Under a $1.75 billion contract — the largest the State Department has ever managed — DynCorp International of Falls Church, Va., near Washington, D.C., trains more police officers than any other private U.S. company in Iraq and Afghanistan, reports the Washington Post. The firm says it has 700 trainers in Iraq, where it helped train 198,000 Iraqis, and more than 500 in Afghanistan, where it helped train 93,000 Afghans.
“If you look at the results, in neither country is the police functional,” said Robert Perito of the U.S. Institute for Peace and a consultant to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. The ost says that U.S. officials are reconsidering “whether the job of constituting a foreign police force is really one for a hired hand.” A DynCorp spokesman says, “We don’t control the political situation, the political loyalties of the people.” DynCorp got into the police-training business in the mid-1990s when it was tapped by the State Department to provide peacekeepers for Haiti. Later assignments took the company’s hires to Bosnia and East Timor. The contract now makes up nearly 40 percent of DynCorp’s annual revenue. Besides police training, it includes conducting drug-eradication programs in Afghanistan and construction of living facilities in Iraq.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/18/AR2007031801284.html