The US State Department has announced their intention to transfer over 6,000 guns to the Afghan National Army, worth roughly $60 million, as proof of their “commitment to Afghanistan’s security,” and based on an “urgent need” for the Afghans to launch new offensives against insurgents.
The deal is being couched in the same “national security” terms as other US weapons sales to foreign powers, and the State Department has insisted that for official purposes, this weapons transfer will be treated as a “sale,” even though the Afghans won’t actually be paying for them.
Rather, the $60 million to “buy” the weapons will be coming directly out of US government grants created specifically for the purposes of getting the weapons into the hands of the Afghan military. The vast majority of the weapons are M16 assault rifles.
It is worth noting that this official transfer presents each weapon as costing $10,000 on average, even though estimates on what the US military normally pays for them suggest they are far less expensive. This overcharging likely doesn’t matter to the Afghans because they aren’t paying either way, but tens of millions of dollars in this deal are in excess to the actual cost of the arms, and it is unclear why.
Kept looking for a line in the article where the Afghans were adding 6000 new troops as the reason for why they are buying the over-priced guns. Since I don’t see that, I can only assume that these are replacements for weapons that were ‘lost’ (or sold) by the existing troops.
Nice racket. The US taxpayer pays $10k a gun (instead of just going down to the street corner and buying an AK-47 for $1k and donating it to the Afghans.) And this is to replace guns that the Afghan troops probably sold to the ‘insurgents’ in the first place.
You’d think the advantage of living in a place where there are way too many guns would be at least that we can pick em up cheap.
Keep an eye for the RFP from the State Dept to see which contractor gets the deal to supply the guns for 10x the cost.