Bring them home
The Pentagon has shipped Afghan security forces tens of thousands of excessive AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons since 2004 and many have gone missing, raising concerns that they’ve fallen into the hands of Taliban or other insurgent rebels.
John F. Sipko, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, found in a report released Monday that shoddy record-keeping by the Defense Department, the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police has contributed to the failure to track the small arms.
The Pentagon is still sending Afghanistan weapons based on its peak 2012 levels of army and police personnel, even as those numbers have declined, Sipko found.
The report says that even though the Afghan National Security Force is scheduled for reductions in numbers of personnel, the weapons supplied to it are continuing as if that were not the case. Which means even more excess weapons, even though the Pentagon admits it has no authority to compel the Afghan government to complete an inventory, and no authority to recover or destroy the weapons it already has provided, even if they could be located, many of which can't be. And in case you were wondering, we're talking:
747,000 rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers and shotguns worth $626 million since 2004
Let me repeat that.
747,000 rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers and shotguns worth $626 million since 2004
And just to make things even more exciting, Congress has made the Pentagon responsible for tracking the weapons, which makes perfect sense, considering the Pentagon has absolutely no means of doing so. We're headed for three-fourths of a million weapons at a cost approaching two-thirds of a billion dollars, provided to a military whose personnel have consistently proven to have inconsistent loyalties, overseen by a government that is rife with corruption, in a country where a lot of people hate the United States, an extremist theocratic opposition army has spent more than a decade proving it can't be defeated, and U.S. military personnel continue to serve in the firing line, while the Afghan people continue to live in it.
What could possibly go wrong?
