Five years after the fall of the Taliban, a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department has found that the US-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the US$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.
In 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 US 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 US 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 US$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 Krongard is the inspector general at State, which led the work on the 97-page report, and Thomas Gimble holds the office at the Pentagon.
US advisers will also have to combat endemic corruption in the force, the report says.
Efforts to respond to some of the issues that the report identified are already under way.
Afghan and US officials recently announced that they had instituted an "auxiliary police" program at the end of the summer, which aims to hire 11,200 officers in parts of the country beset by Taliban attacks, primarily in the south.
But these officers receive only two of the standard eights weeks of training, and the police training experts say the program could worsen the situation. They say the new hastily created program could place ill-trained and poorly vetted officers in the field and allow militias and criminals to infiltrate the force.
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