U.S.-Trained Forces Are Failing in the Field

WASHINGTON — In recent years, thousands of American- trained security forces in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have collapsed, stalled or defected, calling into question the effectiveness of the tens of billions of dollars spent.

The American-trained army and police in Iraq’s Anbar Province, the heartland of the Islamic State militant group, have barely engaged its forces, while several thousand American-backed government forces and militiamen in Afghanistan’s Kunduz Province were forced to retreat recently when attacked by several hundred Taliban fighters. And in Syria, a $ 500 million program to train local rebels to fight the Islamic State has produced only a handful of soldiers.

“Our track record at building security forces over the past 15 years is miserable,” said Karl W. Eikenberry, a former military commander and United States ambassador in Afghanistan.

American- trained forces are marked by poor leadership, a lack of will and political problems. Without their American advisers, many local forces have repeatedly shown an inability to fight.

The $25 billion push to rebuild the Iraqi Army quickly crumbled after the Americans left, when the politicization under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al- Maliki eroded the military’s effectiveness at all levels, American officials said.

In northwest Africa, the United States has spent more than $ 600 million to combat Islamist militancy, with training programs stretching from Morocco to Chad. American officials once heralded Mali’s military as an exemplary partner. But in 2012, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya to rout the military, including units trained by United States Special Forces. That defeat, followed by a coup led by an American-trained officer, Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, astounded and embarrassed American commanders.

In Yemen, American- trained troops and counterterrorism forces largely disbanded when Houthi rebels overran the capital last year and forced the government into exile.

More recently in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the military cam- paigns against the Taliban and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have made little headway. After acknowledging that only four or five American- trained Syrian rebels were actually in the fight there, American officials said that they were suspending the movement of new recruits from Syria to Turkey and Jordan for training. The program suffered from a shortage of recruits willing to fight the Islamic State instead of the army of President Bashar al-Assad.

In Afghanistan, the United States has spent about $65 billion to build the army and police forces. Even before the setback in Kunduz, many Afghan forces were struggling to defeat the Taliban, partly because of what many senior commanders said had been a precipitous American drawdown before Afghans were ready to be on their own. But how thousands of Afghan Army, police and militia defenders could fare so poorly against a Taliban force of only hundreds baffled and frustrated the Americans.

If there is a bright spot in the training landscape, it may be the effort by a 22,000-member African Union force — from nations like Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia — to oust the Shabab, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Somalia, from many areas. The Shabab’s leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, was killed last year in an American airstrike, and other agents have been killed by drone strikes.

The American government has invested nearly $1 billion in the overall strategy in Somalia. But even with the gains, the Shabab have been able to carry out bombings in Mogadishu, the capital, and in neighboring countries, including massacres at a university and a shopping mall in Kenya in the past two years.

In Iraq, a United States training program to strengthen the embattled security forces there has run aground, in part because the Iraqi government has provided far fewer recruits than anticipated, while many Shiite militiamen and soldiers who were fighting the Islamic State have left the battlefield and joined the exodus of migrants seeking new lives in Europe.

John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the C.I. A. who is now at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said American efforts to train the Iraqi military would probably be futile without a political bargain to unite the country’s Shiite and Sunni Arabs.

“Training is a necessary but not sufficient way to get you to the point of creating a robust fighting force, because ultimately, militaries fight over political issues,” he said.