In Northern Afghanistan, over a dozen soldiers of the New Hampshire National Guard are helping to train Afghan National Police and the army.
The Americans say the policy are in most need of help.
New Hampshire Public Radio's correspondent Doug Grindle is in Afghanistan and has that story.
Near the town of Saripul in northern Afghanistan, local police units practice firing rockets and machine guns.
(natural sound)
It may seem extreme for police officers to be firing such heavy weapons.
But they're not learning how to pull the trigger, they can do that already.
They're learning how to safely run a firing range so they can train other policemen.
Police advisor US Army Captain Blake Fowler is from Nashua.
"You do have a lot of these Afghans that are standing right here that use these weapons against the Taliban against the Russians. They know how to use them, but they don’t necessarily know how to use them to teach another lower-level, brand new, 20 year old Police Soldier how to use them."
Sixteen New Hampshire soldiers are part of this training unit.
They act as mentors to the higher-ups, the officers, training them to do all the desk work that goes hand-in-hand with good policing.
Fowler says Afghans are generally good fighters but they need more work on the administrative side.
"I mean, back here we don’t need to focus on combat, we focus on accountability of people, accountability of ammunition, accountability of equipment, of communications, that’s what we can focus on and that’s good."
While the Afghan army can now operate in groups of one or two hundred without help, the national police are a different story.
In many far-flung stations they are plagued by the most basic problems, despite years of training by European soldiers and private contractors.
Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Burnham directs the US training program here.
"Those were great efforts and you need that, you need that trained force to work with, but there was a realization after the initial phases of that, that many of these people weren’t getting paid, they weren’t getting the training they needed, they didn’t have uniforms, they didn’t have effective means of transportation. In many cases, there’s a great deal of corruption."
For example, the Americans are pushing the local police to get off the base and work more actively with area residents.
The Americans want to open small bases so they can work permanently in the two provinces.
Otherwise the police are stationed in Mazar I Sharif, two to three hours drive away.
Captain Fowler:
"Being three, four hours away doesn’t help me out, I feel very distant. The ANP knows this too. You’re not, you’re just a guy who comes by a couple times a week instead of somebody who lives in the community, knows the issues and knows the policing constraints and can help them out."
Until this past summer there were no American mentors at all in the area.
And the training seldom reached the officers in charge of the small police stations.
The trainers are trying to address some issues like the poor police salaries.
But Lt. Colonel Burnham says it is likely to take years for the Afghan police to stamp out what's an almost institutional corruption.
"I think it would be unreasonable for us to expect that we could turn things around overnight. It would be a very American attitude. And that’s something you can’t go into this business, this one on one mentoring of the Afghan people with very American attitudes."
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Pay day at an Afghan army base.
Afghan soldiers line up and check and re-check their cash.
This kind of control system is working fine for the army, and is typical of what's needed for the police to stop corruption.
But it took a while to develop.
Senior advisor Major John Leblanc is from Manchester.
"Each soldier comes up individually, they go thru the roster, find out how much he is to be paid. They count the money in front of him. There are 2 or 3 witnesses as you can see watching that person count the money, the soldiers watching the money being counted, then he counts the money and then he signs for the money."
Soldiers say the army is about five years ahead of the police in terms of local administration.
But northern Afghanistan is comparatively quiet and the police have the luxury of time to improve.
In the south, where the fighting is more intense, trainers have no such luxury.
For NHPR News, I'm Doug Grindle in Mazar-I-Sharif, northern Afghanistan.
