María Elvira Salazar: “I would 1ike to speak a little bit about amendment No. 454, which was adopted unanimously by the Senate last night. I…”

“I would 1ike to speak a little bit about amendment No. 454, which was adopted unanimously by the Senate last night. I appreciate and thank Senators Cochran and Byrd for the time they have spent working with me on this amendment. I also note and appreciate the work of Senators McConnell and Leahy on this matter. Their staff members, Paul Grove and Tim Rieser, were very helpful. It is clear that success in Iraq and Afghanistan is dependent on how well and how fast we train security forces and police there. It is also clear that the faster and better we train these forces, the sooner our troops can come home. This amendment is designed to ensure that the training in Afghanistan--for which this bill dedicates more than $600 million, including $44.5 million which is to be available only for the establishment of a pilot program to train local Afghan police forces-- is handled well and is handled in an accountable fashion. We have seen what happens when training is rushed or when accountability is ignored. The Haitian National Police, for which we spent hundreds of millions of dollars training in the 1990s, is all but disbanded. We are all familiar with the stories of mismanagement of police training in the Balkans. And just last week, Secretary Rumsfeld took an emergency trip to Baghdad to try to salvage some of the training we have done there as Shiite political leaders threaten to purge Sunni officials from the forces.…”