Monday, 16 February 2009A congressionally ordered audit, compiled by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), warned that tens of thousands of assault rifles and other firearms in Afghanistan are at risk of being stolen because U.S. officials have lost track of them. According to the report released on February 12, in the four years up to June 2008, inventory controls were lacking for more than a third of the 242,000 light weapons donated to Afghan forces by the United States that includes thousands of AK-47 assault rifles as well as mortars, machine guns and rocket propelled grenade launchers.
According to the report basic accounting procedures such as recording serial numbers were routinely skipped, placing millions of dollars of weapons "at serious risk of theft or loss". The problems found in Afghanistan were similar to those discovered during an audit two years ago in Iraq. There, at least 190,000 AK-47s and pistols imported into Iraq by the United States could not be accounted for, the GAO said in July 2007. That figure represented roughly 30 percent of all the small arms imported into the county for use by local forces in 2004 and 2005.
Also there are no reliable records showing what ultimately happened to an additional 135,000 weapons donated by other NATO countries, the report said. Many of the weapons, supplied between 2004 and 2008, were left in the care of Afghan-run military depots with a history of desertion, theft and sub-par security systems that sometimes consist of a wooden door and a padlock.
At the start of a congressional hearing on the report, Rep. John Tierney, chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, said failure could led to casualties because of insurgents using weapons purchased by the United States taxpayers. As a result of tens of thousands of weapons washing around Afghanistan, off the books, some weapons may already be in Taliban hands.
A GAO team toured Afghanistan in August 2008 and attempted to track various lots of weapons delivered to the war-torn country over a period of four years. The auditors found that inventory controls routinely used to track U.S. weapons were not applied in Afghanistan, in part because of manpower shortages and a lack of direction from the Pentagon, the report said.
The inspector general's report blamed the U.S. Central Command for failing to set appropriate standards and procedures for handling weapons imported into Afghanistan. The report also criticized commanders of the U.S.-led unit charged with training Afghan police and military forces for failing to issue appropriate directives to training teams and mentors. According to the report, the local U.S. office charged with overseeing the $7.4 billion foreign military sales program to Afghanistan is too small and that its personnel lack sufficient rank, skills and experience to monitor whether associated arms are being diverted. In 2007, just nine people, led by an Army major, were assigned to oversee a program that disbursed more than $1.7 billion in Afghanistan.
The report urges Defense Secretary Robert Gates to "establish clear accountability procedures for weapons while they are in the control and custody of the United States" and direct those "involved in providing these weapons to track (them) by serial number and conduct routine physical inventories."
The report findings came just a day after an audacious attack on three government buildings in the Afghan capital Kabul left 28 people, including eight attackers, dead.
Derya Tan Boya
(JTW) |
Monday, 16 February 2009
JTW
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