U.S. Spent Over $21 Billion on Afghan Police, Got ‘Barely Qualified Mall Guards’

After spending over $21 billion trying to train a national police force in Afghanistan, the United States splurged on equipment rather than focusing on institutional reform and churned out police trainees who were effectively “barely qualified mall guards,” per an international observer. That’s according to a sprawling new report published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that examines what went wrong in America’s costly and ineffective management of the Afghan National Police (ANP).

The SIGAR report notes that “two decades of conflict had left little to reform in Afghanistan” by the early 2000s. “The entire criminal justice system—from police to courts to prisons—had to be rebuilt, and with the help of a largely illiterate Afghan population.” The U.S. has no national police force and lacked any centralized standards or precedent to apply to the ANP. Training and advising fell to a piecemeal collection of departments and agencies, creating inefficient bureaucratic processes that butted up against deeply corrupt institutions in Afghanistan.

No effective, rights-protecting national police force has ever existed in Afghanistan. Both before and after U.S. involvement in the country began, the police had a reputation for arbitrary detentions, torture, and human rights abuses, which affected the Afghan population’s receptiveness to newly trained officers. But the Afghans trained in American facilities were ill-equipped to perform tasks necessary to their jobs. It was so bad that in 2007, one international observer remarked, many graduates of U.S. training facilities were like “barely qualified mall guards.”

Recruitment standards were lax and often colored by the corrupt Ministry of Interior, which prioritized personal and factional allegiance over legitimate qualifications. Further, “between 70 and 90 percent of the graduates of U.S. police training centers were illiterate.” They were incapable of taking complex notes, reading warrants, or jotting down license plate numbers. Militia fighters also filled the ranks of the new police force, with one U.S.-contracted trainer noting, “we train who we can get.” All the while, the yearly attrition rate for trainees floated around 15 percent (but may have been up to 30 percent).

The SIGAR report criticizes an approach