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US Congress Allocates $68 billon for Afghan Forces since 2002
In an August letter sent to the DOD and made public on Friday, John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, noted that it’s unclear if the federal government is taking seriously the fact that there are countless thousands of Afghan troops getting paid, who don’t exist.
Congress allocates more than $68 billion for Afghan forces since 2002.
In 2015, the payments totaled $300 million for the purpose of funding Afghan forces, but as SIGAR stated, those payments were made relying on “partially verified or reconciled data.”
Additionally, SIGAR found “there was no assurance that personnel and payroll data were accurate.”
This problem of “ghost soldiers” is especially prevalent in Helmand province, an area where fighting between Afghan troops and the Taliban has escalated as of late. Afghan forces were pummeled by a fresh Taliban onslaught.
About 40-50 percent of the 26,000 Afghan forces did not materialize when they were asked for assistance during operations, according to the new police chief of Helmand province.
“Salaries of ghost soldiers had been received during the past eight months and the money has gone to personal accounts,” the police chief noted.
In other words, salaries meant for troops who don’t exist are being confiscated by corrupt leaders.
U.S. Forces-Afghanistan maintained in June 2016 that Afghan troop end strength stood at 319,595 troops, a figure which doesn’t even include civilians, but an Afghan official has contradicted that number, saying instead that “the best internal estimate put the number around 120,000, less than a third of what is needed to secure the country.”
While the DOD is trying to fix the problem by collecting bio-metric data to track the locations of troops, according to SIGAR, that step is effective only if there are accurate records of troop numbers in the first place.
Sopko’s letter, released Oct. 7, comes just two days after the international community met in Brussels and promised an additional $15 billion in aid for Afghanistan to be doled out over a four-year time period.
Deputy Spokesperson of Ministry of Defense in Afghanistan Mohammad Radmanish said,” We have launched Bio-metric system in order to find the ghost soldiers or officers, despite of that all the Afghan National Army troops are holding Bank accounts who receive their salaries on monthly basis.”
Meanwhile Deputy Spokesman of Ministry of Interior Affairs Najeebullah Danish said,” over 87 of Afghan police forces are registered within the Data base, having Bank accounts, but 10 percent of the Afghan police forces are yet to become registered within the data base, our delegation is out on the fields to register the rest of the police forces.”
Though the numbers of the Afghan security forces are 352 thousand declared but experts believed that the number of Afghan security forces are less than the numbers mentioned, existing of ghost forces, receiving of salaries by the top officials are the main reasons of increasing war within the country.
Joint story of dailycaller.com and Ariana News
Reported by Fawad Ahmadi