WASHINGTON – The U.S. may have to spend $6 billion over the next year alone to train and maintain Afghan police forces, a Pentagon official told a Senate subcommittee Thursday.
A large part of that money will likely go through a contracting program that since 2005 has been criticized repeatedly in government reports for being inefficient, often lacking basic oversight. In a recent audit, inspectors found that the program could not account for millions of dollars from past years.
The police training is crucial since U.S. troops, under current policy, will only leave the country when the Afghan government can provide security for its citizens.
“Training the police in Afghanistan is part of our military mission,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said at a Senate homeland security subcommittee hearing. “It is as important as anything else we are doing in this nation right now.”
Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., called the situation “catastrophic,” adding that although the U.S. has spent more than $6 billion and is about to authorize more money, the Afghan police still face many of the same problems. Those include lack of leadership, low pay for Afghan policemen, corruption, insufficient training and a low retention rate.
The training program for Afghan police is currently run by Falls Church, Va.,-based DynCorp International under a contract worth $1.27 billion. But witnesses at the subcommittee hearing said the contract lacks clear objectives and stringent assessment.
“Just about everything that could go wrong here has gone wrong,” said Gordon Heddell, a Pentagon inspector general. “The training that was being provided was inadequate.”
An audit of the contract by Heddell and his counterpart at the State Department found that $80 million of unused funds from 2007 and 2008 had not been returned to the U.S. government.
Assistant Secretary of State David Johnson disputed the claim, saying the money had been committed to the ongoing police training, but the accounting process was two years behind.
The argument didn’t sit well with subcommittee members. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., called the competing assertions “political double-speak.” McCaskill demanded a written statement from the State Department explaining whether the $80 million would be returned.
During the audit, the State Department itself also could not provide documentation for $217 million spent under the contract. The inspectors general wrote they were unable to verify that the funds had been properly accounted for.
The reason for these blurred lines of accountability is that the Departments of State and Defense share responsibility of the police training program. The Defense Department sets the goal and provides the funds: The State Department hires and oversees the contractor.
But the State Department has extended little control over the contractors, mainly because of a lack of personnel. At one point, only one contract oversight officer was stationed in Afghanistan, a situation McCaskill called “unacceptable.”
“We were seeking to manage our risk, having no more people on the ground than we had to,” Johnson of the State Department said.
The program also couldn’t be adjusted quickly enough to the changing environment on the ground. When the security situation worsened and the Pentagon wanted to stress counterinsurgency tactics in police training, it took months to implement a new curriculum. Last year, 123 Afghan policemen were killed, up from 79 in 2008.
To end the inefficient arrangement, the State and Defense Departments agreed in August 2009 that the Defense Department would assume responsibility for the regular police training programs. The Pentagon planned to tap into a fund for counter-narcotics technology to pay for the police training – a move that would have excluded DynCorp from bidding for the contract. The company filed a complaint in December, which it won in March. The Pentagon will now to hold an open bidding process for the contract, which could take months.
In the meantime, DynCorp will keep training police in Afghanistan. Since there is no new contract, its old one has been extended until a new contractor is found. The State Department is still responsible for overseeing the program.
“We’re extending a contract that hasn’t worked,” Brown said. “The [contractors] have received $6 billion dollars and haven’t trained, now we’re extending to another contract. At what point do we hold contractors, the people we hire to do a job, responsible for doing that job and getting our money’s worth?”
DynCorp’s president Bill Ballhaus said in a statement issued after the March decision that the company looks forward “to continuing our partnership with the Department of Defense,” and planned to bid for the new contract.
“We … will continue to meet all objectives of the commanders on the ground,” he said,
To ensure that, Johnson said the State Department is planning to send 22 officers to Afghanistan by September to check on the training programs, a number the inspectors general said is insufficient.
Despite the problems of contracting for police training, the U.S. government is likely to keep spending money through similar contracts for years to come, McCaskill said, since the Afghan government doesn’t have the financial means to support the police force on its own.
“We’re going to have contactors over there for many, many years,” she said.