In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

by Seth G. Jones

  The result was that increasing amounts of territory fell into the hands of the Taliban or allied groups. Saleh’s report continued: “The villages are gradually emptied of pro-government political forces and individuals. These rural areas become sanctuaries for the Taliban and the population is left with no choice but to become sympathizers of the insurgents.” In these pockets, he found exactly what we might expect: The Taliban had begun to establish a shadow government, including an administrative structure and courts. Lamenting these disturbing results, Saleh wrote:

  I wish to be contradicted in my analysis of the situation and our perspective of what is going on and what is going to happen. Unfortunately, everybody I have so far talked to agrees with this picture in general terms. It is unfortunate because it is no longer only terrorism. It is insurgency. It is not about which individual is hiding where but about a trend which is undermining us in the rural areas. I still hope that I am wrong.2

  A Monopoly of Force?

  It was no surprise that the police weren’t living up to expectations. Afghan police had not received formal training for at least two decades.3 Germany, which had sent special forces to Afghanistan in late 2001 and had hosted the Bonn Conference, had volunteered to assess and rebuild the police. The initial German fact-finding mission in January 2002 discovered that “the police force is in a deplorable state just a few months after the dissolution of the Taliban regime” and that “there is a total lack of equipment and supplies. No systematic training has been provided for around 20 years. At least one entire generation of trained police officers is missing.”4 The first team of German police advisers arrived in March 2002 to train police instructors at their academy in Kabul. Officers, mostly inspectors and lieutenants, started a three-year course, taking classes in human rights, tactical operations, narcotics investigations, traffic, criminal investigations, computer skills, and Islamic law.5

  By 2003, however, officials at the U.S. State and Defense Departments and the White House became increasingly agitated about the German approach. Many argued that it was far too slow, trained too few police officers, and was seriously underfunded. As one high-level U.S. official told me: “When it became clear that they were not going to provide training to lower-level police officers, and were moving too slowly with too few resources, we decided to intervene to prevent the program from failing.”6 German assessments of progress in rebuilding the police noted that a paltry “17 German police officers—men and women from both our federal and state police forces—are advising the Afghan Transitional Authority on this challenging task of crucial importance for the country’s democratic future.”7 One can hardly blame U.S. government officials for thinking the Germans were not serious about training. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld wrote to CPA Administrator Paul Bremer and General John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, scoffing, “Colin Powell told me this morning that the Germans have offered to help train police in Iraq. I mentioned that I thought they had a done a pretty slow job in Afghanistan.”8

  After supplementing German efforts, the United States reorganized the program to train recruits at a central facility in Kabul, as well as at regional centers in Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif, Gardez, and Jalalabad. The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) oversaw the entire program. Since the end of the Cold War, INL had played an increasingly prominent role in civilian police efforts abroad. It had some administrative, budgetary, and managerial capacity to organize and run a policing program, but it had no police to deploy and no significant operational capabilities. Consequently, it contracted the private security firm DynCorp International, headquartered in the leafy Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, to build facilities and help train the police in Afghanistan.9

  DynCorp emerged out of two companies formed in 1946: California Eastern Airways and Land-Air, Inc. In 1951, California Eastern acquired Land-Air, and over the next several decades the company changed its name several times, settling on DynCorp in 1987. They were largely involved in providing mission support and repair to U.S. military aircraft. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the increase in U.S. stability operations in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, DynCorp broadened its scope to police training and security protection. DynCorp was not alone. With military costs rising and an increased number of operations abroad, the U.S. government began to rely on a growing list of companies—including Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) and Blackwater—to provide such security functions as police training, protective security, convoy protection, border enforcement, and even drug eradication in failing states.

  For their mission in Afghanistan, DynCorp recruited retired U.S. police officers, as well as some active members of state and local police forces, to serve as the U.S. contingents of civilian police teams. From the beginning, senior U.S. military officials had worried that the INL program was not doing a good job of creating more competent Afghan police, and others were concerned that many of the DynCorp advisers had had little experience training police from a Third World tribal society such as Afghanistan. This led to growing tension between the Defense and State Departments in Washington and Afghanistan. The relationship became so bad at times that key INL personnel were not allowed without an escort onto Camp Eggers in Kabul, the headquarters of U.S. police training efforts.

  Afghan government officials also began to grow increasingly concerned about the shoddy state of the police and the unwillingness of the international community to make police training a priority. For example, Minister of Interior Jalali met with National Security Adviser Rice in Washington to push for police reform. He pleaded with her, arguing that the police “should be the front line in protecting highways, borders, and villages.” In September 2003, during Donald Rumsfeld’s five-day swing through Afghanistan and Iraq, Jalali lobbied the secretary to focus on the police. In a 2004 meeting in Berlin with Zalmay Khalilzad and German Interior Minister Otto Schily, Jalali suggested that the international community “should adopt the Balkans model of policing,” which would require the use of competent, high-level police such as the carabinieri and the gendarmerie to train and mentor Afghan police, as they had done in Bosnia and Kosovo.10 But U.S. policymakers were more interested in building the Afghan National Army than in training police. And German policymakers were reluctant to increase their commitment to police training.

  By 2004, there was growing impatience in the White House and the Department of Defense that the State Department effort was failing in the police effort. Rumsfeld wrote a series of “snowflakes”-short, pithy memos that he frequently sent to senior Pentagon officials—expressing concern that the police program was undermining U.S. and broader NATO counterinsurgency efforts. His letters expressed a profound lack of confidence in the State Department’s police-training capability.

  In 2004, Lieutenant General David Barno held a series of video teleconferences (VTCs) with Secretary Rumsfeld, telling him that “police training needed to be done more systematically. They needed a strategy, he said, for what the end state needed to look like, and what kind of resources were needed to get there.”11 According to Barno, Secretary Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, by then the secretary of state, finally agreed to get the Defense Department more directly involved in police training, but only in the spring of 2005. This process had taken at least a year. Barno, Khalilzad, Rumsfeld, and other U.S. officials, including Under Secretary Douglas Feith, were supportive of this shift. But Robert Charles, assistant secretary at INL, who had developed a reputation as hardheaded and abrasive among those who worked with him inside and outside the State Department, blocked the shift. Turf concerns between State and Defense may have partly caused the resistance, since INL was the lead U.S. agency for training foreign police. Whatever the cause, the Department of Defense only became involved after Charles departed.12

  Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who succeeded Barno in May 2005 as commander of Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan, is a strikingly intelligen
t career soldier who earned master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in political science. He also served as a National Security Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Nora Bensahel, who later went on to Harvard University’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the RAND Corporation, was in the same PhD class at Stanford University before Eikenberry was called back to the Pentagon in 1994. “He was very smart,” Bensahel recalled, “and brought a tremendous amount to the program. Not only could he talk international relations theory, he was a practitioner as well.”13 But some of his staff also found him confrontational. In a meeting with Afghan Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Wardak in 2005, for example, he capped a testy conversation by saying: “Minister Wardak, I know your army better than you do.”

  Eikenberry appointed Major General Robert Durbin in late 2005 to head the office in charge of training the Afghan police and army, which was saddled with an unwieldy name: Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan. Durbin had a reputation as a tough soldier who could also be thoughtful and reflective. Arriving in Kabul in January 2006, he found the police in terrible shape; the United States had people with the wrong skill sets in key positions, and their tours were only four to six months. “I honestly believed I could change the police force in a few months,” noted Durbin. “After a number of months, however, I began to realize that it would take over a decade. The amount of institutional change needed was immense.”14 It took Durbin until March 2006 to put together a plan to staff, equip, and train the Afghan National Police. By then, he had concluded that the United States needed to implement a program for the police similar to the one they had put in place for the Afghan National Army.

  Durbin continued to develop the police plan until June 2006, when he was asked to put a price tag on this effort. After going back and forth with Eikenberry, the two agreed to request a total of $8.6 billion for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police: $5.9 billion for fiscal year 2007 and $2.7 billion for fiscal year 2008. Roughly two-thirds of the money they requested was for new equipment for the police. The amount was astounding, more than the gross domestic product of about fifty countries.15 Through dogged efforts over several months, Durbin finally managed to get the budget approved, despite the initial displeasure of Secretary Rumsfeld.

  Durbin also ramped up efforts to build an effective Ministry of Interior. He secured the assistance of the private contractor MPRI, which helped build personnel and logistics systems. MPRI helped the ministry formulate the budget, pay the soldiers, and perform other basic functions, but they also made sure the system was “Afghanized” by working with key Afghans in the ministry. Durbin’s plan envisioned three years to build what he called “base functionality” in the Ministry of Interior, since it was starting from scratch. In August 2006, he identified fifteen key systems and focused on the top five: personnel, finance, logistics, training management, and communications. Durbin told me, “We started at the top of the ministry and worked our way down.” His goal was to create full operating capacity within a year.16

  For Durbin, one of the most challenging aspects of the police program was the number of countries involved. The United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, and other nations working with Afghan police all wanted a say in how their money and resources were spent. This was understandable, but it also made coordination problematic and made it difficult to assign police resources in the places where Durbin assessed gaps. Most countries tended to have parochial visions of the program. After Afghan police graduated from the regional training centers, NATO countries had different—and sometimes entirely incompatible—programs for developing police in the field. One senior Pentagon official told me:

  Coalition efforts to build Afghan police and army forces were, to put it diplomatically, deeply challenging. The South Koreans pulled their forces out of Afghanistan in 2007, and then volunteered a few slots in their defense college for Afghan soldiers. How was this going to help us? Do three or four Afghans really need to go to South Korea for training? The Germans also wanted us to build a military logistics school for Afghans in the north, but not for all of Afghanistan. Our response was: we need to develop a program for all of Afghanistan, not just in specific sectors.17

  Policing Woes

  The painfully slow progress in refashioning Afghanistan’s police force created a slew of challenges. General Durbin told Condoleezza Rice in June 2006 that there was no office in the United States government that could effectively build a foreign government’s police force; INL did not have experience in rebuilding a large country’s police force, nor did the Departments of Defense and Justice.18

  Consequently, government analysts began to express increasing alarm at the state of the Afghan police. The Offices of Inspector General of the Departments of State and Defense reported that the readiness of the Afghan police force “to carry out its internal security and conventional police responsibilities is far from adequate. The obstacles to establish a fully professional [Afghan National Police] are formidable.” It found major obstacles: “no effective field training officer (FTO) program, illiterate recruits, a history of low pay and pervasive corruption, and an insecure environment.”19 Another assessment led by U.S. Colonel Rick Adams lambasted the Ministry of Interior as “ineffective,” “poorly led,” and “corrupt,” and the police forces as “poorly equipped.”20

  A number of Afghan government officials agreed, at least in theory. 21 But the Afghan government was sometimes its own worst enemy. In 2003, Interior Minister Jalali had pushed for the implementation of what became known as the Afghan Stabilization Program. As envisioned by President Karzai’s cabinet, the program was intended to spread the central government’s authority to all provinces and districts. Working on the assumption that all politics in Afghanistan are local, the Afghan Stabilization Program included the construction of key infrastructure in each district, such as police barracks, a prison, a post office, and a mosque. Ideally, well-trained and well-paid Afghan police thus could be sent to a functioning district center. But the program became bogged down in interministerial turf battles, with several key ministers—from the Ministries of Finance, Rural Rehabilitation and Development, and Communications—fighting over a share of the money. There was also significant disagreement about which areas of the country the program should target. Some pushed for Balkh, a relatively quiet province in the north that was home to such strongmen as Abdul Rashid Dostum. But others argued that it should focus on the east and the south, where the Afghan government and NATO forces were fighting insurgents.22 In the end, the Afghanistan Stabilization Program floundered. In a moment of polite understatement, a private consulting firm reported that the plan fell “short of requirements.”23

  The police were sorely needed to help establish order in urban and rural areas, but, as we’ve seen, they were poorly equipped, corrupt, and badly trained. Worst of all, they lacked any semblance of a national police infrastructure. This was especially true in southern Afghanistan. In 2006, the U.S. military concluded that in the south, the Afghan National Police had only “87 percent of weapons with 71% of ammunition; 60% of vehicles; 24% of communications; and 0% of individual equipment such as body armor, batons, handcuffs, binoculars, jackets and first aid equipment.”24 They also lacked uniforms, police stations and jails, national command and control, and investigative training.25 The Ministry of Interior was in particularly bad shape. Another U.S. military report found that the “MoI Finance is broken at every level.” There was “no actual disbursement capability” to pay police officers, “no formal lines of accountability” which “perpetuates corruption at every level.”26

  Afghan, U.S., and European officials involved in police training reported pervasive corruption throughout the force. An Afghan trucker put it succinctly: “Forget about the Taliban, our biggest problems are with the police.”27 Police regularly demanded bribes to allow drugs and other licit and illicit goods to pass along routes they control
led. Police chiefs were frequently involved in skimming money they received to pay their police officers.28 Some district-and provincial-level police chiefs were also involved in “ghost police” schemes. Since the international community paid law-enforcement salaries, some chiefs inflated the number of officers on their payrolls and pocketed the extra money.29 Colonel Rick Adams, who headed the Police Reform Directorate for the U.S.-led Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan, said the first challenge in reforming the police was “overcoming a culture of corruption.”30 An Afghan government report was even more frank, claiming that “allegations of nepotism and unethical recruitment practices are commonplace,” and “financial improprieties have been one of the most visible problems afflicting the Ministry and the police reform process.”31 These findings led to a flurry of efforts within the U.S. military and the State Department to curb corruption in the police. Durbin and his staff began vetting top-level police officials, trying to audit cash flows for paying police officers. They also increased the number of police paid through electronic funds transfers at local banks, rather than giving the money to police commanders, who inevitably would pocket some of it.

  Nevertheless, U.S. State and Defense Department officials acknowledged that it was extremely difficult to vet Afghan police officers or units.32 There was little systematic information on the background of individuals or units, and documents frequently were destroyed by the Afghan Ministry of Interior—or never existed in the first place. The office in charge of training the Afghan police and army, Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan, focused largely on vetting top-level Ministry of Interior officials. There was comparatively little focus on mid-and lower-level police.33 As discouraging as it was, corruption appeared to be more pervasive in the police than in the other security forces.34