US-Trained Afghan Police Force Is Failing.

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, a joint report by the Pentagon and the US State Department has found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work. The report has also concluded that managers of the $1.1 billion training programme cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other pieces of equipment issued to police units have gone. In fact, most police units had less than 50% of their authorised equipment on hand as of June, says the report, issued two weeks ago but was only circulating on Dec. 4 among members of relevant committees in the US Congress.

The report found that no effective field training programme had been established in Afghanistan, despite years of warning from police training experts that field training was the backbone of successful training. Police training experts who have studied or have first-hand experience with the American effort in Afghanistan said they agreed with the report's findings but said additional problems needed to be investigated, including the quality, cost and effectiveness of relying on private contractors to train police officers.

Those experts questioned why the principal contractor in Afghanistan, the American company DynCorp International, escaped direct criticism in the report, which focused on US government managers.

Considering the state of the programme, it will need an estimated $600 million per year indefinitely to sustain the force, says the report, undertaken by the offices of the inspectors general at the Defence and State Departments. Howard Krongard, is the inspector general at the State Department, which led the work on the report, and his counterpart at the Pentagon is Thomas Gimble.

American advisers will have to combat endemic corruption and ineffectiveness in the Afghan Interior Ministry, the report says. Efforts to make up for the shortfall of effective officers are already under way on some of the issues which the report identifies.

Afghan and American officials recently announced they had instituted an "auxiliary police" programme at the end of the summer, which aims to hire 11,200 auxiliary police officers in parts of the country beset by Taliban attacks, primarily in the country's south. But these officers receive only two of the standard eight weeks of training, and the police training experts say that programme could worsen the situation. They say the new hastily created programme could place ill-trained and poorly vetted officers in the field and allow militias and criminals to infiltrate the force.

An American official involved in the new effort said it became necessary after southern governors besieged by Taliban attacks began hiring police officers on their own this summer. American officials feared they were seeing the beginnings of de facto private militias. "This was designed to avoid the creation of the militias", said the official.

Experts on police training say the US has made the same mistakes in training police forces in Afghanistan as it has in Iraq, including far too little field training, poorly tracking equipment and relying on private contractors for the actual training. At the same time, these experts say, the failure to create viable police forces in the two countries has played a pivotal role in undermining the American efforts to stabilise them. In Afghanistan, the failure has contributed to the explosion in opium production, corruption at the Interior Ministry and the resurgence of the Taliban. In Iraq, the challenge is even larger: sectarian death squads have infiltrated the predominantly-Shi'ite police force and helped push the country to what many are now calling a civil war.

"In both places, we were extraordinarily late getting started", said Robert Perito, a policing expert at the US Institute of Peace and former official with the National Security Council, the State Department and the Justice Department. Perito added: "In both places, you have a dysfunctional Interior Ministry in control, and in both places the US has tried to stand up a ministry advisory group to bring order out of chaos".

The New York Times on Dec. 4 quoted Afghan President Hamid Karzai as saying the violence in the country's south was partly a result of the lack of a viable force. He called for "much more support" from the US and for an expansion of the country's 70,000-officer force. "It is not that they are strong", he said, referring to the Taliban. "It is that we are not strong enough to defend ourselves".

The US has so far spent $1.1 billion on the training programme in Afghanistan; most of that money has gone to DynCorp International, a technical services company, which is based in Falls Church, Virginia, and employs 14,000 people in about 30 countries. DynCorp also won the largest part of the training work in Iraq; it received $1.6 billion for its training and security work in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2004, 2005 and 2006 fiscal years, said Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman. The work accounted for roughly 30% of the company's revenues during those years. In May, the company raised $375m in an initial public offering (IPO) of its stock. Under orders from the Defence Department, the company has deployed 377 police advisers to Afghanistan, roughly half the number the US has deployed in Iraq.

Police training experts say far more police advisers are needed in Afghanistan, which is roughly the same size as Iraq. The report says that management of the DynCorp contract by US government officials in Afghanistan has fallen into a state of disarray; conflicting military and civilian bureaucracies could not even find a copy of the contract to clarify for auditors exactly what it called for.

The report largely absolves DynCorp itself of any responsibility for the programme's failures, but former Afghan officials and several American policing experts who have examined DynCorp's training on the ground say the company is partly to blame for long delays and that the use of private contractors for training should be reviewed. Afghan officials have complained about the high cost of the advisers and said that some have too little experience. Lagana defended the company's work and said State Department officials closely monitored their activities.