Baghdad Blues
For three years, the U.S. has tried to build Iraq's police force. Why it's still a mess
Inside a low-slung bunker in a quiet residential neighborhood in Baghdad, Falah al-Naqib was holding court in his temporary office. It was July 2004, and Iraq's new interior minister was briefing a team of U.S. civilian advisers on his plan to jump-start Iraq's moribund police force. A former Sunni opposition leader, Naqib wanted to bring back intact Iraqi Army units, which mirrored Iraq's ethnic and sectarian makeup, to form a new police commando force that could tackle an alarming spike in violence.
Within a few weeks, the first recruits were training, even though they lacked uniforms--and in some cases, shoes. When Matt Sherman, a U.S. adviser, first saw the unit, he was impressed by its tight discipline and high morale. The commandos soon received support from the U.S. military and gained respect from other Iraqis after battling insurgents in several cities. "They literally were the most effective [Iraqi] fighting force," says Sherman. "What was great about it was that the Iraqis were doing it on their own."
Deadly raids. The glow has long since faded. Today, the bunker where this brief success story was conceived is better known as the site of an illegal detention center apparently run by a renegade force within the Interior Ministry. The reputation of the police force now lies in tatters, amid accusations of human-rights violations and other police abuses. And many Sunnis have come to distrust the commandos, now called the National Police, while the ministry is widely believed by Iraqis to be riddled with hard-line Shiite militias that have free rein to pursue their own, often violent, agendas. Suspicion has only grown in the past two weeks after a string of deadly raids on Baghdad businesses by gunmen dressed in Iraqi commando uniforms.
The need for a reliable and integrated police force has never been greater. Iraq is facing a dangerous surge of sectarian violence with insurgents scheming to provoke a full-scale civil war. But these days, the embattled Interior Ministry has become a symbol of the Bush administration's inability to establish basic security in central Iraq. There were some early successes, such as the commandos, but broader progress has been undone by the vagaries of Iraq's emerging political scene and the ever rising violence. The failures were compounded by intense squabbles and profound disconnects inside the U.S. government effort. U.S. military officials point to signs of progress: Police are better able to hold their ground against insurgent attacks, and the ministry has disbanded some outlaw units in recent months. But other U.S. officials insist that the ministry urgently needs to be depoliticized to help stave off a civil war. "I think it's one of our biggest problems," says a senior U.S. official.
Rebuilding was always going to be difficult, given Iraq's recent history of oppression. But, as with most of the reconstruction effort, U.S. officials did very little preinvasion planning for rebuilding the crucial Interior Ministry, which oversees the police nationwide as well as the border and customs forces. When Steve Casteel arrived in Baghdad in the fall of 2003 to be the ministry's senior adviser, he had no time for illusions. On his first morning, the 32-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration pulled up at the Al Rashid Hotel, which was to be his home, to watch smoke billowing from the hulking structure, which had just been rocketed by insurgents. The next day, suicide bombers hit four Baghdad police stations, killing eight officers. And on the third day, an aide warned that the ministry had somehow misplaced $72 million. (The money was located days later.) "So by the third day, I was asking, 'Is Iraq like this every day?'" he says.
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.
The change of government also brought a macho new interior minister, Naqib, known for favoring fancy suits, dark sunglasses, and cigars. Not content to remain in the Green Zone, Naqib regularly traveled the country in a massive armored convoy. After a bloody U.S. offensive in Fallujah, the heart of the insurgency, he insisted on walking the streets there. "Of course, it was dangerous, but what should we do?" says Naqib. "Either you're a leader, or you're not." (It was dangerous for the Americans, too. Officials foiled a plot by the minister's tea server to poison Naqib and Casteel.)
As minister, Naqib worked quickly to build up his commando project. He fired corrupt or incompetent officers and raised the salaries of those who remained. "We had to clean them out," he says. He also brought back many Sunnis who had been pushed out because of their ties to Saddam Hussein's regime. There were hiccups: The police forces in Fallujah and Mosul collapsed after insurgent assaults in 2004. When Naqib took office, the Baghdad police force had only 8,000 officers and 4,000 AK-47s.
Naqib accepted the U.S. target of 135,000 officers nationwide, setting off a scramble for new recruits. The U.S. military, in recruiting and training the police, operated largely independently of Casteel's team. Soon, thousands of Iraqis were going through eight-week courses at police academies in Iraq and Jordan. "There was a constant drive to focus on the numbers, as if success was determined only by the numbers trained," says Sherman. "But you need leaders--that's what's been lacking with the police force."
The ministry was also lacking the capacity to absorb the recruits. Already, salaries were frequently going unpaid, sparking protests and desertions. Now, it was taking months to place the newly trained officers in police stations. The disconnect between the training side and the ministry was severe enough that neither side could even track where tens of thousands of trainees ended up.
The small civilian team was just struggling to keep up with the numbers. "Nobody focused on building institutional capacity for the police, just on training entry-level police," says one U.S. official currently involved in the program. "Instead, it became a cult based on the minister's personality." There was also a concern about the vetting process run by the U.S. military with little Iraqi input. Some U.S. officials believe that militia members--and even insurgents--were able to slip through the cracks.
Naqib's term in office lasted less than a year. There was an election in January 2005, but in the more than three months it took to hash out a new government, the ministry lost control over many local police forces. Provincial councils formed more quickly and usually installed their own local police chiefs. "New police chiefs, especially in the south, would fire the police forces and put militias in their place," says Casteel.
The current interior minister, Bayan Jabr, finally took office in late April 2005. He is a senior leader in the influential Shiite religious party Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which had bargained hard to run the ministry. The commandos were viewed as a prize, because they were a national force that could operate independently--unlike Army units, which had to work closely with U.S. forces. SCIRI officials came into office convinced that Naqib, in recruiting for his commando unit, had allowed former Baath Party officials and some insurgent elements to return.
"Civil war." U.S. officials, meanwhile, worried that Jabr would absorb into the police elements of the Badr Corps, the military wing of SCIRI. "With the militias, we tried to take them as individuals, not as a unit," says Casteel. "That changed with this government." Naqib now accuses his successor, Jabr, of purging some of his best units because they had many Sunnis. "They brought in new people," he says, who were mostly Shiites. U.S. military officials acknowledge that some local police forces remain infiltrated by militias but say that Jabr does not tolerate the practice. A Baghdad police captain in an investigations office, however, says that Sunnis in the force have been discriminated against and that Badr Corps fighters have been brought into the ministry with broad authority. "I see units go out on patrol in the night without any orders from anyone or even a court order signed by a judge," the captain, a Sunni, says. "We have our own civil war in the Ministry of Interior."
Casteel left Iraq soon after the transition. Gradually, the civilian advising team, which had kept offices inside the Interior Ministry, was ordered by the State Department to withdraw to the embassy. Jabr also wanted a more hands-off approach. "We were really kind of blocked out of a lot of things," says Sherman, who left in December.
Quickly, it became difficult for U.S. officials to track developments. They would receive reports of Shiite units carrying out unilateral operations in Sunni areas. Rumors of "death squads" spread as more and more bodies of men who had been killed execution-style began turning up on Iraqi streets. U.S. officials could rarely determine when the ministry was involved--and when it wasn't. Naqib is very critical of Jabr's management, saying the ministry is looking more like groups of militias. "Either they're for the people or against the people," he says. "What's happening now, it's against the people, like we had in Saddam's time."
Indeed, the gist of the rumors seemed to be confirmed in November when U.S. forces raided the Interior Ministry bunker where the commandos had been originally conceived. The search uncovered a secret detention area that held nearly 170 prisoners, some of whom had been starved or beaten. U.S. officials were furious. A U.S. aide walked into Jabr's office the following morning carrying a box with several whips sticking out--a collection of alleged torture implements found at the bunker. An Iraqi investigation is still pending.
Jabr would later insist the reports of tortured prisoners were exaggerated, calling them a ploy to sway voters in the December election for the first government under Iraq's new Constitution. He has publicly denied tolerating militias or death squads inside the ministry, which declined to comment for this story.
The U.S. military, meanwhile, had grown so concerned about the faltering police and hollow bureaucracy that it took over the ministry advising role in October. Today, U.S. officials are deeply divided over Jabr's performance. Some, who were critical early, now praise him. "We believed a lot of the intelligence that said he was the reason for the sectarian divide in the ministry," says Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, the ministry's current senior adviser. "I've tested him, and he has always been national, not sectarian, in his decisions." He notes that Jabr has fired special police commanders and disbanded a rogue, predominantly Shiite, internal affairs unit. But others blame him for the ministry's lack of accountability. "He's either incompetent and not able to exercise control, or he is compliant," says a senior U.S. official.
Peterson says that after two years of focus on the quantity of police, he is trying to "put a little more quality into the force." Specifically, he plans to embed some 200 teams of U.S. military and civilian police mentors into local police stations and fully staff posts in the 10 most contested cities by June.
Casteel, who now works for Vance, a security consulting firm, recently returned for a visit and met with a few former ministry officials in Jordan who say there are some 400 Sunnis ousted from the ministry in Jordan alone. "The more you politicize the ministry, the more likely a civil war will happen because you end up with units that are not loyal to the central government," says Casteel.
These days in Baghdad, dozens of new corpses continue to turn up on the streets each week, many of them blindfolded with their hands bound. The Mahdi Army, the militia headed by firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and the Badr Corps continue to operate freely. And the talks to form a new government, which would name the next interior minister, have stretched out for more than three months. In the tumultuous nation, police remain on the front lines--some 2,700 have been killed in the past 18 months.
This story appears in the April 10, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.