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.