What are the Afghan police like?

By Tulip Mazumdar Newsbeat presenter

Training local police is a major part of the British mission in Afghanistan but the deaths of five British soldiers killed in an attack by an Afghan police officer have raised many questions. Ex-army captain Doug Beattie, who used to train Afghan officers, explains the dangers of the job, why it's important and what the Afghan police are really like.

Ex-army captain Doug Beattie says the training of Afghan police is important

Are you surprised at what's happened?

I think the word is just shocked. What happened, although we are aware of the problems with the police, is extremely rare and certainly at this level. Although last year when I was serving in Afghanistan I had a number of issues with the Afghan police and the Afghan army, there was nothing really on this scale.

What were they like to work with?

Many of them are just young men who are not trained. They come from the various districts around Helmand.

They're put into uniform, they're given rifles, they're put at checkpoints and they're left to get on with it.

They're ill-disciplined, ill-trained, they're high on drugs and they're universally hated by their own population.

The other scale is the more senior officers in the police go to Kandahar and Kabul and do their training there. So there's a real mixed bag with the two.

That must be very disheartening for the British troops training them?

Glowing tributes have been paid to the five soldiers killed in the attack

It is slightly disheartening. We receive good cultural and political briefs before we go to the country so we know roughly what we're going to find when it comes to the police, so it's not always a shock.

But it is slightly disheartening when you look at these people and you say these are the people who we're trying to train to take over their country.

But it's going to take time, it's going to take many man hours to change this around and we have to be in it to win it.

The mentoring of the police, in fact the mentoring of the army, is absolutely fundamental to the success in Afghanistan.

We've had many texts in from serving soldiers. I want to read one of them to you. This one's from Jaime who's an ex-Royal Blue. He says: "We got told in our training, 'You can trust an Afghan with your life, until he gets a better offer'." Is that true?

I think what he's alluding to is the dollar speaks volumes in Afghanistan.

The police are poorly paid, some of them don't get paid at all. If the insurgency turn up and offer him money he will change sides for the dollar.

He's absolutely right, such is the level of corruption within the police and in Afghanistan in general.

That must be very depressing for the soldiers going out there, putting their lives at risk?

It is depressing. Certainly some of the things we're trying to do is get rid of that link towards the policeman being paid by the insurgency and doing things for them and to make sure that policeman are paid correctly, and treated correctly, have good terms of service and are looked after.

We're now putting in a lot more resources to try and make that happen, as we did with the Afghan army.

But as it sits now, these policemen, these tribal militias, have so many influences on them from outside - tribal influences, family influences, district influences, warlord influences and the insurgency influencing them - many of them could not be trusted.

In your experience, to what extent has the police there been infiltrated by the Taliban?

They're infiltrated at every level. I'm not sure it's necessarily an infiltration. I don't think there's a Taliban standing within the police as a sleeper and then all of a sudden, two years down the line, he's going to step out.

I think what you have is policemen who are being influenced by external forces, whether that's ideologically or whether that's through money.

It's those who then turn and carry out instances, and even hand over their weapons and hand over their equipment to the insurgency and Taliban fighters.

Doug Beattie was in the army for 27 years with the Royal Irish Regiment

It must be a hard job to train these people?

It is terrible and they're extremely brave men who do this in very small groups.

They live with the Afghan police, they eat the same food as the Afghan police, they sleep in the same compound, they have an amazing relationship with them.

We sit and we talk through the night, they tell us about their aspirations for the future, we tell them about our family back home and we really do get to know them.

In the most part, these policemen are first class and some of the noblest, bravest men I've ever met are Afghan policemen.

But it's the other end of the scale where things are difficult, the unvetted policeman, the tribal militiaman who's being influenced from the outside.

It really is quite dangerous to be working quite closely with these people. But we have to be shoulder to shoulder with them and mentor them to be able to move this process forward.