Reforming Foreign Security Training to Help Defeat Terrorism

A key component of U.S. strategy to defeat global terrorist groups like al Qaeda is denying them the physical space to operate with impunity. The ability of the U.S. and our allies to train foreign military and security forces can be an effective tool in both preventing terrorists from establishing a foothold in vulnerable states and empowering foreign partners to move against terrorists where they exist today. Yet the current array of U.S. training programs is fragmented, ad hoc, and underfunded. Moreover, overreliance on contractors to provide large scale military and police training in Iraq and Afghanistan, at a collective cost of $48 billion, has led to findings of poor performance, wasteful spending, weak oversight and insufficient accountability.

After over eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, the success of our overall mission there—the elimination of the terrorism threat from the region—will be determined by our success in training Afghan security forces in sufficient number and proficiency to take over their own security. But as the recently leaked documents from that war show clearly, the view from the ground about our training program is currently somewhat grim. This must be rectified—we cannot allow foreign security training to be the Achilles heel in our mission to defeat terrorism. As part of Third Way’s ongoing Defeating Terrorism Initiative, this memo outlines the current fractured state of security training infrastructure, with a look at both the regular training programs and the war-time training in Iraq and Afghanistan. We then offer recommendations for reforming U.S. training of foreign security forces with the goal of building a robust and more effective program that will help forge stronger partnerships, deny terrorists operational safe havens, and prevent the emergence of conflict. These reforms, if successful, will reduce the need for the deployment of U.S. forces overseas in the future, while providing for contingency training capabilities to support overseas operations like those in Afghanistan if needed.

Background: The State of Foreign Training

The U.S. foreign security training program is a patchwork of training efforts managed mostly by the Department of State and the Pentagon. What follows is a summary of peacetime foreign military and police training programs, along with those ad hoc training efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan undertaken in a combat environment, which dwarf the other programs in both scale and cost.

Ongoing Foreign Military Training Programs

Department of State

It is the State Department, not the Pentagon, which Congress has tapped to coordinate the main foreign military training programs, viewing them as another element of foreign assistance.

The International Military Education and Training (IMET) program’s objectives are to further regional stability through better military-to-military relations that culminate in increased understanding and cooperation; to train foreign militaries to support combined operations with U.S. forces; and to train foreign militaries in democratic and human rights values to instill in their own government. The Department of Defense performs the training under the State-funded IMET program and trains roughly 7,000 foreign students annually both inside and outside the U.S.¹ The IMET program is diffuse, with training funds spread among 143 countries, and it has grown modestly in recent years. Funding for the program went from $86 million in 2006 to a request for $110 million in 2011, an average increase of 5% per year, excluding Iraq and Afghanistan.² While there has been somewhat greater emphasis on targeting counterterrorism training, six vital countries in the fight against al Qaeda (Algeria, Kuwait, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen) together received only $8.9 million of IMET funding in 2010.³

The Foreign Military Financing program provides funding to foreign countries to buy U.S. equipment and training. Like IMET, the State Department allocates the funding and the Department of Defense implements the program. While the program is quite large ($5.5 billion requested in 2011), the overwhelming bulk of this money ($4.3 billion) goes to Israel and Egypt, and only $167 million is dedicated for training.

The Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) is a U.S. effort, in conjunction with G-8 partners, to expand global capacity for peace support operations. The GPOI originally had three goals: to train 75,000 troops in peacekeeping skills by 2010 (with an emphasis on Africa), support Italy’s Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units, and foster an international deployment and logistics support system to transport peacekeepers. In the first five years of the program, the U.S. spent $480 million on the initiative. The State Department reports that the goal of training 75,000 peacekeepers worldwide will be accomplished by the end of 2010. Having reached this goal, the State Department has indicated the emphasis of the GPOI will shift from training troops to helping countries develop their transportation and logistics capabilities.⁴

Department of Defense

The Pentagon’s Building Partnership Capacity program was established in 2006 to quickly build the military capacity of friendly governments to conduct counterterrorism and stabilization operations. In total, the program dispersed nearly $980 million from 2006 to 2009.⁵ According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), 82% of the funds have been used to address specific terrorist threats in priority countries. Pakistan has been the primary recipient, receiving more than $203 million over four years. Other threatened states receiving significant funding during this period include the Philippines ($55m), Indonesia ($57m), and Yemen ($97m).

The Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program was created in 2002 to train foreign military officers and civilian officials in counterterrorism operations, and funds are distributed through combatant commanders. Program funding has gradually increased since its inception and was authorized at $35 million in 2009.⁶

The National Guard State Partnership program pairs individual state National Guard commands with another country. The program was started in 1993 to foster cooperation between the U.S. and former Cold War adversaries. Since then, it has expanded to 62 partner programs, with a budget of $10 million.⁷ The relationship is designed to provide security assistance as well as allow direct military-to-military contact.⁸

Ongoing Foreign Police Training Programs

While military training is essential in helping nations protect against both external and internal threats, a capable, non-corrupt police force which adheres to the rule of law can be just as important in protecting against threats posed by terrorist and insurgent groups. The U.S. has several programs to train foreign police units and is a key contributor to an international effort to do the same.

Department of State

The State Department’s International Law Enforcement Academies (ILEA) program, created in 1995, has the mission to support emerging democracies, combat international drug trafficking, criminality, and terrorism through strengthened international cooperation. ILEAs provide training and technical assistance to foreign police, support institution building, and foster relationships between U.S. and foreign units. But State has established just six ILEAs, and none target areas of significant terrorist threat: Hungary, Thailand, Botswana, El Salvador, Peru, and Roswell, New Mexico. About 3,500 students were trained at these academies in 2008 and the administration requested $36.7 million for 2010.

The State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance (ATA) program is a key component of State’s efforts to help foreign governments fight terrorism. The program’s objective is to enhance the antiterrorism skills of friendly countries by providing counterterrorism training and equipment. In 2009, ATA trained 6,015 students from 75 countries, including six in-country programs in Afghanistan, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Funding for the ATA has increased fourfold since 2001, reaching $215m in 2010.⁹

One of the Global Peace Operations Initiative’s primary goals is to support Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units (CoESPU). The U.S. provided $15 million to the center in 2005, roughly one-third of CoESPU’s operating budget. CoESPU employs a ‘train the trainer’ model run by the Italian carabinieri, who base the curriculum on their peacekeeping experiences.¹⁰ Senior officers take a month-long session focusing on issues such as international law, military arts in peace support operations, and tactical doctrine. Junior officers focus on more tactical concerns such as running checkpoints, arrests, riot control, election security and self defense.¹¹ Through 2007, police forces from Kenya, Jordan, Cameroon, Morocco, India, Nigeria, Serbia, the Ukraine, and Senegal have participated.¹²

Department of Justice

The International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), created in 1990, is a law enforcement development effort to develop effective, professional, and transparent law enforcement capacity in foreign countries.¹³ ICITAP receives its funding from State, Defense, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation and focuses on international terrorism and transnational crime. There are programs in 40 countries, with 18 field offices, including ones in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, and the Philippines. ICITAP deploys a mix of federal employees and state and local police officers who are recruited by a primary contractor.¹⁴

Foreign Military and Police Training Iraq and Afghanistan

The programs detailed above are intended to build foreign government capacity to handle security threats and challenges without significant U.S. involvement. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we face a different set of challenges—building capacity of nascent governments in a combat zone. In Afghanistan, the more immediate mission is one of counterinsurgency against the Taliban and the development of a security force capable of preventing Afghanistan from again becoming a terrorist safe haven.

To date, the U.S. has spent over $21 billion to train Iraqi security forces and $27 billion to train Afghanistan security forces. The results have been decidedly mixed. In Afghanistan, there are now about 95,000 Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers and about 93,000 Afghan National Police (ANP), with the goal of reaching 171,000 and 134,000, respectively, by October 2011.¹⁵ ANA training has been relatively successful, with many of the newly trained Afghan troops serving well with U.S. and NATO forces. Though they still lack the capability to carry-out certain operations alone, the ANA has become the most respected institution in Afghanistan.

The ANP has been a different story entirely. In contrast to the ANA training, which has been run by the U.S. military itself, the U.S. has spent over $6 billion on the ANP, relying largely on private contractors to implement a program designed by the U.S. government.¹⁶ For the most part, it has not worked. The ANP has suffered from the lack of a strong training program, lack of equipment, understaffing and endemic corruption. A UN report noted that ANP personnel have been involved in smuggling, kidnapping and extortion at checkpoints.¹⁷ This week’s New York Times expose of the leaked war documents included a large number of reports of ANP misconduct, such as the Balkh Province district police commander who sexually assaulted a young girl in 2009 and then publicly shot his bodyguard for refusing to murder a civilian who tried to intervene.¹⁸

With such incidents proliferating, the ANP’s reputation has grown so bad within Afghanistan that after U.S. forces took Marja, village elders told the Marines that they did not want the ANP to return.¹⁹ The ANP is essential to the ‘build’ portion of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy of ‘clear, hold, build.’ But not only is the institution not up to the job, it is actually making things worse in some areas.

In addition to serious problems in training ANP personnel, oversight of the entire training operation in Afghanistan has been lacking. First, too many units have been put in the field before they were ready. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concluded that the system used to assess Afghan unit capabilities poorly measured the reality of unit readiness and reports that there is a shortfall in the number of U.S. and NATO trainers and mentors.²⁰ As a result, units were put into the field before they were ready and the U.S. has no clear understanding of the actual capability of Afghan forces.

Second, money and equipment intended for the ANA and ANP has been diverted. The GAO found that the U.S. Army could not account for about 87,000 small arms and light weapons funneled to Afghan security forces, which is more than a third of the total number of weapons procured for them. What’s worse, many of the missing weapons have fallen into the hands of the insurgents.²¹ The New York Times report included dozens of instances of insurgents using weapons, vehicles and other equipment purloined from the United States. In one instance, American pickup trucks intended for the ANA were stolen by the Taliban and taken to Kabul for use in suicide bombings.²² In addition to the equipment losses, more than $300 million in funding is insufficiently accounted for and the State Department only had three personnel assigned to oversee a $1.7 billion training contract.²³

The decision to use private security contractors to train foreign forces is usually based on reducing stress on military personnel and allowing them to focus on the combat mission.²⁴ Using private contractors as trainers can offer other advantages as well: they can access personnel with specialized expertise (such as language training), stay in theater longer than U.S. troops, and sometimes surge more quickly than the military. However the rigid and profit driven nature of contracts and the lack of government control and oversight make using contractors in war zones problematic.²⁵ Recognizing this, the 2009 National Defense Authorization Act contained a Sense of the Congress provision that private security contractors should not perform inherently governmental functions.²⁶

The training of Afghan security forces remains a major struggle for the U.S. and NATO effort in Afghanistan. In November 2009, responsibility for training Afghan forces changed from a U.S. mission to a NATO one, followed by further allied commitment to mentor and equip ANA and ANP forces. Last March, General Petraeus told Congress that the U.S. training program needed to be ‘overhauled’ and said it was too soon to tell if Afghan troops would be ready to assume control as U.S. forces leave.²⁷

Recommendations

Looking ahead, we must adjust the ongoing training programs to meet current realities and learn the hard lessons from the training of security forces in combat zones. Given the urgent importance to our own national security, the U.S. needs a new paradigm for training foreign military and police forces, one which is less splintered and ad hoc, less reliant on contractors, and better targeted at halting the spread of violent extremism feeding terrorist organizations. Our recommendations for achieving this goal are set forth below.

Improving the Training of Foreign Military Forces

1. Target Resources

The Pentagon and State Department should perform a targeted assessment of which countries are most vulnerable to the destabilizing effects of violent extremism and the spread of terrorism. This should incorporate an analysis of military and security force capabilities in-country to combat this present and/or future threat. The findings of this review should guide the prioritization and allocation of foreign training resources in order to more effectively preempt the threat. For example, it is not clear why less than 10% of IMET funding currently goes to the six high-impact countries. Moreover, while assistance provided under the State Department’s Anti-Terrorism Assistance program is based on a country needs assessment, a 2008 GAO report found the program lacked prioritization, was fraught with inconsistencies, and was unable to measure whether assistance provided achieved intended results.²⁸

2. Improve Coordination and Oversight

The Departments of State and Defense operate large, separate foreign military training programs, each with its own policies and procedures, program objectives, and list of recipient nations. There is no evidence of coordination among these programs or unity of effort. It is more likely that the bifurcated management of the current array of foreign military training programs produces inefficiency, waste, redundancy, and gaps. Moreover, there is no indication that the foreign police training programs are coordinated with these military training efforts so as to provide a complimentary piece to an overall security training program designed to combat terrorism. Currently, no one person or office is responsible for this critical mission, and the administration and Congress labor to understand how these efforts are managed and produce results that enhance U.S. security interests. While tempting to propose such a position, the prudent first step should be for the Secretaries of State and Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, to provide a report to Congress on all U.S. foreign security training programs—military and police alike—how they are funded, coordinated (both internally and with our allies), evaluated, and support the counterterrorism mission.

3. Combine, Expand and Evaluate CT Training

Funding for training programs in countries dealing with terrorist threats has not been sufficient since 9/11. While the Pentagon’s Building Partnership Capacity program has ramped-up quickly since 2006, training funds under the State Department’s International Military Education and Training (IMET) program have grown marginally and have been widely dispersed, diluting the impact of counterterrorism training. Using the findings of the targeted assessment proposed above, Congress should work with the administration to increase funding of the IMET program to bolster counterinsurgency and counterterrorism capabilities overseas. Congress also should roll the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program into the IMET program and expand it as a way of increasing both unity and strength of effort in this area. Both State and Defense need to strengthen oversight to ensure that capabilities are improving in the recipient nations and report regularly to Congress the efficacy of the targeted training.

4. Establish a Reserve Training Surge Capability

The U.S. should establish a foreign military training component comprised of Reserve units capable of providing ongoing counterinsurgency and counterterrorism training in targeted countries and responding, if needed, to large-scale, extended training missions like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. The slow development and ad hoc nature of training programs in those conflicts shows a clear need to develop such a capability. A surge capability would allow the U.S. to shrink the time it takes to train domestic security forces, which will likely remain a key component to U.S. exit strategies in the future.

5. Recast the National Guard’s State Partnership Program

Leaving behind the post-Cold War legacy of this program, the National Guard should look to create new partnerships in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, particularly where civilian soldiers can serve as an important bulwark against violent extremism and terrorist groups.

Improving the Training of Foreign Police Forces

6. Expand and Improve Oversight of State Training Programs

The State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance program has seen its funding increase from $30 million to $215 million in less than a decade and has become a central player in U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. This growth however seems to have outpaced State’s ability to manage the program.²⁹ Congress should determine if State has corrected these problems and determine what is needed to improve oversight if these problems have not been addressed.

Congress also must look at the targeting of resources under the State Department’s International Law Enforcement Academies program. We have six regional ILEAs, but there is no academy to train police in the Middle East. While State projects an ILEA being placed in the Middle East, at this point a location and partner government has not been found.³⁰ It should be a priority to open a center in this vital region.

7. Renew G-8 Commitments to Expand Police Training

The U.S. provided $15 million in 2005 to help establish the Italian Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units but has not provided any additional funding to the center. In 2006, CoESPU officials expressed their desire to have five U.S. service members detailed to the center to assist with information, training, research, and the development of doctrine.³¹ The U.S. should provide this detail and should look to expand its involvement and funding of the center. The U.S. should also encourage G-8 Partners to agree to a target goal of police officers trained at the Center in the next five years, building upon the training of 75,000 peacekeeping troops by 2010 and expand the program beyond Africa.

The U.S. also should start discussions with our NATO allies to incorporate CoESPU into NATO training programs, with the ultimate goal of having the center become the focal point of NATO foreign police training.

8. Overhaul Wartime Police Training

While State and Justice Departments, working with private contractors, have provided effective training in peaceful or low-intensity conflict areas, a lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is that this arrangement simply does not work in a combat zone. As noted, contracts are too rigid for military operations and too difficult to properly oversee in a conflict zone.

The Pentagon has long avoided becoming a ‘policing’ force. However, counterinsurgency requires a strong, well-developed domestic police force to provide stability. It has become a core component of military strategy and one we cannot afford to outsource. Consequently, we recommend that in addition to building a surge component in the Reserves to train foreign military forces in post-conflict situations, these units should also undertake the mission of training foreign police forces during counterinsurgency operations. Given the relatively high number of Reserve members who serve in civilian police forces, the Army and Marines should consider developing specialized units of civilian experts to assist in the foreign police force training.