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Since 2004, the United States has supplied the fledgling Afghan Nation Security Forces with everything from uniforms to transport aircraft, but a new inspector general report finds that officials might have lost track of more than 43 percent of the 474,823 small arms supplied to the ANSF.
The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction compared two information systems that track weapons transfers from the United Sates to Afghanistan and found major discrepancies between the two, according to a report released Monday.
The first system, the Security Cooperation Information Portal (SCIP), is used by the Department of Defense to track the shipment of weapons from the United States to the ANSF. The second system, Operation Verification of Reliable Logistics Oversight Database (OVERLORD), tracks the receipt of the weapons in Afghanistan.
Both SCIP and OVERLORD require manual data entry and are not linked together, so when SIGAR reviewed both systems, it found that some weapon serial numbers were not only duplicated, but were incomplete or did not match each another. Both OVERLORD and SCIP contained more than 50,000 serial numbers with no shipping or receiving dates.
As well as inspecting the records of SCIP and OVERLORD, SIGAR audited the book-keeping of a number of Afghan supply depots.
At the Afghan army’s Central Supply Depot, the inspector general found that 551 of 4,388 weapons listed in an inventory record, or “property book,” did not match a physical count of the inventory. Among the weapons documented but not present: 24 M2 .50 caliber heavy machine guns and 24 bolt action M48 sniper rifles.
The inventory provided only the total count for certain weapon types and not individual serial numbers. A U.S. military armory, by contrast, not only requires serial numbers for every weapon on site but the serial numbers for every accessory that might be attached to that weapon, including scopes and night-vision devices.
One audit by SIGAR, at the 1st Afghan National Civil Order Police Garrison, yielded only a partial handwritten list of serial numbers for a number of Kalashnikovs.
Aside from record mismanagement and the the apparent loss of countless small arms, the SIGAR report also found that the ANSF has more weapons than are actually called for by the Afghan government’s official list of requirements for the security forces.
That list, known as the Tashkil, originally called for both NATO-standard weapons, like the M-16, and NATO non-standard weapons, like the AK-47. After 2010, however, the Afghan Defense Ministry decided that using only NATO standard weapons would be more beneficial due to supply and maintenance concerns.
This shift in requirements has left the ANSF with a surplus of more than 83,000 AK-47s, 9,000 RPK light machine guns and 5,000 GP-25 under barrel grenade launchers.
In response the SIGAR report, a top Pentagon official did not dispute the findings but said that an effort to reconcile the two weapons-tracking systems was ongoing. The United States, said Michael Dumont, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, does not have the authority to recover or destroy any excess Afghan weapons but can help the Afghans determine “disposition options.”
“DoD will remain engaged in addressing these critical weapons accountability issues as we continue to train, advise and assist the ASNF in the years to come,” Dumont said.
Afghanistan may have lost track of more than 200,000 weapons - The Washington Post
The US Might Have Lost a Heap of Weapons in Afghanistan
The inventories for more than 465,000 small weapons — including rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers, and shotguns — that the US has shipped to Afghanistan in the past decade are a complete mess, and neither US officials nor the Afghan counterparts to whom they handed them over are really sure whether these weapons can be accounted for.
I
Complicating matters, there are also tens of thousands of additional weapons believed to be lying around… somewhere.
Considering the Department of Defense has given Afghan forces some $626 million-worth of weapons and equipment, the possibility that hundreds of thousands of weapons are sitting in abandoned warehouses or being sold on the black market is hardly ideal.
Brown declined to discuss specific instances of US weapons being used against US citizens or interests in Afghanistan.
“
The problem of missing weapons and ammunition is not new — it happened in Iraq and has been an issue in Afghanistan for years.
In 2009, a New York Times reporter examined weapons and rifle magazines found on the bodies of dead insurgents, and determined that more than half of the magazines held ammunition identical to cartridges provided by US officials to the Afghan forces they trained, “strongly” suggesting the possibility that “munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.”
Local reports have also supported this possibility, with some documenting increasing evidence that Afghan police “are happily trading away their ammunition to the insurgents they are supposed to be shooting at.”
“Unfortunately, a proportion of the weapons and equipment assigned to our national army, police, and security agency are now in the hands of our opponents," Mohammad Ali Ahmadi, deputy governor of Ghazni province, in southeastern Afghanistan, told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) late last year.
In other districts, the traffic of stolen or “leaked” US weapons has started to surpass the opium trade.
“There’s a village in our area called Qala-ye Sayed Sadeq. Weapons are traded there on a regular basis,” Borhan, a resident in Nangarhar Province, near the Pakistan border, told IWPR. “The police send weapons and bullets there via arms smugglers. The Taliban come at night in their cars and buy weapons there and take them away.”
Police elsewhere said that the equipment handovers are done overnight, sometimes using a trained donkey that police load up with ammo before sending it back to the Taliban.
The problem of unaccounted equipment is worsened by the fact that thousands of weapons that were deemed to be in “excess” were never returned or disposed of, SIGAR said.
For instance, the report found that the Afghan National Security Forces have 83,184 more AK-47s than they require.
“The US agencies involved and the Afghan government know the overages are there, they’re just basically leaving it as is and making no claim to utilize them,” Brown said. “But the real danger inherent in unutilized weapons is more than in used weapons: if weapons are part of a large stock that is unutilized, unfortunately those could be sold or lost, and they are much more vulnerable to ending up on the black market or having some unintended persons using them.”
The US Might Have Lost a Heap of Weapons in Afghanistan | VICE News
Report: 40% of weapons sent to Afghanistan are unaccounted for
A government oversight agency says the Pentagon has lost track of more than 40 percent of the firearms it has provided to Afghanistan’s security forces, prompting officials to contemplate a “carrot and stick” approach to arming the fledgling military.
Jeffrey Brown, senior audit manager for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said those weapons could very well “go on the black market and enter another country.”
“We have no evidence that it has,” he said. “But that wasn’t really in the scope of our audit.”
Over the past decade, the Pentagon has provided what the report describes as more than 747,000 weapons and auxiliary equipment to theAfghan 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.
In addition, Mr. Kugelman said, if the Pentagon does not resolve issues with its tracking system in the near future, weapons could end up in the hands of Afghan warlords or make their way to the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Even though the U.S. has a good security relationship with Afghanistan, “we do have to worry that there are quite a number of members of the Afghan security forces that would be willing to share these weapons with people they should not be shared with,” he said
Report: 40% of weapons sent to Afghanistan are unaccounted for - Washington Times
The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction compared two information systems that track weapons transfers from the United Sates to Afghanistan and found major discrepancies between the two, according to a report released Monday.
The first system, the Security Cooperation Information Portal (SCIP), is used by the Department of Defense to track the shipment of weapons from the United States to the ANSF. The second system, Operation Verification of Reliable Logistics Oversight Database (OVERLORD), tracks the receipt of the weapons in Afghanistan.
Both SCIP and OVERLORD require manual data entry and are not linked together, so when SIGAR reviewed both systems, it found that some weapon serial numbers were not only duplicated, but were incomplete or did not match each another. Both OVERLORD and SCIP contained more than 50,000 serial numbers with no shipping or receiving dates.
As well as inspecting the records of SCIP and OVERLORD, SIGAR audited the book-keeping of a number of Afghan supply depots.
At the Afghan army’s Central Supply Depot, the inspector general found that 551 of 4,388 weapons listed in an inventory record, or “property book,” did not match a physical count of the inventory. Among the weapons documented but not present: 24 M2 .50 caliber heavy machine guns and 24 bolt action M48 sniper rifles.
The inventory provided only the total count for certain weapon types and not individual serial numbers. A U.S. military armory, by contrast, not only requires serial numbers for every weapon on site but the serial numbers for every accessory that might be attached to that weapon, including scopes and night-vision devices.
One audit by SIGAR, at the 1st Afghan National Civil Order Police Garrison, yielded only a partial handwritten list of serial numbers for a number of Kalashnikovs.
Aside from record mismanagement and the the apparent loss of countless small arms, the SIGAR report also found that the ANSF has more weapons than are actually called for by the Afghan government’s official list of requirements for the security forces.
That list, known as the Tashkil, originally called for both NATO-standard weapons, like the M-16, and NATO non-standard weapons, like the AK-47. After 2010, however, the Afghan Defense Ministry decided that using only NATO standard weapons would be more beneficial due to supply and maintenance concerns.
This shift in requirements has left the ANSF with a surplus of more than 83,000 AK-47s, 9,000 RPK light machine guns and 5,000 GP-25 under barrel grenade launchers.
In response the SIGAR report, a top Pentagon official did not dispute the findings but said that an effort to reconcile the two weapons-tracking systems was ongoing. The United States, said Michael Dumont, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, does not have the authority to recover or destroy any excess Afghan weapons but can help the Afghans determine “disposition options.”
“DoD will remain engaged in addressing these critical weapons accountability issues as we continue to train, advise and assist the ASNF in the years to come,” Dumont said.
Afghanistan may have lost track of more than 200,000 weapons - The Washington Post
The US Might Have Lost a Heap of Weapons in Afghanistan
The inventories for more than 465,000 small weapons — including rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers, and shotguns — that the US has shipped to Afghanistan in the past decade are a complete mess, and neither US officials nor the Afghan counterparts to whom they handed them over are really sure whether these weapons can be accounted for.
I
Complicating matters, there are also tens of thousands of additional weapons believed to be lying around… somewhere.
Considering the Department of Defense has given Afghan forces some $626 million-worth of weapons and equipment, the possibility that hundreds of thousands of weapons are sitting in abandoned warehouses or being sold on the black market is hardly ideal.
Brown declined to discuss specific instances of US weapons being used against US citizens or interests in Afghanistan.
“
The problem of missing weapons and ammunition is not new — it happened in Iraq and has been an issue in Afghanistan for years.
In 2009, a New York Times reporter examined weapons and rifle magazines found on the bodies of dead insurgents, and determined that more than half of the magazines held ammunition identical to cartridges provided by US officials to the Afghan forces they trained, “strongly” suggesting the possibility that “munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.”
Local reports have also supported this possibility, with some documenting increasing evidence that Afghan police “are happily trading away their ammunition to the insurgents they are supposed to be shooting at.”
“Unfortunately, a proportion of the weapons and equipment assigned to our national army, police, and security agency are now in the hands of our opponents," Mohammad Ali Ahmadi, deputy governor of Ghazni province, in southeastern Afghanistan, told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) late last year.
In other districts, the traffic of stolen or “leaked” US weapons has started to surpass the opium trade.
“There’s a village in our area called Qala-ye Sayed Sadeq. Weapons are traded there on a regular basis,” Borhan, a resident in Nangarhar Province, near the Pakistan border, told IWPR. “The police send weapons and bullets there via arms smugglers. The Taliban come at night in their cars and buy weapons there and take them away.”
Police elsewhere said that the equipment handovers are done overnight, sometimes using a trained donkey that police load up with ammo before sending it back to the Taliban.
The problem of unaccounted equipment is worsened by the fact that thousands of weapons that were deemed to be in “excess” were never returned or disposed of, SIGAR said.
For instance, the report found that the Afghan National Security Forces have 83,184 more AK-47s than they require.
“The US agencies involved and the Afghan government know the overages are there, they’re just basically leaving it as is and making no claim to utilize them,” Brown said. “But the real danger inherent in unutilized weapons is more than in used weapons: if weapons are part of a large stock that is unutilized, unfortunately those could be sold or lost, and they are much more vulnerable to ending up on the black market or having some unintended persons using them.”
The US Might Have Lost a Heap of Weapons in Afghanistan | VICE News
Report: 40% of weapons sent to Afghanistan are unaccounted for
A government oversight agency says the Pentagon has lost track of more than 40 percent of the firearms it has provided to Afghanistan’s security forces, prompting officials to contemplate a “carrot and stick” approach to arming the fledgling military.
Jeffrey Brown, senior audit manager for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said those weapons could very well “go on the black market and enter another country.”
“We have no evidence that it has,” he said. “But that wasn’t really in the scope of our audit.”
Over the past decade, the Pentagon has provided what the report describes as more than 747,000 weapons and auxiliary equipment to theAfghan 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.
In addition, Mr. Kugelman said, if the Pentagon does not resolve issues with its tracking system in the near future, weapons could end up in the hands of Afghan warlords or make their way to the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Even though the U.S. has a good security relationship with Afghanistan, “we do have to worry that there are quite a number of members of the Afghan security forces that would be willing to share these weapons with people they should not be shared with,” he said
Report: 40% of weapons sent to Afghanistan are unaccounted for - Washington Times
