J.R. LABBE Afghan trainers fight heat, Taliban

The mercury topped 118 degrees in Kandahar last week.
"But it was a lot cooler today because the dust was so heavy it blotted out the sun," my husband joked in one of his almost daily e-mails.
So long as he has that sense of humor, I know that conditions are, at minimum, bearable in Afghanistan.
Not that I think he's telling the folks back home everything. Clues to how dangerous the situation is show up in comments like, "Not much else new. We just about have our new bunkers finished, so that will be good in case the bad guys decide to be bad."
And the bad guys have made that decision. They just haven't focused on the U.S. contractors training Afghan police officers -- not yet, anyway. The Afghan recruits are another story.
Six of my husband's students have been targets of violence by area insurgents who are none too happy with the locals working to support the fledgling government of President Hamid Karzai.
Three were on their way to the training facility when their car was hit by a bomb. Two were attacked by knife-wielding assailants. One took seven stitches in his face; the other was in critical condition at the hospital.
And one was dragged from his vehicle and killed.
Resilient Afghans
Yet the Afghans continue to sign up for training, although not in the numbers that were anticipated at the beginning of this experiment in developing civil law enforcement in a lawless region.
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage assured members of the National Conference of Editorial Writers who attended a recent department briefing that Afghanistan is the "little engine that could, chugging its way out of failed state status."
But the tracks leading to democracy are littered with debris.
One American soldier was killed June 7 and two were wounded when a bomb hit their Humvee in southern Afghanistan. The same day, Taliban militants killed two policemen south of Kabul and threw a grenade at a relief group in the northwest. Four U.S. special forces soldiers were killed outside Kandahar on May 29 when their Humvee was attacked.
Working without pay
Adding insult to risk, my husband reports, the Afghan trainers and recruits at his center -- one of six in the country -- tell him they haven't been paid since the compound opened in March, nor are they receiving the equipment they were promised.
Complicating the security problems, the Afghans responsible for guarding the camp haven't been paid, either. My husband writes, "Call me paranoid, but if the Taliban comes along and offers our guards some money, wanna take bets what they will do?"
Granted, Mark's narrow view of reality may not reflect what is occurring in the rest of the country. And he is working in the region most heavily populated by anti-government insurgents and Taliban sympathizers, a place that Armitage described as "the most difficult for border forces and police who are trying to support the Karzai government."
"There's going to be more neuralgia before it's over," Armitage said.
Neuralgia exacerbated when guards don't have the means to protect the recruits on their way into the training compound.
"If the State Department really wants this program to work, then they are going to have to make sure these people are paid," Mark wrote.
Priorities for Karzai
Perhaps when Karzai returns to Afghanistan after his U.S. tour to encourage expatriates to take an active role in rebuilding their native land, he can turn his attention to the courageous countrymen who never left and get them the tools they need to survive until the upcoming elections.
It is not all gloom and doom in the land of triple-digit temperatures. The air-conditioned living quarters are welcome relief for Mark and his canine companion, who spends her days inside and not out in the noonday sun.
Nothing mad about that dog.
My husband is an altogether different story.
X Jill "J.R." Labbe is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.