Afghan Govt: 100 Police Killed in Average Month

Though most reports on the struggling Afghan police force center around the failures in training or the large numbers who desert their posts after their first couple of paychecks, the latest Afghan government report centers on what a dangerous job this actually is, perhaps the biggest reason why it is so hard to fill the massive number of positions the NATO forces want filled.

In the past six months in Afghanistan, the average death toll for police is about 100, with 595 killed and 1,345 wounded over that period. The job has been an extremely dangerous one, with police receiving little training and low pay to serve as what amounts to front line soldiers in an ongoing war.

President Hamid Karzai has sought to increase the ranks of the police through attempts to ban all private security forces, meaning that the better paying (and usually safer) jobs as mercenaries would no longer be available and assuming that many of those people would trickle into the security forces for lack of anywhere else to go.

But the high death toll makes these hardly desirable positions, and between desertions, deaths and serious injuries, NATO continues to struggle in training people to replace losses, let alone to increase the size of the force according to plans.