26 OCTOBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL It may help State and USAID diplomatic professionals see the bigger picture of this problem when they look at it as “outsiders.” Consider, therefore, an example from the Department of Defense (DoD). Building the Afghan Army and Police In early 2011, nine years after the U.S. government started rebuilding the Afghan Army, none of its 134 battalions could operate independently, and only 32 percent were deemed “effective with advisers.” The rest still needed significant handholding or worse, and the Afghan police were in almost identical shape. In March of that year, at a hearing held by the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) told General David Petraeus, then commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan: “I notice that on both the police and army readiness measures, none of the units are at the ‘green’ or ‘independent’ level yet. … What do you think is going to happen to that pace in both the police and the army, let’s say, in the next six-month window? What can we expect?” Afghan National Army (ANA) cadets practice drills on the parade grounds at the Afghan National Defense University, where future ANA officers were trained, in Kabul, on May 7, 2013. Inset: Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Craig Gold (at left)—assigned to the Border Mentoring Team of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 7—instructs an Afghan soldier on proper weapons handling at the border patrol compound in Shamshad in Helmand Province on May 15, 2010. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE U.S. NAVY This is what traditional congressional oversight generally looks like: the overseer requests and reviews government documents, asks senior U.S. officials to testify, engages them on comparisons between a policy’s objectives and its results, and reminds U.S. officials that their work is being scrutinized. The hope is that U.S. officials will thoughtfully absorb this feedback and use it to improve U.S. foreign assistance. Yet what often happens is closer to a perversion of that feedback loop. Three months after this hearing, the U.S. “surge” of troops ended. The pressure to transition responsibility for security to Afghan forces was immense. So, to plausibly demonstrate progress toward that goal, in August 2011, the U.S. military changed the Afghan forces’ highest capability category from “independent” to “independent with advisers.” Lowering the bar in this way allowed 12 Afghan Army battalions to be recategorized into the top tier by February 2012, artificially quickening the “pace” of improvement that Rep. Andrews and many other U.S. policymakers were concerned about. The gimmick was used for the Afghan police as well. In a report to Congress in April 2012, DoD wrote: “The number of [Afghan police] units rated ‘Independent with Advisers’ increased from 0 in August 2011 to 39 in January 2012.”
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