Ongoing issues
Rob,
Mosul was a very interesting experience for me. Security Forces and the Judiciary were hot topics resource-wise and politically during my tour. Some of my friends with police and corrections backgrounds were very involved with providing training, getting uniforms and equipment, and seeing if existing facilities could benefit from the application of US standards. Some of my attorney friends worked on capacity building with the local populace of attorneys. DOS was working on good governance in Mosul during this time as well. The grand re-opening of the judicial complex in the fall of '03 (not too far from the water & sewer departments - just around the corner in fact) was a kind of nexus for many different nation-building/stability practitioners and it sounds like we wrestled with the same issues that you did.
I often found that it was best to keep an eye out when dealing with local security forces. The Facilities Protection Service seemed to be underpaid, undertrained, and under-armed at the time, which lead to some 'interesting' situations for us. I didn't see too much of the local police except around the mayor's office, which I felt was a very dangerous area to be in. I would contrast this with my visits to Kurdistan, their police would be directing traffic among other things.
My reading on Vietnamization since I got back, and other topics, has me convinced that there is much to learn from history. I may have mentioned in one of my previous posts that Alistair Horne, in his book A Savage War of Peace (ISBN 978-1-59017-218-6) mentions that over 4,000 Kepi's Bleu or Special Administration Section Officers were deployed in Algeria. Not all of these guys acquitted themselves honorably but some of their tactics (to include functional arabic language skills) are an interesting COIN case-study about possible tactics for some of the problems we face. A google-drive-by on this subject turns up some French references and perhaps your French is better than mine; I would be interested to learn more about these guys.
Regards,
Steve
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