With the humour and skill of a stand-up comedian, RCMP Staff Sgt. Scott Warren pulled in his audience, then kept us enthralled with a fascinating presentation on his year in Afghanistan.

His mission, which took place in Kabul along with two other team members, was to teach basic police skills to an Afghan Special Police Unit. The compound in which they were housed, euphemistically known as “Green Village” turned out to have virtually no equipment, strange meals and to be a very dangerous place indeed.  Warren described it as “a prison with the bad guys on the outside.  The guns were pointed out, not in”.  Any hope of getting out to meet normal Afghan families was simply too dangerous, both for the men and for the citizens.  See more in this article in the Oceanside Star,

By April 2014, Warren and his team had trained 178 enthusiastic people (four of them women) and ten instructors graduated from the class and so the mission was deemed a success. Afghanistan, however, remains a land of peril and corruption where terrorism is rampant.  When asked by a member of the audience “Will it change?”, Warren’s answer was “Probably not…although most of the Afghans are really good people, there just isn’t the political will”.

Text by:  Steph Smith