PMC / Mercenaries in Afghanistan (catch all)

[Schmedlap]

Saw this article today: U.S.: DynCorp Oversight in Afghanistan Faulted. Excerpt below...

WASHINGTON, Feb 27, 2010 (IPS) - Afghan police are widely considered corrupt, unable to shoot straight, and die at twice the rate of Afghan soldiers and NATO troops. After seven billion dollars spent on training and salaries in the last eight years, several U.S. government investigations are asking why.

[...]

But another rather surprising answer was offered in a little-noticed report published earlier this month...

The report - titled "DOD Obligations and Expenditures of Funds Provided to the Department of State for the Training and Mentoring of the Afghan National Police" - says that the U.S. State Department has completely failed to do any serious oversight of the private contractors to whom they paid 1.6 billion dollars to provide police training at dozens of sites around Afghanistan.

DynCorp's International Police Training Programme, run out of Fort Worth, Texas, has won the bulk of the contracts that have been overseen by the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). The company, which has annual revenues of 3.1 billion dollars, has followed a series of wars to run lucrative police training contracts from Bosnia in the 1990s to Iraq in 2003.

DynCorp's work with Kabul began in 2003, almost two years after the fall of the Taliban. It was expanded in 2004 when the State Department issued it a contract to build seven regional training centres, and provide 30 police advisers across Afghanistan.

This initial contract was replaced by a series of related contracts beginning on Aug. 15, 2005, under which DynCorp today employs some 782 retired U.S. police officers and an additional 1,500 support staff. The contracts expired Jan. 31, 2010 but have temporarily been extended till the end of March.

The cost of hiring contractors to train police is high: Each expatriate police officer makes six-figure U.S. salaries - at least 50 times more than an Afghan police officer. Many experts, including the authors of this new report, have questioned the utility of sending police officers - many from small towns in the U.S. - to teach handcuffing and traffic rules to recruits caught in a war zone.

More at the link provided.

[OfTheTroops]

That article paints a rosy picture.

The interagency coordination and cooperation interspersed with contractors in these FSO leaves everyone questioning who is in charge. The IPA types I have worked with received zip for guidance but they knew their entitlements backwards and forwards whether pulling 12 months or being long term contractors. When they did possess initiative they were quickly squashed and this in the theater that had an active police transition plan. My understanding of A-stan has been that PMT has never been a seriously focused and continuous effort.

I did work with a few good IPA but they were definitely the exception and any guidance direction and purpose they received were from the DOD.

I do not understand how the guru's continue to maintain that a local civilian police officer is a better or preferred trainer, mentor advisor to a highly centralized para military police force.

When working yourself out of a job you probably dont want guys who's fortune depend on persistence of conflict. The HN are not the only ones who see the US mil-gov as "cows to be milked."