Sensitive military equipment given to Afghan forces unaccounted'

KABUL: A report has claimed that the US Department of Defence has failed to keep track of surveillance systems, controls for laser-guided bombs, night-vision devices and other militant equipment provided to Afghan forces.

The report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued on Thursday said that Washington has made training and equipping the Afghan forces a "priority of its reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan", TOLO News reported.

It claimed that from fiscal year 2002 through 2017, the US government transferred over $28 billion worth of defence articles and services, including weapons, ammunition, vehicles, night-vision devices, aircraft, and surveillance systems, to the Afghan government.

The goods transferred to the Afghan government are "some of the most sensitive of all defence articles", the report said, adding that they were supposed to be fully inventoried by the US every year to make sure it had not fallen into the wrong hands.

However, only 40 per cent of the sensitive articles were inventoried between May 2019 and April 2020, the report claimed, saying that about 5 per cent of items that were supposed to have been tracked since October 2016 have never been accounted for at all.

Inadequate tracking means that "sensitive technology remains susceptible to theft or loss", and the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, which is responsible for monitoring the equipment, is less able to verify that Afghan units "are using these articles in accordance with their transfer agreements", it said. (IANS)

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