A Government Accountability Office document says that the Pentagon won’t tell Congress what shape the Iraqi army is in. GAO official Joseph A. Christoff said in a prepared statement to a House armed services subcommittee that the Department of Defense is refusing to provide the GAO and Congressional committees with the department’s Transition Readiness Assessments, monthly reports that include detailed information on the training and capabilities of Iraqi army units.
Christoff’s testimony before the subcommittee on oversight and investigations was aimed at identifying obstacles to the creation of Iraqi police and military forces capable of functioning independently of US forces and advisers. He mentioned the Pentagon’s unwillingness to share the TRAs eight times in the course of his relatively brief statement. In GAO-speak, which typically couches complaints in understated and dry terms, that’s the equivalent of screaming at the top of your lungs into an arena-sized sound system.
What Christoff said, repeatedly, is that without the information collected in the TRAs, Congress has no way of knowing whether Pentagon requests for funding to train and support Iraqi troops are reasonable, and no way of knowing whether the expenditures are producing results. These are obviously things the Pentagon doesn’t want Congress to know, probably for the usual reasons: the administration doesn’t think Congress has any business butting into the matter, and the news isn’t good.
The testimony provides a laundry list of obstacles to the development of effective Iraqi forces; most of them are well known, but one that surprised me was the assertion that Iraqi forces are dependent upon the US for intelligence. Given the state of US intelligence efforts in Iraq, that alone is enough to forecast doom. Here are some of the highlights from Christoff’s statement, concluding with the first of his complaints about the TRAs.
- [H]igh rates of absenteeism and poor ministry reporting result in an overstatement of the number of Iraqi security forces present for duty. The Ministry of the Interior does not maintain standardized reports on personnel strength. As a result, DOD does not know how many coalition-trained police the ministry still employs or what percentage of the 180,000 police thought to be on the payroll are coalition trained and equipped. In addition, DOD estimates that one-third of Iraqi soldiers are on leave at any one time as they return home to provide money to their families.
- [S]ectarian and militia influences have divided the loyalties of Iraqi security forces. In November 2006, for example, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency stated that the Ministry of Interior and the police were heavily infiltrated by militia members of the Badr Organization and Mahdi Army. According to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, sectarian divisions have eroded the dependability of many Iraqi army units.
- Iraqi units remain dependent upon the coalition for their logistical, command and control, and intelligence capabilities. As of December 2006, the coalition was providing significant levels of support to the Iraqi military, including life support, fuel, uniforms, building supplies, ammunition, vehicle maintenance and spare parts, and medical supplies.
The extent of these problems cannot be fully assessed without detailed information on the readiness of each Iraqi unit. MNF-I captures such information in its Transition Readiness Assessments (TRAs), but DOD does not provide this critical information to Congress. The TRA reports provide information on and identify gaps in areas such as each Iraqi unit’s manpower, equipment, training levels and, as of late 2006, operational effectiveness and reliability. Congress needs this information to make informed appropriations decisions and engage in meaningful oversight. Despite repeated attempts over many months, we have yet to be provided the TRA information we are seeking.
On a related note, one of the reasons that the Iraqis are somewhat constrained in their own ability to fund their military — aside from the fact that the US vanished a lot of their money during the heady days of the Coalition Provisional Authority — is that they’re still paying reparations to various countries and companies.
Since Saddam was overthrown, Iraq has paid out another $5 billion, and now has looming over it a further $30 billion that the [ UN Compensation Commission] has awarded. Whatever sliver of justice there was in the original reparations has surely completely evaporated by now. The Iraqi people had neither votes nor voice in picking Saddam or directing his policies. Such collective punishment is exactly what the [International Court of Justice] ducked in its recent decision on Serbia.
That’s Ian Williams, who knows much about the UN (and about rum, but that’s a different story). Williams remarks on the irony of simultaneous efforts to raise money for and squeeze money out of the country. One must have priorities.
Good to know we have such solid communication channels in the upper levels of government.
And the BBC is quoting the police chief in a comparatively peaceful province as saying that he doesn’t trust a third of his officers, because they’re loyal to the militias; the army must be worse.