IG to audit Iraqi security forces

At the urging of Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction plans to review how many trained Iraqi personnel are actually serving in the nation's security forces. The audit was sparked by an Oct. 31 letter to Stuart Bowen, the U.S. inspector in charge of investigating Iraq reconstruction, in which Dorgan expressed frustrations at the Bush administration's inability to provide reliable statistics on the size of the nascent security forces.

"While our government has made a tremendous investment in efforts to make the Iraqi Security Forces self-reliant, the alarming fact is, no one in any official capacity seems to know the answer to this critical question," wrote Dorgan, a senior member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Bowen met Friday with Dorgan and assured him that he would review the matter, a Dorgan spokesman said Monday. A spokeswoman for the special inspector general said the office will conduct an audit and work with GAO to answer Dorgan's questions. "He raises some very good questions, but they're also very difficult questions," the spokeswoman said.

In his letter, Dorgan pointed to the State Department's Oct. 17 weekly Iraq status report that notes the total number of trained and equipped Iraqi security forces is 359,700 personnel -- a number Dorgan called "questionable" because a September report to Congress from the Pentagon concluded that no data were available on how many of the personnel are still in the security forces. The Pentagon report estimated that only 40 percent to 70 percent of the trained Iraqi police are still in the force.

"I am concerned that none of the agencies responsible (DOD, State Department, etc.) appear to have a clue as to how many of the people we've trained are actually serving in the Iraqi Security Forces," Dorgan wrote. "Taken in combination with the fact that we don't know the status of almost 200,000 of the weapons we've provided, I think that this is something that you should investigate."

Specifically, Dorgan asked Bowen to review how many trained Iraqis are in the force and available for duty. He also urged Bowen to investigate why there is no current information on the number of trained and equipped Iraq personnel still in the forces, and whether the year-end objective of training 389,400 Iraqi security forces is meaningful if U.S. agencies cannot certify how many of them remain in the force after they complete their training. Dorgan, who has been a leading advocate of accountability in Iraq, recently succeeded in attaching a related amendment to the Senate's version of the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill that would require the Defense Department to create a system to track weapons supplied to the Iraqi army and other security forces or risk no further arms shipments to the Iraqi government.

Dorgan's amendment, which is being considering during House-Senate negotiations on the authorization measure, was a direct response to a July GAO report that concluded that at least 190,000 weapons supplied by United States for the Iraq forces are unaccounted for in Iraq.