U.S. missed chance to train Iraqi police

As chaos swept Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003, the Defense Department began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers.

Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities, a second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad and another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.

Three years later, the police are a battered and dysfunctional force that has helped bring Iraq to the brink of civil war. Police units stand accused of operating death squads for political groups or simple profit. Citizens, distrustful of the force, are setting up their own neighborhood security squads. Killings of police officers are rampant, with at least 547 slain this year, roughly as many as Iraqi and U.S. soldiers combined, records show.

The police, initially envisioned by the Bush administration as a cornerstone in a new democracy, have instead become part of Iraq's grim constellation of shadowy commandos, ruthless political militias and other armed groups. Iraq's new prime minister and senior U.S. officials now say that the country's future — and the ability of America to withdraw its troops — rests largely on whether the police can be reformed and rogue groups reined in.

The realities on the ground in Iraq did not match the planning in Washington. An examination of the U.S. effort to train a police force in Iraq, drawn from interviews with several dozen U.S. and Iraqi officials, internal police reports and visits to Iraqi police stations and training camps, reveals a series of misjudgments by White House and Pentagon officials, who underestimated the role the United States would need to play in rebuilding the police and maintaining order.

Three weeks before the invasion, retired Army Gen. Jay Garner briefed National Security Council officials on plans to manage Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Garner raised an ambitious and detailed plan by Richard Mayer, a Justice Department police-training expert on his staff, to send 5,000 U.S. and foreign advisers to Iraq.

In an interview, Garner said he and others on his staff also warned administration officials that the Iraqi police, after decades of neglect and corruption, would collapse after the invasion.

Garner's proposal was met with skepticism by NSC staff members, who contended that such a large training effort was not needed. One vocal opponent was Frank Miller, an NSC official who coordinated the U.S. effort to govern Iraq in 2003-05. Miller and other current and former administration officials said they relied on a CIA assessment that Iraqi police were well-trained and capable of maintaining order.

But Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the CIA, said the agency's assessment warned otherwise. "We had no reliable information on individual officers or police units," he said. "In fact, the assessment talked in terms of creating a new force."

On March 10, 2003, President Bush approved guidelines for how the United States would govern postwar Iraq, Miller said. One of them was that only a limited number of advisers would be sent. They would not have the power to enforce the law. That would be left to the Iraqi police.

After Baghdad fell, when the majority of Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts, a second proposal by a Justice Department team calling for 6,600 police trainers was reduced to 1,500, and then never carried out. During the first eight months of the occupation — as crime soared and the insurgency took hold — the United States deployed 50 police advisers in Iraq.

Over the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell, the long-range plan was eventually reduced to 500 trainers.

Garner did not have a chance to pursue his police-training proposal again. Three weeks after arriving in Baghdad, he was replaced by L. Paul Bremer, a retired career diplomat. Bremer said he participated in no prewar planning and was never told of Garner's plan.

Two days after Bremer's appointment, Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who had never trained police officers outside the United States, received his assignment from the Pentagon to direct the police mission.

Kerik said Pentagon officials gave him just 10 days' notice and little guidance. With no experience in Iraq and little time to get ready, he said, he prepared for his job in part by watching A&E Network documentaries on Saddam. Kerik also said he was never told of Garner's plan.

Throughout Iraq, Americans were faced with the realization that in trying to rebuild the Iraqi force they were up against the legacy of Saddam. Not only was the force inept and rife with petty corruption, but after the invasion the fractious tribal, sectarian and criminal groups were competing to control the police. Yet for much of last year, U.S. trainers were able to regularly monitor fewer than half of the 1,000 police stations in Iraq, where even officers free of corrupting influences lacked basic policing skills, such as how to fire a weapon or investigate a crime.

While a viable police force alone could not have stopped the insurgency and lawlessness that eventually engulfed Iraq, officials involved acknowledge that the early, halting effort to rebuild the force was a missed opportunity.

What attempts there were to train the police were marred by poor coordination, civilian and military officials said.

Field training of the Iraqi police, the most critical element of the effort, was left to DynCorp International, a company based in Irving, Texas, that received $750 million in contracts. Its advisers, many of them retired officers from small towns, said they arrived in Iraq and quickly found themselves caught between poorly staffed government agencies, company officials focused on the bottom line and thousands of Iraqi officers clamoring for help.

When it became clear that the civilian effort by DynCorp was faltering, U.S. military officials took over police training in 2004, relying on heavily armed commando units that had been established by the Iraqis. Within a year, Sunni Arabs said some units had been infiltrated by Shiite militias and were kidnapping, torturing and executing scores of Sunnis.

White House and Pentagon officials defended their decisions, saying that it would have been impossible to find thousands of qualified trainers willing to go to Iraq and that deploying large numbers of foreign officers would have angered Iraqis and bred passivity.

Administration officials say the insurgency, more than any other factor, has slowed their progress.

This spring, three years after administration officials rejected the large U.S.-led field training effort, U.S. military commanders are adopting that very approach. Declaring 2006 the year of the police, the Pentagon is dispatching 3,000 U.S. soldiers and DynCorp contractors to train and mentor police recruits and officers across Iraq.

U.S. commanders now see the force, which is to increase to 190,000, as the linchpin of a new strategy to protect the population, secure reconstruction projects and help facilitate the withdrawal of American troops.

Back on May 18, 2003, Kerik arrived in Baghdad and found "nothing, absolutely nothing" in place. "Twelve guys on the ground plus me," he recalled. "That was the new Ministry of Interior."

Working from scratch, the team pulled together a new plan to train 50,000 to 80,000 members of an Iraqi police force.

At first, members suggested that Iraqi police recruits receive six months of academy training. Kerik said he "started laughing," and calculated that it would take nine years to train the force.

The team reduced academy training to 16 weeks, and eventually eight weeks. Later, a 2005 State Department audit found that translating classes from English to Arabic ate up 50 percent of training time. With translation, Iraqi recruits received the equivalent of four weeks of training.