Today, despite years of investment, the Taliban, associated fighters, criminal families and warlords still resist control from Kabul.
Its ranks are composed of ex-Baathists, Islamists, small numbers of foreign fighters, criminals and dirt-poor men who agree to fire a rocket-propelled grenade at a passing convoy for $500.
Francisco Aguilar is the chairman of the commission, which typically doesn't penalize fighters for criminal convictions, and which has never punished Mayweather for his assaults.
In Germany, two-thirds of foreign fighters had criminal records and more than half of those from Belgium and the Netherlands had a similar background.
Some of the fighters have criminal records and are paid only a subsistence wage, several sources said.
Republican senators played down the troop issue, and noted that American forces were taking the fight to Baath Party loyalists, foreign fighters and criminals.
In late 2012, the Karzai government blocked investigations into how friends of the Karzai family turned the Afghan central bank into a Ponzi scheme, and resumed public hangings of Taliban fighters and criminals.
They have attributed the violence — car bombs, suicide bombs and assassinations — to insurgents, militia fighters and criminals seeking to exploit the withdrawal of American soldiers from positions in cities before a June deadline set by the new security agreement between the United States and Iraq.
He said the success had flowed from an offensive strategy of going after "former regime elements, extremists, foreign fighters and criminals," by generating jobs for military-age males and by destroying more than 22,000 tons of leftover weapons and ammunition from Mr. Hussein's military machine.
If rehabilitation is too "soft", treating returning fighters like criminals can be equally problematic.
