By Colum Lynch and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post
The Pentagon's search for foreign peacekeeping forces for Iraq gathered some momentum yesterday as the State Department solicited bids from private U.S. contractors for training a national Iraqi police force and overhauling the country's judicial and prison systems.
Two European allies that have supported the Bush administration's war in Iraq, Denmark and the Netherlands, said they might be willing to send peacekeeping forces to Iraq to help stabilize the country. Italy, Bulgaria and Albania also offered forces this week.
Amid these tentative commitments, NATO announced yesterday that it will assume full responsibility for the peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan beginning in August. This undertaking will be the 19-member alliance's first mission outside its membership area in Europe and the United States.
With NATO committed in Afghanistan and with Europe's capacity for contributing large numbers of peacekeepers already strained by operations in Afghanistan and the Balkans, military experts said the United States and Britain might be forced to shoulder much of the peacekeeping burden in Iraq.
On the policing front, the State Department has asked a handful of U.S. companies to bid on a contract for assembling an American team of 1,000 former police officers and lawyers to train Iraqi police and help build effective judicial and prison systems in the country. An administration official said the total cost of the police mission "could be in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars."
The move is aimed at easing the burden on U.S. combat troops, who have been forced by the breakdown in law and order into a policing role in Baghdad and other key Iraqi cities. It also signals the administration's intent to expand the role of private U.S. firms in managing the post-conflict phase in Iraq.
As a first step toward reforming the Iraqi police, the Justice Department plans to send an "assessment" mission to Iraq as early as next week to determine precisely how large a U.S. presence will be required. "They will get on the ground and look at what's going on and tell us what's needed," a State Department official said.
The assessment team -- which will ultimately include 26 law enforcement specialists -- is to form the administrative core of a much larger U.S. police mission. They will answer to retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, who has been appointed by the Bush administration to oversee Iraq's civil administration pending the creation of an Iraqi interim authority. Congress has approved $25 million in emergency spending to "jump-start" the program, an official said.
The United States is trying to cobble together a disparate group of law enforcement specialists, primarily former police officers, but also prosecutors, human rights lawyers and corrections officials, a State Department official said. "They will only be advising and training," the official said. "We're not cops on the beat."
DynCorp International, a government contractor based in Reston, is among the key contenders for the State Department contract. It has already been given the task of recruiting an initial group of 150 former police officers who could be quickly deployed in Iraq.
DynCorp has been a key player in U.S. law enforcement and in military operations from Colombia to Afghanistan -- including providing Afghan President Hamid Karzai with American bodyguards and supplying U.N. peacekeeping operations from Kosovo to East Timor with U.S. police officers.
But its record running police missions in the Balkans during the 1990s has been troubled. In Bosnia, the company came under harsh criticism for allegedly hiring poorly qualified officers, failing to discipline wrongdoers and turning a blind eye on a series of sexual crimes implicating DynCorp employees.
The Bush administration, highly skeptical of nation-building and peacekeeping operations when it assumed office in January 2001, has nonetheless spent the past year and a half engaged in what it calls "stability operations" in Afghanistan. But military experts questioned whether that model -- involving 9,000 U.S. troops focused mostly on combat operations and a force of 4,500 international peacekeepers confined to Kabul -- would work in Iraq.
"Even if NATO gets involved [in Iraq], you're still talking about a major commitment of U.S. troops, if you want to do this right," said Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who estimated that a total of 200,000 U.S. and other foreign troops would probably be necessary in Iraq.
A top Pentagon official acknowledged that the stability operations in Iraq are far more challenging than those in Afghanistan and would require considerably more manpower. But Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has said publicly that far fewer than 200,000 troops will be necessary to stabilize Iraq, calling Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's "several hundred thousand" estimate "way off the mark."
Retired Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, who commanded the Army's first peacekeeping operation in the Balkans in 1995 and whose battalions occupied the area around the Iraqi town of Safwan along the Kuwaiti border for 21/2 months after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, said he thinks 200,000 troops will be needed to stabilize Iraq.
Even with thousands of newly trained Iraqi police officers providing basic security, said Nash, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, two divisions -- made up of 25,000 to 50,000 troops -- could be required just to guard any chemical or biological weapons sites that are discovered until the weapons are disposed of properly.
James Dobbins, a Rand Corp. analyst who served as a U.S. special envoy in Afghanistan and in other countries in which the United States performed stability operations in the 1990s, said he thinks Shinseki's estimate of several hundred thousand troops needed to stabilize Iraq is reasonable.
"Lower numbers are possible, but far from certain," Dobbins said. "A lot depends on the aspirations we have for ourselves. If what we want is a regime that's just a little better than [deposed president Saddam Hussein's], then 'nation-building light' might work."
But with the Bush administration describing a newly made democratic Iraq as a key to stability and democratization throughout the Middle East, Dobbins said, a far more ambitious effort is clearly in order. He noted that Kosovo received 25 times more investment per capita after seven weeks of war in 1999 -- and 50 times more peacekeeping troops -- than Afghanistan has since its Taliban government fell in late 2001.
Theoretically, European countries could commit tens of thousands of troops to peacekeeping duties in Iraq. George Robertson, NATO's secretary general, has noted publicly that there are 2 million people under arms in NATO's 18 European member countries, and some more in the seven incoming member countries from Eastern Europe.
At the European Union summit in Athens yesterday, Denmark and the Netherlands indicated that they would be willing to send peacekeepers to Iraq on an emergency basis without a U.N. resolution authorizing a formal peacekeeping role for the military alliance.
But NATO officials said such a resolution would be necessary before either the NATO command structure or troops from most individual NATO members could be sent to Iraq. The United States has not yet even asked NATO to assume a peacekeeping role there, and is not likely to for weeks.
France and Germany, NATO members that opposed the war in Iraq, have said that they have no objection to NATO's involvement with peacekeeping in Iraq. In fact, both countries have indicated that they might be willing to contribute forces for peacekeeping duties.
Agnes Vondermuhll, a spokeswoman for the French Embassy in Washington, said the Bush administration has not yet asked France to contribute peacekeeping forces. "We would probably examine this kind of request positively, but, of course, not without a U.N. mandate for a peacekeeping operation."
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