With Unemployment at 40 Percent, Afghan Teens Enlist in Army, Police

KABUL, Nov 2 (IPS) -- Niamatullah joined the Afghan National Police (ANP) for the same reasons that many Afghan men do.

"I am illiterate," he says, sitting in the police barracks in Aghandab district, Kandahar, a Kalashnikov machine-gun hanging from a strap on his neck. "I couldn't find a job, so I was compelled to join the police. There were only two ways. Join the police or beg."

Niamatullah has something else in common with all too many Afghan police and army forces: he's only 16 years old.

On the record, government sources say that there are no underage soldiers or officers in the ANP and Afghanistan National Army (ANA). But speaking anonymously, many admit that in fact there are soldiers and police officers under the age of 18 serving in both security forces.

In interviews, these teen soldiers say that they need jobs to provide for their families and the police or army are more than happy to hire them, even providing the teens with fake National Identity Cards (NIC). In a matter of weeks, Afghanistan's boys can go from high school students, to uniformed soldiers.

Seventeen-year-old Abdurrahman lies in a bed at Bagram's military hospital, recovering from wounds suffered during a recent battle in Barg-e-Matal district, Nuristan province. A member of the ANP, he'd been shot in a gunfight between insurgents and foreign soldiers, though he was not directly involved in the conflict.

"I was standing with gun-in-hand," he says, fear still etched on his young face, "at the entrance to a hotel. When the fight started, a stray round hit me."

It is not the first time that Abdurrahman has seen or been in involved in battle, though looking at him it's hard to believe that he's old enough to have seen much outside of a schoolyard and his mother's kitchen.

His uncle, 45-year-old Rohullah, who regularly visits Abdurrahman in the hospital, told this reporter, "I don't think you believe that my nephew was a policeman. Believe me, he was." Rohullah displayed his nephew's ID card, showing that Abdurrahman was, and is, in fact a member of the ANP.

According to the Ministry of Labor, unemployment is at critical levels in Afghanistan, with 40 percent of workers jobless. For families desperate to put food on the table, the police and army offer steady work and long-term job security. Some teen-soldiers are even encouraged by family members to join the military or police.

Marjan Gul, 48, a soldier during Najibullah's regime, says that young people fighting Afghanistan's wars are nothing new and now, his family needs the income provided by his 16-year-old son's military paycheck.

"He always has on a military uniform," Gul says of his son. "He goes to the front lines of war. I am blind … if he quits his job, then who will support us?"

The law regarding underage soldiers is explicit. A presidential decree issued by Hamid Karzai in 2003 expressly forbids anyone under the age of 18 from serving in any military or police branches - conforming to Article 38 the Convention of the Rights of Children.

But some say that despite this law, the Ministry of Interior actually would encourage youths to join the security forces, by helping them obtain fake identity cards.

Zai-Ul-Haq, 17, is a police officer in Kabul who says that in order to recruit young men, "the Ministry of Interior issues NIC's with an older age on them. Or they will update your existing NIC, so that you are of an eligible age."

He says that when he applied to work for the police, "I lied about my age on the NIC. There aren't enough police and soldiers, and that is why NIC's are granted for small or underage boys. They just increase the ages."

One former police officer, who lives in Khost province and asked that his name not be used in this story, says that he joined the police as a minor, even though he still is not legally eligible because he is too young. He says that the man who hired him knew that he was under age, but falsified an identity card so that he could join