Tomgram: Nick Turse, How to Succeed at Failing, Pentagon-Style | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Nick Turse, How to Succeed at Failing, Pentagon-Style | TomDispatch

Iraq and Afghanistan are separated by more than 1,000 miles and, although they both exist in what is now known as the Greater Middle East, they had little in common -- at least until March 2003, when the Bush administration followed up its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by invading Iraq.  Since then, they’ve had quite a bit in common, including vast infusions of U.S. funds and the massive levels of corruption that accompany them, as well as the wayrefugees from both countries have been joining the same flow of the desperate and dispossessed heading for Europe.  These days, with the spread of an Islamic State franchise to Afghanistan, even their insurgents are becoming part of the same “brand.” And there’s one other thing they’ve had in common in these years: ghosts.

In both countries, the U.S. military has built, on paper, vast local security forces from scratch to the tune of at least $65 billion in Afghanistan and at least $25 billion in Iraq.  Their armies and police forces have, however, both turned out to be remarkably spectral in nature.  They are filled with “ghost soldiers” and “ghost policemen” who are being paid salaries but don’t exist.  In some cases, they are quite literally already dead and wandering in the world of spirits.  Their U.S.-funded salaries are, in turn, being pocketed by commanders and other senior military officials in an operation that couldn’t be more profitable or "successful" -- at least until their ranks, sometimes thinned to nonexistence, are attacked by flesh-and-blood enemy forces.  In Iraq, in 2014, after significant parts of that country’s American-built army had abandoned its weaponry and fled its posts in the country’s northern cities in the face of modest numbers of Islamic State fighters, the prime minister announced that there were at least 50,000 “ghost” troops in his military.  (That figure was widely believed to be an underestimate.)

In Afghanistan more recently, as Taliban attacks have ramped up, similarly undermanned units have found themselves hard-pressed and have retreated, fled, or been defeated.  The number of ghosts in the ranks of the Afghan security forces (as in its police) is unknown.  Recently, however, the head of the provincial council of Helmand Province, a key area in the Taliban’s southern heartland, estimated that 40% of the Afghan soldiers there might, in fact, be ghosts.  Whatever the specific numbers, what’s striking is the Pentagon’s strange skill when it comes to creating, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, spectral security forces of a remarkably similar kind in two such, until recently, disparate countries.  Make of that knack what you will while reading TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse’s epic saga of how the Pentagon made special “progress” and racked up “success” after “success” over the last 12 years building Iraq’s spectral forces. Tom

The Pentagon’s Progress 
Will American “Successes” Lead to More Iraqi Military Failures? 
By Nick Turse

There’s good news coming out of Iraq... again. The efforts of a 65-nation coalition and punishing U.S. airstrikes have helped local ground forces roll back gains by the Islamic State (IS). 

Government forces and Shiite militias, for example, recaptured the city of Tikrit, while Kurdish troops ousted IS fighters from the town of Sinjar and other parts of northern Iraq. Last month, Iraqi troops finally pushed Islamic State militants out of most of the city of Ramadi, which the group had held since routing Iraqi forces there last spring.

In the wake of all this, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter touted “the kind of progress that the Iraqi forces are exhibiting in Ramadi, building on that success to… continue the campaign with the important goal of retaking Mosul as soon as possible.”  Even more recently, he said those forces were “proving themselves not only motivated but capable.”  I encountered the same upbeat tone when I asked Colonel Steve Warren, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, about the Iraqi security forces.  “The last year has been a process of constructing, rebuilding, and refitting the Iraqi army,” he explained. “While it takes time for training and equipping efforts to take effect, the increasing tactical confidence and competence of the ISF [Iraqi security forces] and their recent battlefield successes indicate that we are on track.”

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