The Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has issued yet another damning report on the enormous levels of waste and lack of oversight in Afghanistan, this time focusing on 474,823 guns provided to the Afghan military by the Pentagon.
We’d known for awhile that a lot of Afghan recruits who sign up and leave after their first paycheck routinely took their guns with them, but never kew the extent. According to the report, 43% of the total serial numbers recorded had missing information and were not properly accounted for.
The Pentagon’s record-keeping system is also flawed in other ways, with some 22,806 serial numbers repeated multiple times, meaning the same gun was reported shipped or delivered many times. 59,938 had no record of ever being shipped or received.
SIGAR noted this only covers the Afghan Army, and not the national police. The news is even worse for them, as there is essentially no record-keeping there, being a hodge-podge of handwritten records by a few officials, with no audit even possible.
conveniently in the hands of ISIS
Taliban may have the answer to this riddle.
Waste and lack of oversight? Why would any side not control their weapons in order to keep them out of the hands of their enemy? Only losers would permit their enemy to arm with their own weapons.
There is another reason for those losses: One of the ways used to measure who is winning an insurgency is to calculate the number of weapons lost, to the number of weapons gained. If the insurgents are obtaining access to more of our weapons than we take from them, then they are winning the war, pretty much in direct proportion to the ratio.
Back in Vietnam those calculations were performed by Special Forces throughout the war – it was an average of 9:1 in favor of the Vietcong, while in Afghanistan it looks more like 9.999:1.
"there is essentially no record-keeping there, being a hodge-podge of handwritten records by a few officials, with no audit even possible"
That's very convenient. How much of those arms were diverted to US "black ops" or "off the books" operations? Anyone who sees operations like Iran-Contra as an aberration just isn't paying attention. Remember this one from 10 years ago? "A soon-to-be-released audit will show that at least $8.8 billion in Iraqi money that was given to Iraqi ministries by the former U.S.-led authority there cannot be accounted for, FOX News has confirmed" and "one of the main benefactors of the Iraq funds was Texas-based firm Halliburton."
I forget to post the link. Sorry about that! http://www.foxnews.com/story/2004/08/20/audit-sho…