Summary of GAO Report on Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq
September 5, 2007
The full report is available here.
This report represents the findings of the General Accountability Office (GAO) from their year long assessment of the 18 benchmarks set down jointly by the Bush and Maliki administrations. In its research, information was collected from a wide variety of sources ranging from the Multi-National Force-Iraq to the United Nations. It should be noted that GAO placed special significance on the fact that they had discussions with both Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraeus who are due to give their own assessment on Monday, September 10, 2007.
Overall, the GAO found that the Iraqi's had met 3, partially met 4, and did not meet 11 of the 18 benchmarks. Of the 3 benchmarks met, 2 involved operations supporting the Baghdad security plan with the final one concerning the establishment of minority rights in the Iraqi parliament. The 15 remaining benchmarks which had not been met covered the broad spectrum of problems in Iraq.
The report summarizes this lack of progress by stating that, "Key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds."
In testimony given before the House Armed Services Committee, Comptroller General David M. Walker stated that although he had not been given a priority structure for the benchmarks, he found it especially distressing that those involving the sectarian loyalties and training of the Iraqi Security Forces and police (Benchmarks 7, 10 and 11) were not far along enough to be even classified as partially met.
These results are a stark contrast to the Administration's initial assessment issued in July. This earlier report found that progress on 8 benchmarks was satisfactory, progress on 2 was mixed and progress on 6 was unsatisfactory. As can be seen in the chart accompanying this summary, in most cases the Administration report found progress to be satisfactory where the GAO had found only a partially-met benchmark. The GAO Report goes on to state that in the future, the Administration needs to provide a far greater level of data along with their benchmark analysis reports so that more transparency can be introduced into the evaluation process.
During the Congressional testimony, a few other key points were discussed that aid in the understanding of the benchmark report. The GAO had initially rejected the idea of the "partially met" result for the benchmarks. However, while conducting their investigation, they realized that simply failing a benchmark for not being in the final phases of implementation would provide an inaccurate idea of developments in Iraq. To this end, Walker noted that benchmarks that received the "not met" label could still have achieved some progress.
Walker also stated that the GAO was not comfortable with the methodology used by the Multi-National Force-Iraq to determine what part of the violence in Iraq could be labeled as sectarian in nature. Some disagreement has already risen over how the GAO report characterized the reduction of violence in Iraq. The report only considers sectarian violence levels as laid out in benchmark 13 and the discrepancy between the GAO and the Multi-National Force-Iraq in methodology has led to the controversy.