Bring back our heroes

What happens when police and military forces mandated to uphold the law and protect citizens turn into predatory assailants? We get tragedies like the disappearance of 43 college students in Iguala, Mexico since September; the abduction and enslavement of over 500 girls in northern Nigeria in the last five years; and a mockery of justice without due process via hastily implemented death sentences on persons accused of committing mass rapes in Paghman, Afghanistan.

The macabre thread tying Mexico, Nigeria, Afghanistan and other war-torn countries is rogue state agents handin-glove with gangsters, drug dealers, fanatical terrorists or criminal syndicates. Unprofessional conduct of men in khakis does occur around the world, and is somewhat inevitable due to the unique power they wield as authorised carriers of weapons. But the degree of criminalisation of security forces is extreme in conflict-affected countries. Societies where law enforcers are hopelessly sunk in banditry are plagued with prolonged state failure and collapse.

Mexico is the quintessential case of cops and soldiers gone bad. The proliferation of drug cartels catering to the lucrative American market up north has destroyed the country with the connivance of security forces. Since 2006, the “war on drugs” involving complex battles and alliances among military, police and rival cartels have cost more than one hundred thousand lives.

Mexico’s drug woes began in the 1980s, when a federal police agent called Félix Gallardo leveraged high-level political and intelligence connections within the Mexican state apparatus to launch a cartel for trafficking cocaine from Colombia and Central America into the United States. Nicknamed “the Godfather”, Gallardo also enjoyed blessings of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for his anti-communist dirty jobs. His life is a study in how collusion between police, military, civilian politicians and transnational criminals can wreak havoc.

Gallardo’s flamboyant successors, who today rule territories of Mexico like warlords, boss over judges, police and military officers and journalists. Kingpins are the de facto state on the ground. Mexican law is at their mercy while major Wall Street banks in New York launder money for them.

Mexico’s cartels, which are implicated in countless unidentified mass graves dotting the countryside, are entrenched because uprooting them would incur grave costs for politicians and bureaucrats at the federal and local levels. When the 43 youth went missing in Iguala, it was a familiar chain of events exposing the depth of the rot. Police arrested the students for staging a harmless protest and handed them over to Guerreros Unidos, a local mafia that had the town’s administration in its pocket. The mayor, who was being paid a regular retainership by the thugs, fled into hiding once news emerged of the innocent students possibly killed and buried without a trace.

Mexican Presidents symbolically fire security officials for their complicity in unspeakable abuses of citizens. But the body politic is so infiltrated by the menace that a thorough cleanup entails risks of challenging too many vested interests.

In Nigeria, the military enjoys enormous privileges on budgets and policymaking but has drawn a blank in protecting helpless citizens from Boko Haram, which has declared a “Caliphate” and killed or kidnapped countless youth to be converted to Islam, forcibly married or serve as bonded labourers.

Like Mexico, the actual trouble is not so much the barbarism of the Boko Haram insurgency, but the unprofessional and criminal conduct of the Army and police who spawned the problem and are now embarrassing Nigeria as a helpless state. The global movement on Twitter to #BringBackOurGirls from Boko Haram’s captivity has shone a harsh light on the incapacity and criminal penetration of the Nigerian security forces. It is an open secret that heavy weaponry deployed by Boko Haram in its campaigns against allegedly un-Islamic Westernisation are bought from rogue Nigerian military personnel moonlighting as arms peddlers.

The inability of the Nigerian security establishment to crush Boko Haram despite the former’s vast superiority over the latter, in resources, speaks of how corroded and corrupt the police and the Army are in a permissive environment where the line between protectors and killers is erased.

The stakes of security sector incompetence and unprofessionalism are even higher than Nigeria in Afghanistan, where despite billions of dollars poured into training and skilling police and armed forces by culturally insensitive and thoughtless foreign donors for a decade, the end product is a crippled force struggling to resist the Taliban onslaught.

Miscarriages of justice, such as the Paghman rape case, and routine harassment of citizens by intoxicated soldiers and policemen lend zero confidence toward the state apparatus in the

The Nigerian

security establishment’s inability to crush Boko Haram despite the former’s vast

superiority, indicates how corrupt the police and the Army are

Afghan provinces. Journalist Ben Anderson’s book, No Worse Enemy, documents at length how Afghan security forces skim off weapons, military supplies and fuel for the black market, and also take cuts from opium production and trafficking. The penetration of Afghan soldiers by Taliban and the everpresent danger of “insider attacks” reveal a vulnerable and divided Afghan state structure.

Echoing Mexico and Nigeria, many in Afghanistan argue that insurgents pose less of a problem compared to the abusive and corrupt state security apparatus. Terrorism thrives in zones where agents of state lack capacity, legitimacy, tact and integrity. If only one could fix the woes of police and military in these countries, the anti-national elements running amok would have no option but to shut shop.

How can non-performing security systems be decriminalised? First and foremost, civilian politicians at the top have to be courageous and set personal examples of honesty. If the President or Prime Minister is on the take or running patronage networks of his own, the policeman or soldier in the field will be emboldened to steal and cheat.

Secondly, recruitment and training of inductees into the police or Army have to be shielded from nepotistic practices by according these functions special inviolable status in a country’s national security strategy.

Thirdly, humane values and patriotism have to be inculcated early into educational curricula so that the uniforms that agents of state wear invoke pride, duty and responsibility rather than signalling a licence to wanton killing or selfenrichment.

Reforms are easy to recommend, but appear impossible to achieve in countries devastated by wars. But there are no shortcuts to state building, which is a brave, painstaking and generational task. The writer is a professor and dean of the Jindal School of International

Affairs