By Eric Schmitt
New York Times
04 February 2005
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 - Less than a third of the 136,000 members of Iraqi security forces that the Pentagon says are trained and equipped can be sent to tackle the most challenging missions in the country, and Iraqi Army units are suffering severe troop shortages, two top Pentagon officials told a Senate panel on Thursday.
Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said about 40,000 of Iraq's forces "can go anywhere in the country and take on almost any threat," but he quickly added that the remaining forces were useful in less demanding jobs, like police work in relatively stable southern Iraq.
Pentagon officials displayed a chart showing 79,116 Iraqi police and Interior Ministry officers, and 56,949 army and other military troops. General Myers said he had more confidence in the military figures than the police ones, saying the police figures might be inflated.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told senators that Iraqi Army units had absentee rates of up to 40 percent partly because many new soldiers had failed to return to duty after going home on leave.
The new information revealed fresh details of problems plaguing the fledgling Iraqi security forces and underscored the challenge the Bush administration faces in helping whip the Iraqis into fighting form to secure their own country and allow the 150,000 American service men and women there to leave eventually.
At the hearing of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, read an e-mail message from a Marine colonel who complained about corrupt Iraqi commanders in his area.
"They have been lying about their numbers in order to get more money," she read from the message, which an aide said was sent this year. "They say they have 150 when there are only 100. The senior officers take a cut from the top. We've caught soldiers in houses stealing property, and the commander won't react to it. They have no interest in learning the job, because right now the Marines are doing all of that."
Mr. Wolfowitz and General Myers said such corruption was not widespread among Iraqi officers, but they acknowledged that absenteeism was a problem in a military where soldiers are regularly granted time off to bring their paychecks home because there is no way to mail the money, and that until recently the absentees suffered no penalty for returning late or not at all.
"It is a different culture, and it's hard to get used to," said General Myers, adding that commanders knew of the problems.
The disclosures at the hearing appeared to support the contentions of Democrats who have accused the Pentagon of playing fast and loose with the number of Iraqis who can tackle the toughest missions in Iraq.
"We should stop exaggerating the number of Iraqi forces that have already been fully trained and capable, and willing to take on the insurgency," said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the panel's ranking Democrat.
Asked about the numbers debate at a Pentagon briefing later in the day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld denied that Pentagon had been misleading, and warned against relying too heavily on the figures themselves - which he and other administration officials have regularly cited - and focus instead on the Iraqi units' duties and improvement.
"It is flat wrong to say that anyone is misleading anyone, because they are not," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "We are providing the best data anyone has in the world to the Congress on a regular basis every week." But Pentagon officials conceded that they had done a poor job of explaining to Congress and the public a confusing accounting of Iraqi troops that reflected a wide array of training and experience among more than six classes of security forces, from capable commandos to less skilled guards.
Mr. Wolfowitz and General Myers, the most senior Pentagon officials to appear before Congress since the elections in Iraq, said Iraqi forces had performed heroically while protecting thousands of polling sites.
Although they insisted that security forces were rapidly becoming more capable, they acknowledged that they still lacked an effective way of measuring the units' abilities.
"We are going to have to move to a way where we can start tracking the capability," said the general, who told senators that he had spoken Wednesday morning to the top American trainer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, about the need to address the issue quickly.
Mr. Wolfowitz and General Myers declined to give a schedule for withdrawing American forces. Mr. Wolfowitz said about 15,000 American soldiers who had been added for election security would leave in the coming weeks as scheduled, and that 135,000 members of the American armed forces would probably remain through this year.
[A United States marine was killed Thursday south of Baghdad, Reuters reported, citing a statement on Friday by the military. The soldier was killed in Babil province, but no further details were given.]
Some Democrats bridled at the administration's reluctance to set an exit schedule. "How long are we going to be there?" thundered Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. "How long is it going to take to train Iraqis to fight for their own country, to shed their own blood, as Americans are doing?"
Mr. Wolfowitz replied: "They are facing it bravely; they are shedding their blood." Mr. Wolfowitz then said that 1,342 Iraqi soldiers and police officers had died while on the job since last June. "Those numbers are going up faster than ours," he said.
Mr. Wolfowitz also announced that the Pentagon had decided to include a permanent increase in the Army force starting in fiscal year 2007. Until now, the Pentagon had supported only a temporary, three-year increase of 30,000 troops to the Army, to a total of 512,000 soldiers.
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Citation: Eric Schmitt, "Many Iraqi Troops Not Fully Trained, U.S. Officials Say," New York Times, 4 February 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/politics/04military.html?pagewanted=print&position=
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