\u201cOur operation began with essentially zero police infrastructure, and my team helped build systems to keep people safe under extremely difficult conditions,\u201d he said. \u201cWe trained police, stood up institutions, and took on some of the toughest assignments in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Bobby_Charles_Troy_Jackson-3-600x455.jpeg\")
Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles (left) speaks during a debate with former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, a Democratic candidate, at the Hilton hotel in Auburn on Feb. 25. Credit: Michael Shepherd \/ BDN<\/p>\n
The campaign also provided testimonials from several people who worked with Charles. The BDN spoke with two who described Charles as successfully navigating a difficult position.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reality is that the bureaucracy didn\u2019t want to change, and Bobby was a change agent,\u201d William E. Todd, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to both Brunei and Cambodia and worked with Charles directly from 2003 to 2005, said. \u201cHe brought into INL\u00a0\u2014 which had been running on cruise control for a long time \u2014 fiscal responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
The audits examined by the BDN came from the State Department, the Pentagon, the U.S. Government Accountability Office and other watchdogs and span two decades. While they don\u2019t mention Charles by name, they refer to the position he held between 2003 and 2005 and work beginning during that\u00a0period.<\/p>\n
Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan quickly forced the Taliban and Al-Qaeda out. Germany was charged with retraining national police. The U.S. became more aggressively involved by 2003. By early 2004, the U.S. had also been in Iraq for a year, and Charles\u2019 team was tasked with rebuilding both countries\u2019 police forces.<\/p>\n
The State Department contracted with DynCorp International to carry out this work in early 2004. All told, the U.S. poured more than $21 billion into the efforts over two decades and came away with little to no positives, a 2022 report<\/a>\u00a0led by Sopko\u00a0found. Afghan police proved incapable of enforcing the law and protecting civilians from the Taliban and emerging insurgent groups.<\/p>\n \u201cIn short, despite having the legal authority and the budget, State proved ill-prepared to operate in a high-threat environment like Afghanistan,\u201d the report concluded.<\/p>\n In the two years before his arrival, the bureau\u2019s funding nearly doubled\u00a0from roughly $1.3 billion to $2.4 billion, driven by Middle East missions, an internal audit from 2005 found.\u00a0<\/p>\n Inspectors pinned several oversight\u00a0failures\u00a0on management. For example, Sopko\u2019s team discovered that the U.S. paid $43.8 million between 2004 and 2006 for trailers that were supposed to house American police trainers rebuilding the Iraqi security forces. They were built in Italy and sat unassembled\u00a0in storage at the Baghdad airport for more than two years.<\/p>\n Officials couldn\u2019t say whether they\u2019d received what they paid for. A federal audit found the bureau responsible had accepted a contractor\u2019s word about their status without checking, paid invoices before work was contracted, and allowed millions in unauthorized construction, including a swimming pool at the Adnan Palace in Baghdad, to go through without objection.<\/p>\n In February 2005, a month before Charles left the State Department, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a confidential memo from commanders in Afghanistan titled \u201cANP Horror Stories.\u201d It described an Afghan\u00a0police force that was illiterate and largely untrained despite years of American investment. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is a serious problem,\u201d Rumsfeld wrote<\/a>. <\/p>\n When Newsweek<\/a>, ProPublica<\/a>, and Foreign Policy<\/a>\u00a0published investigations around 2010, they found reality matched years of internal warnings: Billions spent with no way to verify training numbers, contractors billing for unperformed work and a force viewed as predatory by Afghans. The Washington Post\u2019s \u201cAfghanistan Papers<\/a>\u201d series of 2019 confirmed this disconnect between public success stories and private assessments was sustained for nearly 20 years.<\/p>\n On the counternarcotics front, efforts spearheaded by Charles\u2019 team in the Middle East were met with similar failures. In Afghanistan alone, the only industry that grew following the U.S.\u2019 invasion was the country\u2019s opium market, the opposite of American foreign policy goals, audits of the State Department\u2019s efforts said.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/2006-10-27T120000Z_920365335_GM1DTUSUVWAA_RTRMADP_3_BUSH-NA-600x414.jpg\")
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stand in the Oval Office of the White House on October 27, 2006 as they listen to President George W. Bush. Credit: Jason Reed \/ Reuters<\/p>\n