America’s Colonial Armies: Absentee Soldiers, Corrupt Officers and Collapse

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/10/americas-officers-collapse.html

America’s Colonial Armies: Absentee Soldiers, Corrupt Officers and Collapse
By contributors | Oct. 15, 2014
By William J. Astore via Tomdispatch.com

In June, tens of thousands of Iraqi Security Forces in Nineveh province north of Baghdad collapsed in the face of attacks from the militants of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), abandoning four major cities to that extremist movement. The collapse drew much notice in our media, but not much in the way of sustained analysis of the American role in it. To put it bluntly, when confronting IS and its band of lightly armed irregulars, a reputedly professional military, American-trained and -armed, discarded its weapons and equipment, cast its uniforms aside, and melted back into the populace. What this behavior couldn’t have made clearer was that U.S. efforts to create a new Iraqi army, much-touted and funded to the tune of $25 billion over the 10 years of the American occupation ($60 billion if you include other reconstruction costs), had failed miserably.

Though reasonable analyses of the factors behind that collapse exist, an investigation of why U.S. efforts to create a viable Iraqi army (and, by extension, viable security forces in Afghanistan) cratered so badly are lacking. To understand what really happened, a little history lesson is in order. You’d need to start in May 2003 with the decision of L. Paul Bremer III, America’s proconsul in occupied Iraq and head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), to disband the battle-hardened Iraqi military. The Bush administration considered it far too tainted by Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party to be a trustworthy force.

Instead, Bremer and his team vowed to create a new Iraqi military from scratch. According to Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks in his bestselling book Fiasco, that force was initially conceived as a small constabulary of 30,000-40,000 men (with no air force at all, or rather with the U.S. Air Force for backing in a country U.S. officials expected to garrison for decades). Its main job would be to secure the country’s borders without posing a threat to Iraq’s neighbors or, it should be added, to U.S. interests.

Bremer’s decision essentially threw 400,000 Iraqis with military training, including a full officer corps, out onto the streets of its cities, jobless. It was a formula for creating an insurgency. Humiliated and embittered, some of those men would later join various resistance groups operating against the American military. More than a few of them later found their way into the ranks of ISIS, including at the highest levels of leadership. (The most notorious of these is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a former general in Saddam’s army who was featured as the King of Clubs in the Bush administration’s deck of cards of Iraq’s most wanted figures. Al-Douri is now reportedly helping to coordinate IS attacks.)

..

Tom Engelhardt has a great lead-in to this post on his web site:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/58975/tomgram-william-astore-americas-hollow-foreign-legions

Tomgram: William Astore, America's Hollow Foreign Legions
Foreign Policy
by Tom Engelhardt | October 14, 2014 - 8:36am

~snip~

And by the way, those Afghan ghosts have a history nearly as long as America’s second Afghan War. In 2007, for instance, the U.S. Government Accountability Office was already reporting that the “actual number of present-for-duty soldiers” in Afghan military units was “about one-half to two-thirds of the total” at any given time. While some of those were soldiers on leave, significant numbers were clearly ghost troops. Similarly, in 2009, Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Washington University, estimated in a study that 25% of Afghan police units were, in fact, ghostly presences.

It’s not hard to understand why. From early on, the Afghan army and police forces -- set up, funded, equipped, and trained by the Americans and their NATO allies -- have hemorrhaged recruits. Desertion rates have often reached 25%, which means that if an Afghan commander simply fails to report all the troops he's losing, the money to pay them just keeps coming in -- to him. None of this should surprise anyone, including John Sopko, since reports on the inability of the Pentagon (and the U.S. government) to accurately track where their funds were going in Afghanistan, what they really paid for, and how they were actually used have been a commonplace in these years.

You could say that such ghosts have been subsisting on American tax dollars for more than four decades. After all, “ghost soldiers” were a commonplace in South Vietnamese units in America’s long war in that country; and as we now know from the fall in June of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, Iraqi military units, which disintegrated at the approach of the militants of the Islamic State, were similarly filled with such specters.

The question is: Why do the armies that the U.S. has formed, armed, and trained in lands where we’re at war and on which endless billions of dollars have been lavished always appear so ghostly and, in the end, fight so much less effectively than the forces opposing them? As retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore suggests, if you foster kleptocratic governments, you shouldn’t be shocked when their armed forces prove to be filled with grifters, skimmers, and con artists.

[KoKo]

1. K&R!