Senate Wants Changes to Afghan Police Training Program

The State and Defense department recently tried to explain to a Senate subcommittee how they managed to spend six billion dollars since 2002 trying to train an Afghan Police force that is currently at less than %15 operating capacity. According to Gordon S. Haddell, the inspector general of the Department of Defense: "Everything that could go wrong here, has gone wrong." The program has faced numerous problems, ranging from corruption, to a lack of recruitment and retention to a lack of training time.

The Defense and State department agree that they need clearer guidelines for the military contractors doing the training. I for one, think we should just oust those guys and have our military do the training. It may not be as cost effective but it would damn sure get the job done a lot better than these guys. The other key issue is the way-to-short training time: 6 weeks. That is not nearly enough time to train these recruits, who are as green as can be, to protect their country. Clearly this is not something that can be accomplished in a matter of weeks or months. Real dedicated time needs to be spent in this area.

Clearly this is not an issue that will be cleaned up over night. We are going to have to spend several more years and possibly billions of more dollars to get these men properly trained. I think Senator Claire McCaskill was correct when she stated "It's obvious that Afghanistan is not going to be able to afford what we're building for them, [US Tax payers] have made a billion dollar commitment for years to come."