KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Classrooms in Kabul will soon be filled with Afghan cops learning their ABCs.

The U.S. army and Canada's international contracting agency are looking for firms to teach Afghanistan's mostly illiterate police force to read and write.

The new, six-hour-a-day course is meant to speed up efforts to boost the force's chronically-low literacy rate.

As many as 2,000 Afghan cops will be part of a pilot program expected to last between six and 12 months.

A document posted this week on a pair of websites that advertise Canadian and American government contracts contains more details about the course.

"The Afghan National Police (ANP) is currently 35 per cent literate in their native languages," the document says.

"This low literacy rate hinders its development as it evolves into a modern police force governed by the rule of law...

"In an effort to increase the pace of raising the ANP literacy rate, we seek expansion of current efforts with inclusion of an intensive literacy program."

The U.S. and NATO, working with the Afghan education and interior ministries, now provide literacy training for the Afghan police at 221 spots around the country, all at the district level.

The intensive literacy courses will be held in the capital Kabul, using the Afghan Education Ministry's latest curriculum. Each class will have 250 students.

No one from the U.S. army's contracting office was immediately available for comment.

Interior Minister Hanif Atmar recently approved a new Afghan policing strategy that, in part, identified illiteracy as a problem plaguing the force.

Under the new strategy, the police force will put more emphasis on developing professional and leadership skills, including reading and writing, rather than training beat cops.

That training is already going on. Twenty-three officers recently finished a six-week leadership course in Kandahar. The Canadian-sponsored course taught everything from payroll to how to deal with the public.

Those cops are now back in their detachments teaching colleagues what they learned.

Teaching cops to be able to read their pay stubs will also help cut down on the rampant corruption that pervades the force. A typical officer can see about a third of his salary skimmed off by his superiors.

In turn, many an Afghan has been shaken down by corrupt cops looking to fatten their wallets.

The new policing strategy aims to make the force more professional, and that includes having cops who can read and write.

A competent Afghan police force is a cornerstone to NATO's exit strategy in Afghanistan.

The western military alliance wants to hand over more security to the Afghan force as its troops pull out of the country.

The Afghan government wants to have 160,000 officers on the force by 2014. That's up from the 97,000 Afghan cops now in service.