3 Utahns coached Afghans on laws

Many members of the recently returned 1st. Corps Artillery faced hot combat against the Taliban on the battlefronts of Afghanistan during their yearlong tour of duty.

But among their ranks are three soldiers, all from Utah County, who fought against injustice on a different kind of battlefront — the courtrooms of Afghanistan.

In civilian life, Lt. Col. Robert Church, Capt. Dusty Kawai and Maj. Paul Waldron are hometown prosecutors and defense attorneys. Church works as an Orem city prosecutor, Kawai is a defense attorney with Esplin & Weight in Provo, and Waldron is a lawyer with Scribner & McCandless PC in Provo. But a year ago, they were deployed as JAG officers who trained the staff judge advocates of the Afghanistan National Army on military judicial procedures.

While the U.S. military has taken a strong hand in training the Afghan army for nearly six years, they are the first JAG officers to train the legal officers. For more than a year, the three officers challenged corruption, faced death threats, endured setbacks and saw the progress of a fledgling military judicial system in their quest to establish rule of law.

Church, Kawai and Waldron arrived in Afghanistan on Aug. 20, 2006. Originally, they were activated to work in civil affairs such as building community wells and bridges, but a JAG official reassigned them to become legal mentors in the cities of Kabul, Gudar and Kandahar.

When they arrived at their assigned bases, they soon received reports of blatant corruption among high-level Afghan officers. Many would steal military supplies, abuse young soldiers in their battalions and engage in racketeering, charging local villages "protection fees." Others were cogs in the drug-trafficking machine.

The Afghan military legal teams were eager to prosecute low-ranking soldiers for petty theft and assault, but Church was frustrated that they winked at crimes perpetrated by high-ranking officers with far-reaching political connections.

"They weren't prosecuting or investigating them," he said. "They were just accepting it as a part of the culture."

Almost immediately, the three JAG officers took a direct hand in prosecuting crooked senior officers.

Rule of law

A few months into his deployment, Kawai received reports that a battalion commander had drugged and sexually assaulted a young soldier, which, he said, is an all-too-common practice in Afghanistan. Kawai and his ANA counterpart traveled to the base where the assault reportedly happened and began looking for the soldier, who had fled to the mountains.

Three days into their search, the soldier came to them at night. He had heard they were looking for him, and his friends sneaked him onto the military base disguised in civilian clothes.