Bobby Charles looked into a debate crowd in February, raised his hand and rattled off accomplishments from his time as the head of a State Department bureau under President George W. Bush.
“I was brought in by [Secretary of State] Colin Powell and the president to clean up that place. At the same time as I cut bureaucrats and cut the budget, I trained the Iraqi police,” he said. “I trained the Iraqi police and the Afghan police.”
Charles, who has led polls of Maine’s Republican gubernatorial primary, has built his campaign largely around his firsthand experience managing large, complex federal operations, saying it sets him apart from the field. His experience at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, which combats drugs and crime abroad, is something he often cites.
More than a dozen federal audits criticized the bureau Charles led for roughly 18 months between 2003 and 2005. Auditors found poor management, billions spent without accountability, and failure to accomplish primary foreign policy goals. Leaders of the bureau were faulted for their work on the agency’s key goals of training national police and countering narcotics.
Before Charles’ appointment, the position had been vacant for 14 months. People who worked with him described near-impossible circumstances on the ground and cite some successes. But his campaign is notable for trying to find bright spots in a heavily scrutinized early part of the wars that spent hundreds of billions of dollars without securing the Middle East.
“I don’t know why anybody in their right mind would take credit for this,” John Sopko, who was the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction for nearly 13 years and oversaw more than 700 reports and investigations, said of the police training efforts in an interview. “I mean, it was a total disaster, and our reports confirm that.”
Charles’ campaign declined an interview and did not answer specific questions on his service. In a statement, Charles, who lives in Leeds, said he’s proud of his service and record and dismissed a reporting overview and questions provided by the Bangor Daily News, which he referred to in a Monday post as the “Bobby Derangement Network.”
“Our operation began with essentially zero police infrastructure, and my team helped build systems to keep people safe under extremely difficult conditions,” he said. “We trained police, stood up institutions, and took on some of the toughest assignments in the world.”
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.
“The reality is that the bureaucracy didn’t want to change, and Bobby was a change agent,” 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. “He brought into INL — which had been running on cruise control for a long time — fiscal responsibility.”
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’t mention Charles by name, they refer to the position he held between 2003 and 2005 and work beginning during that period.
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’ team was tasked with rebuilding both countries’ police forces.
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 led by Sopko found. Afghan police proved incapable of enforcing the law and protecting civilians from the Taliban and emerging insurgent groups.
“In short, despite having the legal authority and the budget, State proved ill-prepared to operate in a high-threat environment like Afghanistan,” the report concluded.
In the two years before his arrival, the bureau’s funding nearly doubled from roughly $1.3 billion to $2.4 billion, driven by Middle East missions, an internal audit from 2005 found.
Inspectors pinned several oversight failures on management. For example, Sopko’s 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 in storage at the Baghdad airport for more than two years.
Officials couldn’t say whether they’d received what they paid for. A federal audit found the bureau responsible had accepted a contractor’s 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.
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 “ANP Horror Stories.” It described an Afghan police force that was illiterate and largely untrained despite years of American investment.
“This is a serious problem,” Rumsfeld wrote.
When Newsweek, ProPublica, and Foreign Policy published 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’s “Afghanistan Papers” series of 2019 confirmed this disconnect between public success stories and private assessments was sustained for nearly 20 years.
On the counternarcotics front, efforts spearheaded by Charles’ team in the Middle East were met with similar failures. In Afghanistan alone, the only industry that grew following the U.S.’ invasion was the country’s opium market, the opposite of American foreign policy goals, audits of the State Department’s efforts said.
The 2005 audit found that the bureau suffered from “periodic leadership vacuums” and a front office that was “structurally dysfunctional” during Charles’ time in charge. Morale was also poor. Internal tensions had become severe enough to warrant a mediator from the State Department’s civil rights office.
The bureau also lost standing under Charles, the report said. Leadership was “perceived as preoccupied with defending its turf, too ready to embroil itself in sterile interagency strife, and as ineffective in presenting its positions in interagency forums,” the audit found. As a result, the bureau had become “isolated and marginalized” within its own department.
Charles was faced with a difficult situation, retired Air Force Col. John Mosbey, who worked under the candidate on police training in the Middle East, said. Charles had to navigate the State Department while working with the Defense Department on the ground, while using a police training model that wasn’t well-suited for the trainees, Mosbey said.
“The whole situation was complicated, really complicated,” he said. “I think we made it work.”
Charles has spoken often about his federal government experience on the campaign trail. His primary opponents have mostly left it alone. But the Democratic candidate whom Charles debated in February had an ally pass out a copy of the State Department audit to reporters.
Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson argued it showed that Charles had “all kinds of problems” running his team. Charles said the opposite was true.
“I managed it so well that at the end of the day, Colin Powell and the president were glad for what we achieved, and we achieved it in a faster period of time than anybody would ever manage it before,” he said. “So you got to just go do your fact-checking.”
BDN writer Michael Shepherd contributed to this report.
Bangor Daily News investigative reporter Sawyer Loftus can be reached at [email protected].
