Billions In U.S. Assistance To Afghan Soldiers And Police Is Still Based On Ragged Data

This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.

The U.S. government’s subsidies for Afghan security forces are allocated on a per capita basis, with the amounts reasonably pegged to the number of police and military personnel authorized to be on the rolls. But federal auditors have long worried that many personnel ostensibly in the forces are nothing more than ghost workers who don’t show up, leaving the extra funds in the hands of corrupt Afghan officials.

That’s why Defense Secretary Ashton Carter raised eyebrows when he announced a few weeks ago that the Pentagon intends to finance an Afghan security force through 2017 at its existing, authorized level of 352,000 personnel — a force more than 50 percent bigger than the NATO alliance earlier said it would support at the end of that period.

Federal auditors, in particular, are warning that this may be a hard ambition to fulfill, since no one has a solid estimate of how large that force is now, or a good way of finding out anytime soon.

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko plans to testify before a House subcommittee on April 29, for example, about his enduring concern that “neither the United States nor its Afghan allies truly know how many Afghan soldiers and police are available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities.”

In 2012, leaders from Afghanistan and NATO member countries agreed at a summit in Chicago that the size of the Afghanistan National Security Forces should be 228,500 after the end of the NATO combat mission in 2014. They also said the Afghan government should begin contributing at least $500 million of the estimated $4.1 billion annual budget for those forces by 2015.

The higher force strength that Carter said he now wants will cost at least $1.4 billion extra each year, according to estimates the Defense Department provided to Sopko, as explained in a new quarterly report that he plans to release April 30.

In 2015, the Afghan government did indeed contribute half a billion to the Afghanistan Security Forces, according to the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2015 budget request for the forces. But the department’s budget request for 2016 projected spending by the Afghan government of only $250 million for its army and police.  Read More at Huffingtong Post

Billions of dollars in U.S. assistance to Afghan soldiers and police is still based on ragged data - Read More