Recent in the news that the increases happened so he thought i might be able to add some Background Information on that. For about 6 months i was the Senior Advisor to the chief of police for Kabul City Police department in the capitol. Back at the end of 20092010, we real laiz that we probably spent a great deal of money and effort on trying to transform the afghan army and we probably neglected the police force. And the reason that realization was so important was because the police in afghanistan are not what we consider traditional police. Theres a number of Police Officers in the audience that could understood this. In afghanistan, the police are not so concerned with traffic control, traffic is insane in afghanistan. So youll see traffic lights but they dont work. They are not so concerned with chasing criminals. What they are concerned with is protecting themselves and protecting the villagers. In a lot of places throughout afghanistan, the police might be the only thing thats s
Were at now, is there hope i would say, yes, there is. As we stand down our combat forces and shift to an advisory and a training role i think were going to be able to take our lessons lerbed learned and ensure that we can continue to build on what weve done. There were some Great Success stories. One of the things we worked on a lot was trying to bring women into the policing, something that was unheard of only a few years ago. Nina talked about the teachers but there was women who wanted to be Police Officers, there was women who had Death Threats against them from their own families and were actually serving as Police Officers in hiding because they wanted to do something that was important. So that was, to me that was a huge success story. But i think what we need to do is reset our vetting process, put more bio metrics in and ensure that we are Standing Shoulder to shoulder with the afghans as they try to build and then we teach the afghans to help themselves. And i think thats wh
Them went out and worked every day until they got as many people recovered as possible and even then most of them just moved into the fire station because they didnt have anywhere else to go. And even then it didnt stop because now you have People Living in tents. Their heating is open flames. Every night they were out fighting tent fires so people that were already displaced and already without just gt a little worse. Yet they kept doing it. I asked him, i said, what do you guys need . What can i do . What can we do as a city, as a community, what can we do to help you . And the answer was, you know, we really need equipment. I said, all right, well, i can see what i can do, theres a couple networks. And what we really would like is a way to help the community because as youve heard mentioned here a few times, this idea of post traumatic stress, it was prevalent. You can feel it. People were this was a month or so, two months after. Every time there was an aftershock people were on ed
Address the women. So we created the female engagement team. With our interagency partners, the u. S. Department of state, danish and british governments and of course the afghans, additionally we reached out to the private sector for partnerships, and not for profits to deliver things that we werent capable of delivering or to cover gaps that arose as we implemented the plan. We implemented the plan through 17 teams through helman and our two female engagement teams. This is actually just scrolling pictures. Sometimes a picture says a thousand words and i dont want to take you down the whole history of a year but i wanted to talk to you about how we framed this plan. This plan was framed into 5 pillars and the 5 pillars were students and parents, we attempted to build buy in and assure safety among the students. There was lots of fear of reprisals. By sending your kids to school there was fear that the taliban was going to knock on your door and let you know that that wasnt allowed. P
So we would be out there telling the afghans, this is how you conduct police operations, this is how we do police training, this is how you hold your weapon and engage the enemy, and then several weeks later another force would come in and not that it was necessarily wrong, but it was different. So from the afghan perspective, incredibly frustrating to understand where they are going and what they need to be doing and what is right and what is wrong. So in closing if someone were to ask me from 2010 to where were at now, is there hope i would say, yes, there is. As we stand down our combat forces and shift to an advisory and a training role i think were going to be able to take our lessons lerbed learned and ensure that we can continue to build on what weve done. There were some Great Success stories. One of the things we worked on a lot was trying to bring women into the policing, something that was unheard of only a few years ago. Nina talked about the teachers but there was women wh