No law, no order

The building of Iraqi security forces is now in its fourth year. Iraqi and Coalition officials consistently report that the effort is ‘on track’, if not yet complete. Iraqi military and police personnel carry out missions, independently and with Coalition support, to fight insurgents and secure law and order. Over time, Coalition officials tell us, development of Iraqi security forces will eliminate the need for a large foreign military presence, enabling tens of thousands of American, British, and other soldiers to go home.

But there is another side to this story. Iraqi police units have been implicated in kidnappings and sectarian violence. The police and army have been infiltrated by insurgents. Meanwhile, thousands of weapons procured by the US for the use of Iraqi forces have disappeared. The forces trained with foreign aid appear increasingly to be amongst the foot soldiers in a deepening civil war.

In this context, the present analysis seeks to paint a clearer picture of Iraqi security force development, in order to help sort fact from fiction and better inform the debate.

Iraq has a number of government security forces. Ministry of Defense (MoD) forces comprise ground, air, and naval personnel, as well as special operations units. The forces reporting to the Ministry of Interior (MoI) include police and police-like personnel, including border guards. Other security forces include agents of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service and the Ministry of State for National Security Affairs, as well as tens of thousands of lightly armed (and lightly trained) facilities protection service personnel, who are assigned as guards to various ministries and government structures.

US government officials often state that by the end of 2006 over 325,000 MoD and MoI personnel will have been ‘trained and equipped’. Over 312,000 meet this definition now. But these numbers are misleading because they only count those who were trained in Coalition-designed programmes. They do not fully account for attrition, including deserters, and they do not include large numbers of MoI personnel who were recruited and hired locally, and whom MoI does not track.

In fact, neither the Coalition nor MoI know how many police (and thus security forces as a whole) there are today. It is also not known how many people are available for duty at any given time in either the MoD or MoI — MoD units have a 25% absence rate caused amongst other things by personnel travelling home to transfer their pay to their families. In the MoI, shift schedules preclude a clear sense of who is on leave and who is absent without authorisation.

Over 129,000 of MoD’s 131,000 forces are ground troops, comprising ten divisions. Military personnel receive 13 weeks of basic training followed by three to seven weeks of specialised training. Iraqi trainers now carry out the vast majority of training. Over time, MoD forces have also accumulated significant equipment of varying quality and type, primarily funded by the US government and mostly procured without support packages. Due to shortages both of spare parts and mechanics trained on what is a very broad range of equipment, operational readiness is a challenge. Plans call for standardisation and modernisation, again with US help, but this will take time.

Ministry of Interior forces are divided into the Iraqi Police Service (IPS), the National Police, Department of Border Enforcement (DBE), and a small number of dignitary protection personnel. IPS personnel are recruited locally, deployed locally, and report to local officials. National Police are centrally recruited and deployed as central authorities deem necessary.

The National Police combines what used to be various specialised forces, including emergency response forces, public order brigades, a mechanised brigade, and commando units. In principle, the role of the National Police is that of a heavily armed, mobile intervention force with a primary mission of counterinsurgency. The IPS, by contrast, is responsible for regular policing.

Formal IPS training is a ten-week course for new recruits (although some report it has shrunk to eight weeks), or a three-week course for those with prior experience. Because many IPS members are recruited locally, independently of the Coalition, they do not attend the 10-week training. They are eligible for the three-week programme after they have served for a year, but it is not clear how many of them attend. IPS personnel are paid by local officials, who receive lump sum payments from the Ministry of Finance.

National Police training comprises six weeks of tactical counterinsurgency training, which may or may not include policing skills — reports vary. Units such as the Emergency Response forces receive additional training. Both IPS and NP forces are equipped when training is completed. Those who are trained separately are presumably equipped by their parent unit. IPS officers have AK-47s, PKC light machine guns, Glock pistols, individual body armour, and high-frequency radios. Units are issued small and medium pick-up trucks and mid-sized SUVs. The National Police is equipped as light infantry, with crew served machine guns, grenade launchers, and personal machine guns. Its mechanised brigade also has armoured vehicles. As with the MoD, lack of standardised equipment has created difficulties.

The US Department of Defense assesses capability by rating units in the categories of personnel, command and control, training, sustainment/logistics, equipment, and leadership. These assessments are not publicly available. However, based on reports from Coalition personnel and Iraqis, capacity is generally not sufficient to the tasks of counterinsurgency or policing in an increasingly violent country.

Even the Iraqi units to which the Coalition has transferred ‘lead’ authority (as of August 2006 these included five Iraqi Army divisions, 25 brigades, and 85 battalions, and two National Police battalions) cannot operate independently of Coalition partners: they need help with logistics, sustainment, and command and control. Units are below strength overall, and particularly when it comes to NCOs and officers. Few personnel have more than one to three years’ experience. In many cases, Iraqi forces are not only less equipped than Coalition forces, they are less equipped than their adversaries.

Stories of forces refusing to fight and abandoning police stations and military units, which were common in 2004, have diminished, although some forces remain reluctant to redeploy and attrition rates remain significant, particularly in the face of combat. Increasingly, the greater concern is a growing perception that Iraqi Security Forces are divided along ethnic and sectarian lines — and fight along those lines as well.

Indeed, Iraqi units are predominantly monoethnic. IPS units tend to reflect the local ethnic mix. The National Police are now overwhelmingly Shi’a. In the Iraqi Armed Forces, where the rank and file are disproportionately Shi’a and officers still somewhat disproportionately Sunni, there are reports of ethnically-mixed units becoming less so, as Sunni personnel leave. There are also recent reports of efforts by senior Iraqi officials to solidify Shi’a control of all of the security forces.

Accounts of Iraqi Security Forces’ individual and unit membership in sectarian and ethnic militas (mainly the Kurdish peshmerga and the Shi’a Badr Corps and Mahdi Army) are common and consistent. Even personnel who are not militia members may be loyal to regional, religious, or political leaders. Insofar as these are local IPS, serving in monoethnic communities and focusing on law and order, this is not a problem. In fact, ethnic and tribal ties can be an excellent way of promoting community policing.

However, when the overwhelmingly Shi’a National Police carry out searches in Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad, or Kurdish military units are sent into Shi’a towns, Iraqi security forces are seen by their fellow Iraqis as part of the growing sectarian conflict. This is further exacerbated by the fact that some Iraqi security force personnel have, indeed, been complicit in death squad activity. This activity is most often traced to the National Police, particularly the commandos, but IPS and Iraqi Armed Forces personnel have also been accused.

The criminal justice system is another weak link in this chain. Although Justice Ministry prisons reportedly meet international standards, there are not enough of them to house the accused and the convicted. There are also insufficient courts and judges to handle the large numbers of cases.

Currently, MoI and MoD, as well as Coalition forces, are holding thousands of people. MoI and MoD facilities are overcrowded and have been found complicit in human rights abuses, including along ethnic and sectarian lines. The building of some additional, albeit insufficient, Justice Ministry prisons is planned — but they will need to be staffed with guards, who are also lacking. In the meantime, Coalition access to inspect prisons has been limited in recent months.

Although means to assess loyalty remain crude, to the extent they exist at all, efforts are now underway to eliminate from the forces individuals with Saddam-era criminal records. Of course, this cannot account for the intervening years of continuing crime and conflict, but it has already led to the dismissal of some police.

In the National Police, each unit is being individually (and sequentially, to eventually encompass the entire force) required to undertake a short training programme, focusing on professionalism and ethics. While the programme is unlikely to transform dual loyalties into patriotism in three weeks, it provides an additional opportunity to re-examine and vet personnel.

Potentially most immediately effective is the effort by the US to institutionalise and increase the embedding of advisers with Iraqi units. These advisery teams are now assigned to the Iraqi Armed Forces, the IPS, and the National Police. The programme with the Department of Border Enforcement is lagging but also underway; it has been most far-reaching with the Iraqi Armed Forces and the National Police.

Mentors eat, drink, sleep, and, in the best of cases, patrol with Iraqi units. They mentor them, train them, and report problems. By building relationships they may help instill professionalism and prevent abuses. Embedded mentors have been instrumental in getting better head-counts of the National Police, and in implementing a biometric identification card system in the Iraqi Army.

But problems remain. There are not enough civilian police advisors to advise the many IPS units. Military Police are backing up the civilians, but they lack the appropriate policing background to appropriately support the community-policing IPS. Similarly, although Italian Carbinieri have been involved in training and advisory roles, the majority of National Police advisers are also US military personnel.

This reinforces the military nature of National Police training and the combination may preclude the development of a force guided by policing, rather than war-fighting principles.

A police-focused counter-insurgency effort leverages the law and order aspect of the fight, and emphasises the protection of Iraqi civilians. A military-focused effort drops the bar for internal use of the armed forces, and for the use of military, rather than police tactics in a domestic framework. This can turn the population against the government and government forces which are seen as combatants rather than protectors, and feeds continued fighting.

US military personnel are embedded with the Iraqi Army and National Police in 10-12 person teams. Teams are assigned to Iraqi battalions and higher level units for one year rotations. Their training has improved over time, and now involves a programme of cultural preparation, combat drills, live fire, and language training. However, embedded advisers are required to move in teams of at least nine people, making it impossible for advisers to deploy with multiple Iraqi squads at a time.

The largest problem for Iraqi security force development, however, is state capacity. The training of forces is only effective if it is one component of a broader effort to develop the institutions that can manage, resource, and oversee them independently. The failure of the MoI even to track its personnel is indicative of the failure of the institution-building effort.

Senior government leadership should be committed to building national forces, not hedging their bets against possible sectarian fighting by ensuring that they control sufficient armed personnel. Iraq must develop its own vetting and investigative capacity. As has been amply demonstrated already, foreigners cannot do this job effectively.

Officials should have the courage to take action. For example, in the wake of abuses uncovered in recent months, units have been taken off-line, and leaders relieved of duty. However, in many cases, personnel were not fired, but reassigned, or sent for further training. Only a few were accused of crimes through legal channels. If Iraqi security forces are to become effective, they will need a government context of accountability and professionalism, rather than politics and sectarianism. As long as it retains some leverage, the Coalition can play a role. It can hold Iraqi officials to high standards and focus more effort on developing institutions and mentoring senior government officials.

Iraqi forces will also need time, resources and effort: more mentors (especially civilian police mentors), better equipment, improved monitoring, and better-designed training. Programme evaluation that focuses not on numbers, but on capabilities, accountability, professionalism, and, most importantly, improved security for the Iraqi public, would help Coalition and Iraqi personnel better understand what is and what is not working — and end programmes that are not effective.

The building of the rule of law, including sufficient prisons and judges, is no less crucial. The Coalition can help support the judicial system. Donors can also invest in prisons. Moreover, assistance must focus not just on training Iraqi forces, but on ensuring they are the face of Iraqi peace and security. The more Iraqi forces, especially police, are seen to be protecting Iraqis the better, even though they still need some help. Mentors and joint patrols are a better use of Coalition resources than independent actions, however immediately effective, that fail to bolster faith in Iraq’s own institutions.

All of this is a terribly tall order in the face of continued violence and increasing incentives for Iraqis to align themselves with subgroups, rather than the state as a whole. And time is limited. Participation by security force personnel in sectarian conflict, and even the perception thereof, helps deepen faultlines which, in a vicious circle, will be reflected in the security forces.

If, even with policy adjustments, levels of violence continue to develop at current rates over the next twelve months, no amount of training and mentoring will be able to turn the tide. Indeed, under such circumstances training may simply contribute to the effectiveness of combatants in the developing conflict. Moreover, if the tide is turned, and violence reduced, the development of Iraqi security personnel should not be grounds for a rapid departure of foreign forces.

Successful development of forces that can provide transparent and accountable security to Iraq’s people will require many years — perhaps a decade — of mentoring, monitoring, and institution-building. In the absence of such a commitment, the stage will be set for a resurgence of abuse, oppression, and violence.

Olga Oliker is a senior international policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. She served as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2004.