God is playing to an audience too afraid to laugh!

According to Newsweek, the Afghan police are central to the West's plans for getting out of Afghanistan now that Iran is low on the list of priorities.

But, the government in Kabul will never have popular support if it can't keep people safe in their own homes and streets.

Yet in a United Nations poll last fall, more than half the Afghan respondents said the police are corrupt.

Police commanders have been implicated in drug trafficking, and when U.S. Marines moved into the town of Aynak last summer, villagers accused the local police force of extortion, assault, and rape.

The public's distrust of the cops is palpable in the former insurgent stronghold of Marja. Village elders welcomed the U.S. Marines who recently drove out the Taliban, but told the Americans flatly they don't want the ANP to return.

"The people of Marja will tell you that one of their greatest fears was the police coming back," says Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who took over in November as chief of the U.S. program to expand and improve Afghanistan's security forces. "You constantly hear these stories about who was worse: the Afghan police that were there or the Taliban."

The success of America's counterinsurgency strategy depends on the cops, who have greater contact with local communities than the Army does. "This is not about seizing land or holding terrain; it's about the people," says Caldwell. "You have to have a police force that the people accept, believe in, and trust."

More than a year after Barack Obama took office, the president is still discovering how bad things are.

At a March 12 briefing on Afghanistan with his senior advisers, he asked whether the police will be ready when America's scheduled draw down begins in July 2011, according to a senior official who was in the room.

"It's inconceivable, but in fact for eight years we weren't training the police," replied Caldwell, taking part in the meeting via video link from Afghanistan. "We just never trained them before. All we did was give them a uniform."

The president looked stunned. "Eight years," he said. "And we didn't train the police?"

"It's mind-boggling."

The room was silent.

America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force. Buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits — but the program has been a disaster.

More than $322 million worth of invoices for police training were approved even though the funds were poorly accounted for, according to a government audit, and fewer than 12 percent of the country's police units are capable of operating on their own.

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the State Department's top representative in the region, has publicly called the Afghan police "an inadequate organization, riddled with corruption."

Mohammad Moqim watches in despair as his men struggle with their AK-47 automatic rifles, doing their best to hit man-size targets 50 meters away. A few of the police trainees lying prone in the mud are decent shots, but the rest shoot clumsily, and fumble as they try to reload their weapons.

The Afghan National Police (ANP) captain sighs as he dismisses one group of trainees and orders 25 more to take their places on the firing line. "We are still at zero," says Captain Moqim, 35, an eight-year veteran of the force. "They don't listen, are undisciplined, and will never be real policemen."

Poor marksmanship is the least of it.

Worse, crooked Afghan cops supply much of the ammunition used by the Taliban, according to Saleh Mohammed, an insurgent commander in Helmand province.

The bullets and rocket-propelled grenades sold by the cops are cheaper and of better quality than the ammo at local markets, he says.

It's easy for local cops to concoct credible excuses for using so much ammunition, especially because their supervisors try to avoid areas where the Taliban are active.

Mohammed says local police sometimes even stage fake firefights so that if higher-ups question their outsize orders for ammo villagers will say they've heard fighting.

When you take all of this news together folks, and then combine that with the mess we have had in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, the only sane conclusion you can draw is that God must have one weird sense of humor to give this part of the world all that oil!

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available as an E-Book H E R E! and H E R E! And as a paperback H E R E ! and H E R E !