Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [368]
As in Iraq, there was a glaring deficiency in our training of local security forces: the police.10 Germany had agreed to train Afghanistan’s police in early 2002 at the Bonn conference. It sent forty police advisers to Kabul, which was enough to train only several hundred for the capital city.11 In light of the modest efforts by our coalition partner, the State Department took over the effort a year later. State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) had the statutory responsibility for police training by the United States. Unfortunately, they lacked the resources and expertise to fulfill it and so sought help from contractors. Their eight-week basic training course did not include weapons training, and only thirty-nine hundred of the thirty-four thousand “trained” police officers had even been through the eight weeks of training.12
I tried to have the police training responsibilities transferred from State to Defense, where the crucial mission could be given the attention, resources, and focus it needed, and where our trainers had backgrounds in training for counterinsurgency.13 I had worked out an agreement with Colin Powell in 2004, only to have his turf-conscious deputy scuttle it with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.14 Without a viable Afghan police force, U.S. forces would be taking on the policing duties at an inordinately high cost in taxpayer dollars and American lives.15 I wrote to NSC Adviser Steve Hadley:
It is costing the US taxpayers a fortune as long as the US, instead of the Afghans, continues to provide for Afghan security. . . . I don’t think it is responsible to the American taxpayers to leave it like it is. We need a way forward. I’ve worked on it and worked on it. I am about to conclude that it is not possible for the US Government bureaucracy to do the only sensible thing. If anyone has an idea as to what can be done about it, I’d like to hear it. I’m ready to toss in the towel. The only solution I can see is to fashion an old-time decision memo and have the President decide it. If that is necessary, please draft the memo; or, if you prefer not to do it, tell me and I’ll do it.16
Months later, I was finally able to get permission for the Defense Department to assume responsibility for the police training. Over the next two years, we invested more than $1. 5 billion in the mission.17 An institutional fix to the underlying problem took even longer—over the continued objections of some in the State Department bureaucracy and members of congressional oversight committees who did not want to relinquish budgetary control over their failing State Department foreign police training programs.18 It was not until January 2006 that we managed to realign our country’s authorities for training foreign forces when Congress passed Section 1206 of the National Defense Authorization Act.*
On the military side of our coalition effort, General Barno and Ambassador Khalilzad recommended shifting the strategic emphasis from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency, since most of the remaining al-Qaida and Taliban had fled into the tribal areas of Pakistan.20 Our forces would still pursue terrorists when and where they found them, but coalition forces would move to strategically located outposts in key population centers outside of Kabul and the main base at Bagram airfield to help to defend the population from enemy infiltration and intimidation. This approach to counterinsurgency didn’t require tens of thousands of U.S. troops. It used Afghan army and police to bolster the small American presence and the twenty-two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) we had established, supposedly comprised of experts from different agencies and bureaus of the U.S. government. The PRT was a well-conceived idea. It was a decentralized way of enabling