Afghan civil order policemen stand guard at the compound of a provincial governor's office in Jalalabad on April 8. Parwiz/Reuters
Jonathan Broder, Newsweek: U.S. Doesn't Know How Many Afghans Are Fighting the Taliban
After nearly a decade of training, equipping and paying for Afghanistan's security forces, the United States has no idea how many Afghan soldiers and police are currently serving or how effective they are at fighting the Taliban.
That's just one of the grim conclusions from John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), who at midnight on Wednesday released his latest audit of the $110 billion-and-counting American nation-building effort there. The reconstruction of Afghanistan has been the largest nation-building project in U.S. history, and Sopko's previous audits have catalogued an appalling litany of Afghan government corruption and lax U.S. oversight, which has resulted in the theft, waste and abuse of billions of dollars in American aid.
"Neither the United States nor its Afghan allies truly know how many Afghan soldiers and police are available for duty or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities," the 40-page report said.
Update: Billions In U.S. Assistance To Afghan Soldiers And Police Is Still Based On Ragged Data -- Julia Harte, Huffington Post/Center For Public Integrity
WNU Editor: And the sad part of this story is .... the Afghan Army probably also does not have an idea on how many soldiers they have, their operational capabilities, or on how effective they are against the Taliban.
WNU Editor,
ReplyDeletei think they know how "effective" they are against the Taliban.
The cynic in me agrees with you Jay. But as long as the Afghan government remains in Kabul, I will have to say that some of the soldiers are probably still fighting ... albeit less than what we are being told.
ReplyDeleteWonder who has the bigger army of ghost soldiers iraq or afganistan
ReplyDelete