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The U.S. government’s Afghanistan watchdog, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), released a report Thursday on the lessons learned from trying to rebuild and train Afghan’s security forces.

Remarks by John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General, and the report, outline the following issues with training Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF):

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— The United States failed to understand the complexities and scale of the mission required to stand up and mentor security forces in a country suffering from thirty years of war, misrule, corruption, and deep poverty.

— U.S. military plans for ANDSF readiness were created under politically constrained timelines, rather than based upon realistic assessments of Afghan readiness.

— The U.S. government lacks a deployable police-development capability for high-threat environments, so we have trained over 100,000 Afghan police using U.S. Army aviators, infantry officers, and civilian contractors. One U.S. officer watched TV shows like Cops and NCIS to learn what he should teach. In eastern Afghanistan, we met a U.S. Army helicopter pilot assigned to teach policing.

— The NATO training mission for the ANDSF was chronically understaffed by more than 50%.

— Insufficient attention to Afghan institutional capacity meant that the personnel, logistical, planning, administrative, and other functions vital to sustaining the fighting forces remained underdeveloped-as they do to this day.

— The U.S. government is not well organized to conduct large scale security-sector assistance missions in post-conflict nations or in the developing world.

— Security-sector assistance cannot employ a one-size-fits-all approach. Security-force structures and capabilities will not survive the end of U.S. assistance if the host nation does not fully buy into and take ownership of security sector assistance programs.

— Developing foreign military and police capabilities is a whole-of-government mission. However, there is a large “hole” in U.S. government reconstruction activity.

— Security sector assistance training and advising is not currently career enhancing for military personnel. Therefore, experienced and capable military professionals often choose other assignments later in their careers, resulting in the continual deployment of new and inexperienced forces for security sector assistance missions.