Baghdad Blues
For three years, the U.S. has tried to build Iraq's police force. Why it's still a mess
Lots of money. In those early days, under the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, U.S. officials largely operated inside the confines of the Green Zone, cut off from many Iraqis. Casteel had a mission--to rebuild the police--and a big budget, but few aides. "It was my first assignment in government where money wasn't the problem," says Casteel, who had served Latin America. "[Yet] I only had 19 people on my staff."
The pace was frenetic, as aides drafted a raft of plans--many idealistic, some even fanciful--usually with little Iraqi input. One CPA staffer who came from the Department of Homeland Security kept peddling a color-coded threat alert system for Iraq, similar to the much-ridiculed U.S. system. Other officials actually bought a $250 million digital radio system, only to have it rejected by Iraqis as too complicated and too costly--at $20 million a year--to operate.
Meanwhile, a host of serious problems loomed--the ragged, poorly trained police force was increasingly outgunned by the growing insurgency. Casteel wanted to build a national police force, but many CPA officials were leery of re-creating powerful, centralized security bodies. The staff advising the Interior Ministry was one of the larger U.S. teams, but Casteel's squad never got close to the 120 people he needed in order to manage the sprawling ministry. He topped out near 60, with high turnover, and many advisers lacked law enforcement expertise.
The immediate imperative was to train and deploy as many police officers as possible. "If you have overwhelming presence on the streets, you create a deterrent and you unleash intelligence," says Robert Charles, who ran the State Department's law enforcement bureau at the time. The plan, based on U.S. work in Kosovo, was an eight-week basic training course, followed by on-the-job mentoring by western police officers.
Frustrated by the slow pace of training, the Pentagon took over the program. (What's more, most of Casteel's staff erroneously were sent pink slips and instructions to leave Iraq within three days.) There was another wrinkle as a bitter bureaucratic battle raged for several months over a large chunk of the $800 million training effort. Some in Washington, like Charles, were impatient to get foreign police mentors deployed and blamed other U.S. officials for not helping. In Iraq, meanwhile, Casteel saw few mentors arriving and concluded that the violence would prevent sending them outside the capital. Instead, he wanted to move $250 million to pay for advanced training for skills like criminal investigation and bomb disposal. Eventually, the Baghdad team won the battle, but the delay was costly. "There was an appalling lack of a sense of urgency on the part of this administration to make sure that we were coherent at the execution level," says Paul Eaton, the retired major general who was in charge of training the Iraqi military and police at the time.
Lost in transition. Meanwhile, the CPA was handing over authority to a temporary Iraqi government and a new U.S. Embassy. But some things were lost in the transition. The CPA wanted to create a commission to manage the integration of Iraq's sectarian militias, like the Shiite Badr Corps and the Kurdish peshmerga, into the security forces. The idea was to allow fighters to enlist as individuals and disavow loyalty to the militia, which some officials thought far-fetched. Either way, neither the new Iraqi government nor the new embassy staff were interested in the commission, which was not funded and eventually disappeared. This left the militia problem waiting to re-emerge.
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