afghan National Police (ANP) is critical to Afghanistan’s ability to shoulder the security burden increasingly thrust upon them as the international military presence draws down. For Afghanistan to stay on an even keel and advance and sustain overall stability, the ANP, alongside the Afghan military, must be marginally better than the armed non-state groups that threaten the current political order. But the ANP is very ineffective, hamstrung by widespread corruption, attrition, illiteracy and public distrust. Progress is being made, albeit slow and uneven, but this is unlikely to significantly alter the bottom line by 2014, when the international military combat mission in Afghanistan formally draws to a close.

Training the ANP has been the centerpiece of the EUs engagement in Afghanistan since 2007. What began as a German-led police training mission in 2002 became an EU-led mission in February 2007, christened EUPOL. The German effort was found wanting or, in the words of then-SACEUR James Jones, “very disappointing”. Today, after six years, the conventional wisdom of EUPOL and its results generally echo Jones’ verdict. This will undoubtedly cloud the EUs legacy in Afghanistan. But the conventions should not overshadow EUPOLs strengths, for herein lies a lesson can be leveraged in future statebuilding missions.

The EU was widely seen as the ideal candidate to lead the police training mission in February 2007. The EU had extensive experience and expertise from police training missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Georgia and elsewhere. In European capitals many saw the mission as an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the EUs capabilities in a war that still enjoyed broad public support in most European countries. Finally, there were few serious alternatives to the EU. President Bush had recently announced a military surge in Iraq to enable a dramatic shift in strategy, effectively rendering a larger US role in Afghanistan unfeasible at that time.

As stipulated and adopted by the European Council, EUPOLs mandate was ambitious in scope – although also somewhat ambiguous – explicitly emphasizing the need to link the mission of training the Afghan National Police to a broader undertaking of strengthening rule of law in Afghanistan. Since its inception, however, EUPOL has severely struggled to fulfill this ambition. It hit the ground stumbling, not running. The means were never commensurate to the ends. Results were meager. In recognition of the ill state of the Afghan police and army, and their centrality to Afghanistan’s future and a viable international withdrawal,  the US led a push in late 2009 to form the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTM-A). Eventually it came to dominate the entire training effort and symbolize the ineffectiveness of the EUs parallel effort.

What when wrong? EUPOL has suffered from ineffective leadership, dysfunctional internal procedures and political and bureaucratic in-fighting since 2007. The first EUPOL-chief resigned after just three months at the helm. Since then, the quality of leadership has varied greatly, but regardless of the person, they have all been hampered by consecutive battles to secure and retain institutional autonomy. This was a fight on several fronts. In Brussels, a strong EU bureaucracy and the contributing member states were reluctant to delegate authority. In Kabul, the EUPOL-chief had a rocky relationship with the EU Special Envoy, who, acting on behalf of the EU, would insist on being the EUPOL-chiefs in-country principal. This was ostensibly a cause of the first EUPOL-chief’s quick resignation. Even withinEUPOL infighting was common. Seconded staff had national agendas, methods and interests specific to their preferences and domestic political context. This further weakened the EUPOL-chiefs authority as well as EUPOLs autonomy and decision-making process.

Moreover, EUPOL has been dramatically and consistently under-staffed since 2007. The mission never had sufficient means at its disposal to achieve its objectives. EUPOL was planned to have 400 police trainers, but for most of its existence the mission has hovered between 200 and 300 trainers. Even if the staffing threshold had been met, it would still have been incommensurate with the task at hand. It paled in comparison to the thousands of trainers NTM-A devoted to build the Afghan national security forces since 2009. This severely limited EUPOLs capacity to drive the ANP forward. Leaving quality aside for now, the output was simply too slow and too little.

EUPOLs mandate also was also constrained by restrictive and risk-averse caveats, preventing it from taking on roles in unstable areas such as in the South and Southeast, where a concerted EU training and advisory mission could have made a difference to the counterinsurgency campaign. Instead, EUPOL operated in relatively secure areas on the outskirts of Kabul and in Bamiyan province in central Afghanistan. That EUPOL could only operate in on the war’s periphery is a stark reminder of the limits of the EUs footprint and impact. Moreover, to the dismay of its critics in Kabul, EUPOL trainers were allowed to drink alcohol, were often not allowed to work on weekends, and had considerably more time off than their international counterparts at NTM-A and elsewhere. Tellingly, in the international community in Kabul – an environment were scathing sarcasm admittedly is a common refuge – EUPOL was an easy and popular target.

Much can and should be learned from these mistakes and shortcomings before the EU takes on a similar task. But given the politics and mechanisms of the EU, it is highly unlikely that these issues will ever be sufficiently resolved. Future EU police training missions will also suffer from lack of delegated discretion, in-fighting across national staff, limited resources and restrictive caveats. Instead, it its worthwhile to consider the strengths of EUPOL in order to gain a realistic understanding of how and for what specific objectives the EU can make a serious contribution to future, similar missions. EUPOLs flaws should not lead to a neglect of its special assets that, if leveraged with a narrow mandate, could make a valuable impact.

One of EUPOLs unparalleled strengths in Afghanistan was that its training effort was conducted by active policemen and –women with a wealth of professional experience from home and in post-conflict settings. This is in stark contrast to NTM-As effort, which is predominantly led by military personnel and contractors. The lack of civilian police trainers has reinforced the ANPs heavily militarized nature. The training, mindset and operational activities of the ANP is more green than blue. This is a significant obstacle to the ANPs long-term normalization from a war-fighting force advancing stability to a constabulary force advancing the rule of law. Most of the ANP today lack the skills to perform even the most basic police functions beyond preventing and deterring malign actors by the use or threat of force. Officers trained by EUPOL at the ANP Staff College near Kabul are educated and socialized as a truly blue police force. As the ANPs future leaders, they have the capacity to act as agents of reform (though it is unclear if they have the incentives to do so). 

In Bamiyan province EUPOLs training effort has had a tangible impact, providing a visible benefit for the local population in that their police units are more effective and trusted. Being heavily dominated by the ethnic Hazara minority – the minority most exposed to repression under the Taliban’s brutal rule – the insurgency will likely never attain a strong foothold in the province. Nevertheless, EUPOLs effort may have hardened the security against pressures from criminal networks and potential spill-over effects from less stable neighboring provinces. Moreover, while Bamiyan is relatively unimportant to the outcome of the counterinsurgency effort, EUPOLs presence there has somewhat counteracted what many Afghans point to as a morally hazardous incentive structure inherent in the international community’s strategy: the logic of counterinsurgency prevails upon ISAF countries to devote the lion’s share of their development resources in areas that are contested by insurgents in order to shore up fragile security gains. To many Afghans outside these unstable areas – such as in the orderly Bamiyan province – ISAF is essentially rewarding bad behavior.

The story of EUPOL is a testament to the limits of the EUs capacity to shoulder large, strategic burdens in the “hard” end of the spectrum of counterinsurgency tasks. EUPOL was never designed, resourced or able to build a sufficiently effective ANP – at least by 2014. Its results have fallen dramatically behind the goal envisioned when the EU took on the responsibility in 2007. As such, EUPOL will cast a cloud over the EUs legacy in Afghanistan. It has not been a success. But the silver lining sheds light on an important lesson: The EUs capacity to produce a high-quality, although incremental, training output is an asset that should not be forgone in future missions. In nascent security institutions, where professionalism is weak and internal cohesion low, effective leaders can make a truly decisive difference. Well-trained leaders have an amplifier effect. They can prove the difference between an ANP unit that stands its ground, builds rapport with the local community and prevails and a unit that preys upon the local citizens, colludes with malign actors or simply falls apart. The EU cannot supplant US-led actors like the NTM-A in large scale training efforts, but it can complement it in ways that, if leveraged effectively, can make a substantial contribution.

Christian Bayer Tygesen was an Anna Lindh Fellow at The Europe Center at Stanford University from September 2012 to January 2013. He was in Kabul from February to June 2011 and from May to June 2012 to conduct field research and other assignments.

Carnegie Corporation of New York, the foundation that promotes “real and permanent good in this world,” has awarded a $1 million grant to CISAC to fund research and training on international peace and security projects over the next two years. 

Specific areas of focus include research on strengthening communities in Afghanistan through collaborative civilian-military operations, several projects on improving nuclear security, and a study of community policing interventions to increase public safety and stability in rural Kenya. 

“The breadth and extent of Carnegie’s support will be crucial in advancing CISAC’s research and teaching to help build a safer world,” said CISAC Co-Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. 

As part of a project funded in part by the Carnegie Grant, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at FSI and the School of Engineering and a CISAC faculty member, and Siegfried S. Hecker – former CISAC co-director and professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering – will travel, consult and write on issues of nuclear security in Russia and China. Their goal is to increase technical cooperation between national nuclear laboratories in the United States and Russia. They will also pursue Track II dialogue with Pakistan to promote stability in South Asia.  

“It is crucial to promote cooperation with Russia and China on nuclear issues, both in terms of superpower relations and preventing nuclear proliferation and terrorism around the world,” Hecker said. “Bill Perry and I will continue to use our broad network of contacts to promote common approaches to reducing global nuclear risks.” 

Also in the area of nuclear security, Lynn Eden, CISAC senior research scholar and associate director for research, will take a hard look at the conflicting U.S. nuclear weapons strategy and policy for her project, “Vanishing Death: What do we do when we plan to fight a nuclear war?” Eden will focus on nuclear war planning and draw out the implications for future nuclear policies, including achieving a world free of nuclear weapons. She intends to publish her research with the goal of better informing the American public about the paradoxes and contradictions of U.S. nuclear weapons policy. 

“A historically informed public will be in a far better position to democratically participate in nuclear weapons policy debates, including questions of reducing the role and size of global nuclear weapons arsenals,” Eden said. 

The Carnegie grant also will enable CISAC senior research scholar Joseph Felter, a retired U.S. Army colonel, to assess and compare the effectiveness of counterinsurgency strategies and operations in the Philippines and Afghanistan. The former director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and commander of the International Security Assistance Force’s Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan, Felter has reported to the nation’s senior military officers and intends to generate a number of policy scenarios to be incorporated by the military. 

“CISAC brings scientists and engineers together with social scientists, government officials, military officers, and business leaders to collaboratively analyze some of the world’s most pressing security problems,” said Carnegie Corporation’s Patricia Moore Nicholas, project manager of the International Program.  “The original thinking and proposed solutions that emerge from these collaborations will help address a series of enduring and emerging challenges.” 

The funding for the project in Kenya will allow James D. Fearon, the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a CISAC affiliated faculty member to study the security sectors in Kenya, and then to use this research as a basis for developing effective strategies for peace building in other states in transition.

Joseph Felter, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel, spent much of his military career in areas impacted by insurgency and civil war, gaining firsthand knowledge about the complex nature of threat environments. Later, as a Stanford Ph.D. student in political science, Felter was struck by the significant barriers confronting scholars conducting research on the dynamics of politically motivated violence and conflict. 

Prior to deploying to Afghanistan in late 2009, Felter joined forces with Jake Shapiro, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, to build a team of researchers and establish the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC). They wanted to make conflict analysis easier for academic colleagues and create mechanisms that would allow them to share their results with military and government decision-makers. 

They spent the last four years building a team of scholars from across multiple universities committed to conducting high-quality, evidence-based conflict research. The team developed an open-source website devoted to compiling micro-data and analysis on insurgency, civil war and other politically motivated violence around the world. The site launched this week, with the stated goal of “empowering the nation’s best minds with the quality of data and information needed to address some of the most enduring and pressing challenges to international security.” 

The U.S. government and its allies produce massive amounts of data for their internal use, ranging from public opinion surveys and administrative tracking data on spending, to detailed incident reports on conflict. But this information is rarely made available outside official channels.

The site hopes to empower the nation’s best minds with the quality of data and information needed to address some of the most enduring and pressing challenges to international security." - Felter

“Consequently, military commanders and government policymakers are denied a significant pool of expertise, and outside scholars lose the potential to better support national security priorities,” said Felter, former director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and commander of the International Security Assistance Force’s Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan, reporting directly to both U.S. Army Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus. 

The independent research by the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project is supported in part by a variety of research grants including a substantial one from the Defense Department’s Minerva Research Initiative, administered through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego and the Hoover Institution at Stanford have provided critical resources and archival support. Private supporters include the Palo Alto-based data analysis software company, Palantir Technologies, which made a significant donation of software licenses for use by ESOC researchers. 

Felter said the website is designed to make it easier for other conflict scholars to do the kind of research that can make for better decisions and more efficient allocation of resources by military leaders and civilian policymakers, thereby enhancing security and good governance worldwide. 

“Decisions of great consequence are made by leaders of operational units in the field and by government decision-makers, based on the best information and analysis available to them at the time,” Felter said. “I’ve advised senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan and can attest that more and better data-driven analysis is in great demand. The stakes are high; literally life and death in some cases. We hope this website and the data it makes available to the broader scholarly community can help inform important decisions and policymaking.” 

The ESOC website supports three of ESOC’s core objectives:

• To answer key analytical questions for policymakers and those on the ground in insecure areas to help them manage conflicts and respond to security threats;

• To harness the expertise of leading scholars and provide them with the detailed sub-national data required to provide cutting-edge analytical support to policymakers at government agencies and non-governmental organizations;

• And to maintain a repository of quality data across multiple cases of conflict and make these data available to a broad community of scholars, policy analysts and military strategists.

"One of the critical barriers to getting more top-notch research done on policy-relevant problems in the areas of security and development is the huge investment it takes to build data on areas experiencing or emerging from conflict,” said Shapiro, a Navy veteran who teaches at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. 

“The ESOC website is designed to dramatically lower that barrier by making available a broad range of data which took our team years to develop,” he said. “In doing so, we hope to promote careful empirical work on how to reduce conflict, rebuild order, and apply scarce aid and security resources more effectively." 

The site is devoted to data on Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Pakistan, Philippines and Vietnam, with more countries to be added in coming years. There are hundreds of maps, geographical, demographic and socioeconomic data files, links to publications and university databases and other materials related to the study of conflict. 

Felter said that as a result of their research, ESOC members have uncovered significant new findings, some of which has been shared with decision-makers in the field. “In Afghanistan, for example, we were able to provide empirical evidence that conflict episodes resulting in civilian casualties led to an increase in attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan. These findings were briefed to senior leaders in the International Security and Assistance Force as well as to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” 

“I’ve advised senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan and can attest that more and better data-driven analysis is in great demand. The stakes are high; literally life and death in some cases." - Felter 

 They also were able to facilitate the release of data on insurgent attacks and aid spending in Iraq to test theories on what led to the dramatic reduction in violence in 2007. With aid spending, they found that the use of impromptu humanitarian relief projects could help gain popular support and cooperation, leading to a reduction in insurgent violence, but that large-scale aid projects could have the opposite effect. 

"Four years ago, practitioners would ask us how to best implement development projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict zones. We could only shrug,” said Eli Berman, a UC San Diego economics professor, research director for international security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and ESOC member. “Today, we can confidently give advice based on solid evidence: projects are likely to be violence-reducing if they are modest – say less than $50,000 – secure from destruction and extortion, informed by development experts and conditional on government forces controlling the territory.” 

Felter and Shapiro hope that new discoveries by ESOC researchers and by scholars working with micro-conflict data made available by ESOC can help shape American counterinsurgency doctrine as it evolves going forward.

“ESOC works collaboratively with other institutions dedicated to making data available to the scholarly community, such as West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, where ESOC researchers are engaged in a  new joint project  building data from recently released documents from the Iraqi insurgency,” Felter said.

Other ESOC members include:

• James D. Fearon, Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University

• David D. Laitin, the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

• Jeremy M. Weinstein, Associate Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He serves as director of the Center for African Studies, and is an affiliated faculty member at CISAC and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law