Two wonderful stories this morning, one from Afghanistan and one from Iraq.
First, Iraq: 'Fear took over' in Baghdad raid. Read the intro for the details on how one of the supposedly elite Iraqi units refused to fight, almost killing a number of US soldiers in the process. Here's the depressing conclusion from the LAT:
The U.S. military is ramping up its training program to add 30,000 Iraqi troops by mid-2007 to make up for soldiers who have abandoned their posts or died. The new recruits are also intended to supplement the small number of Iraqi troops willing to travel away from their home bases despite dangerous conditions or the possibility of being ordered to fight against members of their own sect.
Most soldiers in the 9th division, for example, are Shiites, and U.S. and Iraqi officers said they doubted the troops would obey if ordered to fight in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad such as Sadr City."In August, when we started Operation Together Forward to secure Baghdad, we called on a bunch of units to assist," said U.S. Army Col. Douglass S. Heckman, the commander for the 9th Division Military Transition Team. "This division was the only one that moved into the operation. The others balked."
But Friday's battle suggested that even Iraq's best trained and equipped division is far from having the ability to operate independently. Heckman said attrition and liberal leave policies meant that only 68% of the 9th division is even on duty at any given time.
Another American advisor complained that the division had only 65% of the weapons and other equipment that it had been allocated by the U.S.
"And it's not just my guys," said the advisor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "As I look across the division MiTT teams, they all tell me the same thing. Some of them have 50% of their equipment, some have 75%, but it's the same thing all over Iraq."
Despite efforts to get more financial support from the Iraqi Defense Ministry, the division stays operational only with help from the U.S. military, which provides everything from food to batteries.
Its hard for people here in the US to understand this, but the Iraqis aren't willing to die for the Iraqi state. Its not what matters to them. But why should it? Iraq was an artificial creation of the British in the post WWI era, a state created to satisfy the needs of the West, not the people of the region. It's never been something that anything more than a small fraction of the population, namely the elites who sought to protect their power, were willing to die for. Now all of a sudden, we hold a few purple-fingered elections and think the people are going to step up and die for their country? Who among us would be willing to do that?
Next, to Afghanistan: Panel Faults U.S.-Trained Afghan Police. From the NYT:
Five years after the fall of the Taliban, a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department has found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.
n fact, most police units had less than 50 percent of their authorized equipment on hand as of June, says the report, which was issued two weeks ago but is only now circulating among members of relevant Congressional committees.In its most significant finding, the report said that no effective field training program had been established in Afghanistan, at least in part because of a slow, ineffectual start and understaffing.
Police training experts who have studied or had first-hand experience with the American effort in Afghanistan said they agreed with the report's findings, and some said they had warned for years that field training was the backbone of a strong program. But they said additional problems needed to be investigated, including the quality of private contractors and the cost and effectiveness of relying on them to train the police officers. In particular, the experts questioned why the report focused on United States government managers and only glancingly analyzed the performance of the principal contractor in Afghanistan, DynCorp International of Virginia.
Considering the state of the police force, an estimated $600 million per year will be needed indefinitely to sustain it, says the report, undertaken by the offices of the inspectors general at the Pentagon and the State Department. Howard J. Krongard is the inspector general at State, which led the work on the 97-page report, and Thomas F. Gimble holds the office at the Pentagon.
American advisers will also have to combat endemic corruption in the force, the report says.
A few thoughts here...
First off, the idea of outsourcing the duties of the US military to private contractors has always struck me as absurd, not simply because I think if there's any one thing the government should handle on its own its defense, but also because I have no confidence in the ability of the profit motive to generate the outcomes we desire. The goal of the military is to protect national security. The goal of a corporation is to make a profit. It's hard enough to get all of our contractors to follow military regulations and obey federal laws. Did we really think we'd have more success at that when they were 12,000 miles away?
But more to the point, isn't a project like this simply too valuable to farm out to a company that's only concerned about its bottom line? Shouldn't we approach efforts like this with national security needs at the top of the priority list? And why on earth does anyone think DynCorp International will do a better job of training a military police force than, you know... our own military police force? I don't think there's anyone who would seriously suggest that DynCorp International is a more effective MP force, is there? So why did we choose to go with something less than our best?
Second... anyone who knows anything about the history of Afghanistan could have seen all this coming a million miles away. No matter what we in the west might like to think, it is the tribes that rule Afghanistan. It's been that way for hundreds of years, and it's likely to be that way for hundreds of years more. Without taking that into account from day one, our entire project was doomed to fail. But... surprise! The people put in charge of the program in its earliest days new nothing about Afghanistan:
Ali Jalali, an Afghan-American military historian who served as interior minister from 2002 to 2005, said the expertise level of some DynCorp advisers sent to his ministry was mixed. He said he rejected the first group he was offered because their résumés were unimpressive. When a second group arrived, some were retired officers not up to the demands of working in Afghanistan, he said. Others knew virtually nothing about the country.
"They were good on patrols in Oklahoma City, Houston or Miami," said Mr. Jalali, now a professor at the National Defense University in Washington. "But not in a country where you faced rebuilding the police force."[...]The international effort lost critical time when it initially mounted a token effort to train officers in Afghanistan, according to Afghan officials and policing experts. For the first two and a half years after the fall of the Taliban, no systematic police training program existed outside of Afghanistan's capital, according to American and Afghan officials. The United States focused on training a new multiethnic army and paid little attention to the need for policemen. Germany pledged to train a new force but sent only 40 police advisers to Kabul.
Then, in 2004, the State Department issued a contract to DynCorp to deploy 30 police advisers across Afghanistan and construct seven regional training centers.
The United States spent $164 million building and running the training centers; recruits received two to four weeks of training. The effort was poorly monitored and achieved mixed results, according to a June 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office.
In April 2005, the Defense Department took over police training in Afghanistan and drastically expanded the number of American police advisers; the number is 377 today. Still, police training experts said the Afghanistan effort remained far too small, with small teams of advisers each expected to field train thousands of Afghan policemen.
I love that part that I've put into bold. We were so focused on the need to create a multi-ethnic army, something that should be noted Afghanistan has never once had in its history, and for good reason, that we didn't bother to train a police force. It's mentioned in such an off-handed way that you could easily miss what an indictment this really is. If your goal is to build a peaceful democratic state, a police force isn't a nice to have luxury item; its absolutely central to your mission.
Now, all that said... am I surprise that "corruption" is a big part of the new Afghan state? Absolutely not. But we need to be very, very careful here with our choice of words. What we in the West see as "corruption," Afghans - particularly tribal Pashtuns - see not simply as a fact of life, but as an important part of their system of tribal values. We may not understand it, but they actually prefer to have a system that works this way. It's part of a system of values called pashtunwali, a tribal code of conduct that dates back centuries, perhaps even millennia. It's very, VERY different than the way we live here in the west, but so what? Its worked from them for a very long time, and besides... since its their system, I don't think we really get a say.
The point, however, is that we should have taken that into consideration from day one. Why anyone ever thought we could simply walk in and transform their society overnight is beyond me. Afghan leaders have been trying to do that for well over a century now, and all of them have ended up being overthrown, sent into exile, or worse.
All of which makes me wonder... Aren't conservatives the one who are supposed to doubt our ability to undertake grand societal transformations? Aren't they the ones who constantly remind us how vitally important culture is to the success or failure of society?
I'm just asking.
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