US officials say costs have skyrocketed since planning began two years ago, write Karen DeYoungin Washington and Ernesto Londoin Baghdad
AS THE last US combat troops prepare to leave Iraq this month, the state department is struggling to implement an expanded mission that it has belatedly realised it might not be able to afford.
Beginning in September, the state department will take over all police training in Iraq from coalition military forces. It proposes replacing its current 16 provincial reconstruction teams spread across the country with five consular offices outside Baghdad.
But since planning for the transition began more than two years ago, costs have skyrocketed and the money to pay for them has become increasingly tight. Congress cut the state department’s Iraq request in the 2010 supplemental appropriation that President Barack Obama signed late last month; the senate appropriations committee and a house subcommittee have already slashed the $1.8 billion request for fiscal 2011 operations in Iraq.
Gen Ray Odierno, the outgoing commander of US forces in Iraq, and other US officials are urging lawmakers to reconsider their plans, citing concerns that waning resources could jeopardise tenuous security gains.
“We can’t spread ourselves so thin that we don’t have the capacity to do the job in the places where we put people,” said deputy secretary of state Jacob Lew, who has told Congress that civilians will not be deployed in places it cannot protect them.
“If we don’t put people in a place where they have mobility, where they can go out and meet with the people and implement their programmes,” he said, “there’s very little argument for being in the place we send them”.
The state department has signalled in recent weeks that it will need up to $400 million more than initially requested to cover mushrooming security costs, but lawmakers seem in no mood to acquiesce.
“They need a dose of fiscal reality,” a senior senate aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity amid ongoing negotiations over the state department funding. “If they miscalculated by hundreds of millions of dollars, they need to tell us where they propose to find the money,” the aide said. “It’s not going to come from [funds allotted to] Afghanistan or Haiti.”
Mr Lew, at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies last week, indicated that the state department might be forced to revise its plans, including limiting the number of police-training facilities to fortified, central locations in major population areas.
“That means there will be other places that we don’t have a police-training capacity,” he said, although “anyone who has done police training in difficult environments knows that it’s much better to be out in the field, working one-on-one, than to do classroom training”.
Other officials have said that at least one of the “embassy branch” offices, or consulates, will have to be eliminated, most likely in Diyala province, and that at least two others will have to be scaled back.
To undertake unprecedented tasks in what is still a highly dangerous environment, the state department plan calls for replacing protection for civilians that the US military now provides with what amounts to its own armed force. It proposes to triple the current 2,700 security contractors and reinforce facilities where diplomats and police trainers will work.
Mr Lew, now Obama's nominee to head the office of management and budget, warned that if there was no more money for the operations budget, it would have to be taken out of development assistance programmes in Iraq and elsewhere. "So now you have security, but no programmes," a senior house aide said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity. "That's what drives us nuts about them. They screwed this one up, and we have to fix it." – ( WashingtonPost-Bloomberg)