With alarming frequency in recent years, thousands of U.S.-trained security forces in West Asia, North Africa and South Asia have collapsed, stalled or defected, calling into question the effectiveness of the tens of billions of dollars spent by the United States on foreign military training programs, as well as a central tenet of the Obama administration’s approach to combating insurgencies.
The setbacks have been most pronounced in three countries that present the administration with some of its biggest challenges.
The Pentagon-trained army and police in Iraq’s Anbar province, the heartland of the Islamic State militant group, have barely engaged its forces, while several thousand U.S.-backed government forces and militiamen in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province were forced to retreat last week when attacked by several hundred Taliban fighters. And in Syria, a $500 million Defense Department program to train local rebels to fight the Islamic State has produced only a handful of soldiers.
U.S.-trained forces face different problems in each place, some of which are out of the United States’ control. But what many of them have in common,
U.S. military and counterterrorism officials say, is poor leadership, a lack of will and the need to function in the face of intractable political problems with little support. Without their U.S. advisers, many local forces have repeatedly shown an inability to fight.
“Our track record at building security forces over the past 15 years is miserable,” said Karl W. Eikenberry, a former military commander and U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan.
The U.S. military has trained soldiers in scores of countries for decades. But after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that mission jumped in ambition and scale, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the ultimate goal was to replace the large U.S. armies deployed there.
The push to rebuild the Iraqi army that the United States disbanded after the 2003 invasion had largely succeeded by the time U.S. troops withdrew eight years later. But that $25 billion effort quickly crumbled after the Americans left, when the politicisation of the army leadership under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki eroded the military’s effectiveness at all levels, U.S. officials said.
Obama’s approach has already endured several setbacks, but with no political appetite among most Republicans or Democrats to send in large numbers of U.S. troops, the administration is adjusting its strategy, often turning to regional allies for help in supporting local forces.
After acknowledging that only four or five U.S.-trained Syrian rebels were actually in the fight there, Pentagon officials said last week that they were suspending the movement of new recruits from Syria to Turkey and Jordan for training. The program suffered from a shortage of recruits willing to fight the Islamic State instead of the army of President Bashar al-Assad. — New York Times News Service
