It was disturbing — if not genuinely surprising — when earlier this year large portions of the Iraqi army fled in the face of the advance of the Islamic State, allowing the group to take over large swaths of territory across the country’s northern half. Well, if you were wondering how hundreds of thousands of American-trained and -equipped troops can turn out to be so ineffective, one explanation is that 50,000 of them didn’t exist. Loveday Morris of the Washington Post:
The Iraqi army has been paying salaries to at least 50,000 soldiers who don’t exist, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Sunday, an indication of the level of corruption that permeates an institution that the United States has spent billions equipping and arming. . . .
Abadi, who took power in September, is under pressure to stamp out the graft that flourished in the armed forces under his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki. Widespread corruption has been blamed for contributing to the collapse of four of the army’s 14 divisions in June in the face of an offensive by Islamic State extremists.
The United States is encouraging Abadi to create a leaner, more efficient military as the Pentagon requests $1.2 billion to train and equip the Iraqi army next year. The United States spent more than $20 billion on the force from the 2003 invasion until U.S. troops withdrew at the end of 2011.
With entry-level soldiers in Iraq drawing salaries of about $600 a month, the practice of “ghost soldiers” is likely to be costing Iraq at least $380 million a year — though officials say that’s probably only a fraction of the true expense.
“It could be more than triple this number,” said Hamid al-Mutlaq, a member of the parliamentary defense and security committee, pointing out that more thorough on-the-ground investigations are planned. . . .
The corrupt practice is often perpetrated by officers who pretend to have more soldiers on their books in order to pocket their salaries, experts say.
This, unfortunately, isn’t even that shocking either — there is of course huge amounts of graft in developing-world governments, and if you want to help such a country build a military, you’re going to see something skimmed off the top. There’s a lot of money at stake (and more than just American dollars — ordinary Iraqi government employees and citizens get the raw end of this kind of corruption). But you could argue the bigger question is whether the billions of dollars the U.S. and now the Iraqi government are spending on their military will manage to create an effective, non-sectarian force at any price.
Abadi seems more interested in that than Maliki, who was a committed Shiite sectarian from the start, ever was, but it’s going to take more than one committed prime minister, if we even have that. (One piece of good news today: The Iraqi central government has reached a new revenue-sharing deal with the Kurdish Regional Government, which has always been a point of conflict — the deal should make cooperation between the two parties on all matters easier, after they’ve struggled to work with each other to confront the Islamic State over the last year.)