The Afghan National Police poisoning
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Asked in 2021 how Afghanistan had arrived where it was, John Kiriakou said corruption and tribalism, and then gave one story in place of an argument.

The training facility

There had been a report in the New York Times, he recalled, dating it to 2012. DynCorp had been charged with establishing and training a new national police force, the Afghan National Police, and set up a huge training facility, bringing young Afghan men from all over the country, from all the different tribes and all the different regions. That, Kiriakou says, was mistake number one. 

What happened

To make a long story short: one night one of the recruits poisoned a pot of stew that was being served for dinner, killing about a dozen of his fellow recruits. That same night, while the survivors were sleeping, he let four members of the Taliban into the dormitory being used for housing, and they went bed to bed and stabbed all the other recruits and killed them. 

It was a story for a day or two, Kiriakou says. To him it was a glaring example of exactly what was wrong in Afghanistan: that the tribe was more important than the nation; that Hazaras were not supposed to be working with Pashtuns, or northerners with southerners; and that it simply was not going to work. When you hate your enemy more than you love your country, he said, it is doomed to fail, nothing will work if that is the prevailing belief.  

The trajectory afterwards

Asked whether tribalism had eased in the intervening years, Kiriakou said the opposite: he thought it had strengthened. He added that for himself he does not really care who leads Afghanistan, if it is the Taliban, it is the Taliban, but that he worries about minorities there, about Shia Muslims and specifically about the Hazaras, a concern he illustrates with the story of a Hazara leader's judo belts. 

The incident sits alongside his account of American attempts to design tribalism out of Afghan policing by administrative fiat, described in the Afghan police tribal rotation, a policy he says did nothing whatsoever to combat corruption. 

See also

- Afghan Police Tribal Rotation
- Hazara Judo Belts
- The Taliban truck escort origin
- Renting Afghan warlords
- Girls' madrasa raid error
- Afghan heroin policy
