News of the deaths had me scrabbling for my notes from this July. In Afghanistan I had visited a training centre for young police recruits.

It was part of the Dutch/ Australian camp, Camp Holland, near Tarin Kowt in the southern province of Oruzgan, adjacent to Kandahar and Helmand. The Dutch, who “administer” the province, were proud of the training they were organising. A keen and energetic young officer who asked (as all junior Dutch military personnel ask) not to be identified was in charge, and took us to the makeshift college, within the camp’s security perimeter. Here training took place before outside patrols were permitted.

A big, dusty yard was surrounded by a series of Nissen-style huts in the baking sun. These were the cadets’ dormitories. They were messy and smelt bad — there was little sense of military order — but “this is the way our trainees like it”, said the officer. Some cadets were lying on bunks as we entered, others milled by the doors. Within minutes we were surrounded by perhaps 30 of them. Fascinated by their visitors, they followed us around the facility, staring like children. They watched over my shoulders, intrigued, as I took notes.

“Most of them are illiterate, in any language,” the officer said.

Many looked like teenagers. One, I’m sure, was just a child. There were also some who looked middle-aged. Some were tiny; some puny; some looked hungry; some fearsome. The word “motley” can’t begin to do justice to this crew.

I asked the officer what kind of people applied, and why. These were just ordinary men and boys from the local communities, he replied. What they had in common was that they needed work. But he hoped they were inspired to help their country too. We asked a couple of them why they had joined up. Both replied that they needed work, and here at Camp Holland they were fed and given an allowance.

The Dutch officer spoke no Pashto. It seemed implausible that, enthusiastic as he was, he was in any position to make independent judgments of the circumstances, profiles or personalities of these recruits, or in any real sense to know them. They were a mixture of the keen, the desperate and riff-raff. I had no sense that any serious filter was, or could be, applied to the intake. The training facility tried to insist that they were clean of drugs when they arrived, said the officer, “and sometimes we test”. But he said it was an uphill battle.

Their training took a matter of weeks. At the end, unless discharged as a failure, a recruit would receive a certificate confirming his training. There were no grades: it was pass or fail. The great majority passed.

In Kabul I learnt that a significant proportion of the Afghan National Police (I calculated it to be up to 2 per cent) was being murdered every year. The job is incredibly dangerous. Recruits need to be fairly desperate for work, but many Afghan men are. This knife-edge balance between danger and desperation looked likely to produce, at best, a disturbingly mixed bag of police cadets.

Times Recommends

• UN may halt 400-year-old 'freedom of the seas'
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone
• Gas deal on hold, but Ukraine may pay in the end