Tuesday, July 29, 2014

ARMING THE ENEMY: Pentagon Admits Losing Track of Hundreds of Thousands of Weapons in Afghanistan

7/29/2014


We often write here about the fact that the U.S. is openly arming and funding terrorist groups in the middle east, many of whom are now being integrated into the deadly ISIS military infrastructure. And as is often the case, we’ll get emails asking how this is possible.

It’s simple, really. We ship in nearly a million rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers and shotguns. Then, we turn it all over to a corrupt, incompetent accountability structure and say goodbye.


Over the past decade, the Pentagon has provided what the report describes as more than 747,000 weapons and auxiliary equipment to the Afghan National Security Forces at a cost of $626 million. Small arms, such as rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers and shotguns, account for the majority of those weapons.

Of the 474,823 serial numbers recorded in the oversight database, 203,888 of those numbers — or about 43 percent — had missing or duplicate information, according to data collected by auditors. Auditors discovered in the course of their research that 24,520 serial numbers were repeated in the database, often more than once, and that no shipping or receiving dates were attached to 50,304 serial numbers.

A multinational military formation known as Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan is supposed to be overseeing the delivery and transfer of the weapons to security forces. Data collected by auditors, however, shows that security command has fallen short of accountability requirements.

Equally concerning to the auditors is that firearms tracking methods employed by Afghanistan’s security forces are based on a combination of hard-copy documents, handwritten records and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which sometimes are not entered into the system correctly, the report says.

It’s like Fast and Furious only on a world war scale.


source

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