You can't buy loyalty, but you can rent it

That's the trouble with empire building. You can train a former enemy to fight, but you can't keep him on your side. Judging from this report, the future's not bright for a local Iraqi security force if the results in other countries is any indication of the success rate of such conversions.

Training in the new states of the former USSR was suspended after "more than 800 troops from these countries deserted, and many reportedly joined militant groups, such as al-Qaeda and Chechen rebel forces."

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, IRIN News of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs earlier this year quoted an Afghan Ministry of Defense report saying that more than a quarter of the Afghan National Army (ANA) had deserted since its formation in mid-2002. "Around two to three thousand soldiers have fled the ANA so far," General Zahir Azimi, a spokesperson for the ministry, told IRIN. ...the Taliban were in possession of SAM missiles of Russian and Chinese origin, which they were getting from Iraqi Kurdistan.

...It is quite possible that the people now using the SAMs were trained by the US in the ANA, or in Iraq. In Afghanistan it is accepted that the resistance penetrated the recruitment process at the very outset, as in Iraq.

A part of the problem is that the Pentagon employs private contractors to train many of the foreign troops. This made it easier for the resistance to penetrate the recruitment process and get training. Since the private contractors are paid by the number of people they train, vetting of the trainees becomes somewhat less rigorous.

This could explain some of those inexplicable helicopter crashes in Aghanistan lately. And I see one of the contractors is DynCorp, a company heavily involved in the war on some drugs in Colombia and that received a $316 million contract helping the Department of Justice (DOJ) seize assets from US citizens in drug arrests.

How cozy.