US-supplied weapons missing in Afghanistan: SIGAR

KABUL (SIGAR) in a report released on Monday said tens of thousands of excessive AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons the Pentagon supplied to Afghan security forces since 2004 have gone missing.

John Sipko, the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said in the report that shoddy recordkeeping by the Defense Department, the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police had contributed to the failure to track the arms.

He said the Pentagon was still sending Afghanistan weapons based on its peak 2012 levels of army and police personnel, even as those numbers had declined.

Congress has made the Pentagon responsible for tracking all US 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,” Sipko concluded in the report.

“Given the Afghan government’s limited ability to account for or properly dispose of weapons, there is a real potential for these weapons to fall into the hands of insurgents,” the report said.

Pr/ma

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