Bushco: Worst.Police.Trainers.Ever

We've all read and seen the reports from Iraq where the so-called coalition of the willing still can't get a grip on training anything near an effective police force - that is if recruits ever actually make it into the recruiting centers which have been frequent suicide bomber targets because the facilities are not adequately protected. Now, a new report from Afghanistan shows that the US military has been just as ineffective there as well:

Via the NYT:

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department has found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.

In fact, most police units had less than 50 percent of their authorized equipment on hand as of June, says the report, which was issued two weeks ago but is only now circulating among members of relevant Congressional committees.

In its most significant finding, the report said that no effective field training program had been established in Afghanistan, at least in part because of a slow, ineffectual start and understaffing.

Police training experts who have studied or had first-hand experience with the American effort in Afghanistan said they agreed with the report’s findings, and some said they had warned for years that field training was the backbone of a strong program. But they said additional problems needed to be investigated, including the quality of private contractors and the cost and effectiveness of relying on them to train the police officers. In particular, the experts questioned why the report focused on United States government managers and only glancingly analyzed the performance of the principal contractor in Afghanistan, DynCorp International of Virginia.

They can blame the private contractors all they like but the fact is they hired and supposedly oversaw those companies. Yet now, 5 years later this ineptitude is only finally being noticed?

Once again, the Pentagon and the Bush administration are having to play catch up to the realities of their failures while they have the audacity to chastise NATO countries for not doing enough to fix the situation in Afghanistan.

Does it get any more ridiculous than this?

The report says that management of the DynCorp contract by United States government officials in Afghanistan has fallen into a state of disarray; conflicting military and civilian bureaucracies could not even find a copy of the contract to clarify for auditors exactly what it called for.

When will they get the fact that peoples lives are on the line over there? Are our Canadian soldiers dying because the US government doesn't even care enough to properly train the Afghan police force to handle major security issues? And just how long are we supposed to put up with that?