Lost in Afghanistan: U.S. can’t track weapons it sends --- WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has shipped Afghan security forces tens of thousands of excessive AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons since 2004 and many have gone missing, raising concerns that they’ve fallen into the hands of Taliban or other insurgent rebels. -- John F. Sopko, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, found in a report released Monday that shoddy record-keeping by the Defense Department, the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police has contributed to the failure to track the small arms. -- The Pentagon is still sending Afghanistan weapons based on its peak 2012 levels of army and police personnel, even as those numbers have declined, Sopko found. -- “The scheduled reduction in Afghan National Security Force personnel to 228,500 by 2017 is likely to result in an even greater number of excess weapons,” the report said. “Yet DOD continues to provide ANSF with weapons based on the (2012) ANSF force strength of 352,000 and has no plans to stop providing weapons to ANSF.” -- Congress has made the Pentagon responsible for tracking all U.S. small weapons and auxiliary equipment sent to Afghanistan, which have totaled 747,000 rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers and shotguns worth $626 million since 2004. -- “However, controls over the accountability of small arms provided to the Afghanistan National Security Forces are insufficient both before and after the weapons are transferred,” Sopko concluded in the report. -- The Pentagon said in response to the audit that it has no authority to compel the Afghan government to perform a complete small-weapons inventory as Sopko recommended, and that the Afghanistan government, not the United States, is responsible for determining whether there are excessive weapons. -- “The DOD does not have the authority to recover or destroy Afghan weapons,” Michael J. Dumont, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, wrote to Sopko in response to his findings. -- Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, said he wasn’t surprised by Sopko’s findings of loose weapons in the war-torn nation. A former strategic adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, he has visited there more than a dozen times since the U.S. invasion in October 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks. - More, McClatchy, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/07/29/234677/lost-in-afghanistan-us-cant-track.html?sp=/99/200/111/