What will Bush’s “New Way Forward” do about this? As this writer states,
Also, because hundreds and thousands of ghosts exist at all echelons, many military and police units in the field do not have nearly as many men at arms as they seem to have on paper. Thus the units are often assigned tasks for which they do not have necessary manpower.

FORT BENNING, Georgia: The level of corruption in the Iraq Security Forces is staggering. The Iraq Study Group found that $5 billion to $7 billion is lost annually to different types of corruption, and yet “there are still no examples of senior officials who have been brought before a court and convicted of corruption charges.” The result: “Economic development is hobbled by insecurity, corruption, lack of investment, dilapidated infrastructure and uncertainty.”

Yet of the study group’s 79 recommendations, only two are much relevant to this problem, and no anticorruption milestones to be achieved were set forth. Having served in Iraq, I find this very disappointing.

While I can’t of course speak officially for the Pentagon, I can describe what I saw and give my own thoughts on how to improve things.

The most prominent forms of corruption I saw were Iraqi commanders pocketing the paychecks of nonexistent troops in the Iraqi army and officers in the police forces, and customs officials abetting the smuggling of oil and precious rebuilding supplies across Iraq’s porous borders.

The greatest amount of corruption in the Iraq military and police forces occurs when payrolls are handed out at the unit level. Because the country doesn’t have a functioning banking system, military and security commanders receive large sums of cash every payroll period based on the number and rank of soldiers on their personnel rosters. The endemic problem is that commanders frequently put nonexistent soldiers and security personnel - “ghosts” - on their rosters and pocket their salaries.

It is difficult to overstate how deeply these ghosts hurt the war effort. Most obviously, we have no idea how much of this money is being siphoned off to support tribal and ethnic fighting, and even the insurgency itself.

Also, because hundreds and thousands of ghosts exist at all echelons, many military and police units in the field do not have nearly as many men at arms as they seem to have on paper. Thus the units are often assigned tasks for which they do not have necessary manpower.

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