It's pretty unlikely that you'll ever see an Afghan cop doing this:
Or that you're ever going to see this anywhere in Kabul:
It's not that Afghan cops couldn't bust moves like this.
Or that they don't have what it takes to pull this off.
And it's not that they don't love their jobs as much as this guy...
...or this guy.
And since the Americans are here, this could happen.
So maybe Afghan cops would make great dancers. But we'll never know, because who wants to dance when you're not getting paid?
Outgunned by the Taliban and often derided by some as little more than uniformed thieves, police officers in Afghanistan do not have an easy job. But in recent months, their lives have gotten even tougher: Afghanistan's police officers have not been paid since November, and some have not seen a paycheck since October.
The government has the money, which comes from the United States and its NATO allies, but the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, missed a deadline for filing the necessary forms with the Finance Ministry, said Afghan officials interviewed Sunday. The back salaries will be paid in the next few days, the officials said, playing down the issue as a minor administrative mix-up.
What makes this story almost unbelievable is that foreign organizations are still nominally responsible for the oversight of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). If 150,000 of those folks (or nearly one half of all Afghan security forces) haven't been paid for months, that's what we call in the development biz a "problem."
While it's true that the Afghan government is the one disbursing the cash, if the coalition effort here is so completely disconnected from their Afghan counterparts that they don't know whether people are getting paid, that says a great deal about our success (or lack thereof) in this country.
So the group with the most responsibility for the law and order in this developing nation goes unpaid for weeks at a time. Forgive them if they don't break out the happy feet. Although a dancing penguin in Kabul would be pretty sweet.
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