© FP 2015/ Noorullah SHIRZADA
Afghan soldiers are struggling against the Taliban, in part because close to 40% of Afghanistan's forces are "ghost soldiers," troops that exist only on paper.Karim Atal is the head of the provincial council in Helmand, where the resurgent Taliban has seized large areas of land since the United States handed over control to Afghan forces a year ago.
"At checkpoints where 20 soldiers should be present, there are only eight or 10," Atal told the Associated Press.
"It's because some people are getting paid a salary but not doing the job because they are related to someone important, like a local warlord."
In other cases, dead soldiers and police remain listed among active participants, while senior police or army officials pocket the salaries of the deceased, said Attal, who estimates that some 40% of the registered forces do not exist, the AP reported.
Helmand's former deputy police chief, Pacha Gul Bakhtiar, said the province has 31,000 police officers on its registers, "but in reality it is nowhere near that."Afghanistan's government is ignoring the problem, Afghan lawmaker Ghulam Hussain Nasir told the AP.
"When we say we have 100 soldiers on the battlefield, in reality it is just 30 or 40. And this creates the potential for huge catastrophes when the enemy attacks," he said.
Afghanistan's security forces are entirely funded by the international community, at a cost of some $5 billion a year, most of which comes from the United States.
Comment: The US continues to prove how corrupt its chain of command is. Also see:
Another major source of systematic corruption: the filching of Pentagon money via salaries paid to "ghost soldiers" and policemen, recruits enrolled in the Afghan security forces who don't exist. Here, too, Washington's funds became the basis for embezzlement and "Afghan" corruption.
Up to 90% of Afghan troops and police are illiterate, and about a quarter of the force deserts annually. This has provided rich opportunities for commanders to pad their lists of soldiers with so-called ghosts, keep them on the books, and pocket their salaries. (It is worth recalling that this practice became similarly widespread in the South Vietnamese army during the American war in Vietnam.)
Besides filching salaries, enterprising police and army commanders have made money by reselling Pentagon war materials. For instance,according to documents leaked by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, a police chief in the eastern town of Zurmat reported fictitious firefights with the Taliban, and upon being restocked with thousands of rounds of ammunition, sold them to a bazaar merchant. Another provincial police commissioner purloined food and uniforms, while leaving his men cold and underfed in the winter. Such acts led to the creation of a significant black market in U.S. military equipment and goods of every sort.
How the Pentagon corrupted Afghanistan
Where's all that money going? Into pockets, bribes, drug smuggling and clandestine arms equipping. Nothing has changed since the days of the Iran- Contra scandal.