The police training mission to the Afghan province of Kunduz is to begin this summer after all. Radio Netherlands worldwide reporter Bette Dam in Kabul concluded after reading a cabinet letter to parliament that some 500 soldiers will need to start packing their bags quite soon. Part of the training mission itself will also start in summer.

Most Dutch people are still under the impression that the mission has been postponed until 2012. This notion is based on a letter the cabinet sent to parliament earlier this week.

In it, the government writes that many of its plans cannot yet be realised and more time is therefore needed. And so the plans have had to be postponed. Or have they?

Careful scrutiny of the letter to parliament leads to a rather different conclusion. The plans that are being postponed form only a small part of the mission. Only about 20 out of a total of 550 soldiers will leave for Afghanistan at a later date. The others are heading for Kunduz this summer.

Detecting IEDs
The 120 pilots and ground crew of the Dutch F-16s will start their mission in north Afghanistan then. Their job is aerial detection of IEDs. The Netherlands is one of just a few NATO member states which have the equipment to perform that task.

However, the jets will also take part in air strikes against ground targets, in marked contrast with parliament’s wishes for a much more civilian mission. The air strikes are highly controversial in Afghanistan, where debate on the strikes in which 60 civilians were recently killed in the province of Kunar is still raging.

A contingent of 125 support troops will also leave for Kunduz this summer. They are to provide support in a number of different ways, including intelligence gathering and medical assistance.

‘No matter what’
Most noteworthy is that the letter to parliament states that the Netherlands will deploy 165 soldiers to train Afghan police officers this summer ‘no matter what‘, while the conditions set by parliament have clearly not been met.

This is exactly why the 20 military police officers – who are to be deployed at the German training camp – will remain in the Netherlands for the time being.German forces are in command of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) mission in northeast Afghanistan, and the Dutch training mission will fall under German command.

The cabinet pledged to extend the basic training course from six to eight weeks, but this will not be possible this year. The Netherlands also wants to have a voice in the recruitment of police recruits, for instance by checking for motivation and possible drug abuse, but also for ethnical background to ensure all ethnicities are represented in the new police force.

At present, the Afghan authorities are in charge of recruitment, and NATO and other trainers have no say in the matter.

‘Dutch Approach’
The ‘Dutch approach’ apparently does not apply to the 165 members of the Police Mentoring and Liaison Teams (POMLTs) who will begin their mission by training Afghan policemen in the Kunduz bazaar, and, if it’s up to the Dutch cabinet, as soon as possible in other districts as well.

The POMLTs do not appear to be in any way affected by parliament’s demand for a different approach to training police recruits in Afghanistan.

This first batch of trainees, who will be taught an advanced training course, have taken the six-week basic training course the Dutch parliament so strongly disapproves of. And they were not selected on the basis of Dutch criteria and will not be monitored after graduation to check whether they are being deployed to fight the Taliban.

German training camp
The POMLTs will take randomly selected groups of police officers to the Bazaar, probably from the German GPPT training camp in Kunduz. A German Interior ministry spokesperson said Germany would not follow the Dutch approach to training courses and would not supervise recruitment.

In reply to questions whether the German troops would monitor police officers after graduation or check whether they were going off to fight, the spokesperson clearly stated that “We don’t know where they are going afterward, or where they should be going. That is up to the Afghans.”

For the time being at least, the marked contrast between the reality of the situation on the ground in Kunduz and parliament’s demands appears to be no reason for debate, and the Netherlands will start its training mission in summer as scheduled. Except for the 20 military police officers, that is. They will follow in 2012.