U.S. military officers tasked with training 100,000 Afghan police officers were ill-equipped to do so, and one even used television shows as a guide to training members of the Afghan National Police, according to a new report from the government watchdog overseeing Afghanistan reconstruction.
The findings come as part of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s investigation into the United States efforts to build Afghanistan’s security forces, as well as the flaws of executing that mission.
“The U.S. government lacks a deployable police-development capability for high-threat environments, so we have trained over 100,000 Afghan police using U.S. Army aviators, infantry officers, and civilian contractors,” SIGAR John Sopko said during a speech Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The only ministerial advisory training program is designed solely for civilians, but in Afghanistan, mostly untrained military officers are conducting that mission.”
In one example of the failures of the community-policing training, Sopko said he and his team spoke with a U.S. military officer who watched shows like “Cops” and “NCIS” to determine what to teach Afghan police.
In two other instances, Sopko said he and his team met a U.S. Army helicopter pilot who was assigned to teach policing, and discovered a U.S. police-training unit that was designed as a military unit, while another was designed as a police unit.
“You should have police or people with police backgrounds teaching police,” Sopko said. “And it is silly to have a really well-trained Army helicopter pilot teaching police. That just doesn’t make sense. You’ve got to align it.”
Since 2002, the U.S. has spent more than $70 billion to train and support the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, but in a new report exploring the lessons learned from these efforts, Sopko said there were many issues with the U.S.-led mission.
“The U.S. government is not well organized to conduct large-scale security-sector assistance missions in post-conflict nations or in a developing world,” Sopko said. “Our doctrines, policies, personnel and programs are insufficient to meet security-sector assistance mission requirements and expectations.”
Sopko warned the U.S. has taken a one-size-fits-all approach to security-sector assistance, which was not an effective strategy for the development of Afghan forces.
In one instance, senior U.S. and NATO officials failed to seek input from senior Afghan officials when they took on development of Afghan forces from 2002 to 2015, he said.
“The work of securing Afghan buy-in mostly took the form of briefing Afghan leaders on what military plans and training programs the westerners had already selected for them,” Sopko said. “Perhaps I am naïve — as I sometimes joke, I’m just a simple country lawyer — but that doesn’t strike me as an ingratiating approach to a future successful outcome.”
In another example, Sopko said U.S. officials used PowerPoint presentations based on US-NATO Balkan operations in their training sessions with Afghan police.
“The presentations were not only of questionable relevance to the Afghan setting, but also overlooked the high level of illiteracy among the recruits,” he said. “Such cut-and-paste activities lifted from one country and slapped onto another like a decal are not likely to boost the prospects of overall success.”
Despite the flaws identified in his report, Sopko said he is “cautiously optimistic” going forward.
President Trump has adopted a new strategy for the Afghanistan war, which includes sending additional U.S. troops to the country.
In remarks Thursday before a meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said the new strategy from the Trump administration has made a “difference night and day.”
“A cloud of uncertainty has been lifted, but equally important is your commitment to a political solution at the end of this process,” Ghani said.
