US Defence Dept never properly cataloged weapons inventory shipped to Afghanistan: SIGAR

A new report by Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has revealed that the majority of the weapons inventory shipped to Afghanistan by the United States was never properly catalogued by the Pentagon. This implies that the US military has no idea how much arms and ammunition it inadvertently supplied to the Taliban when it abandoned Afghanistan last year.  

According to the new report by SIGAR, a Pentagon watchdog focused on America's military campaign in Afghanistan that ended last year, the US Department of Defense has only provided “limited, inaccurate, and untimely information about the defence articles it left behind," reported Sputnik.  

The report highlights the US' crass handling in Afghanistan

“Although DOD reported $7.1 billion in equipment left in Afghanistan that was previously provided to the Afghanistan government and the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), the department has struggled for years with accurately accounting for the equipment it provided to the ANDSF,” the SIGAR report stated.   

SIGAR and the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DOD IG) have been publishing reports since 2009, noting accountability shortfalls and issues with Pentagon's processes for tracking equipment in Afghanistan. As per the latest report, the Pentagon “did not meet its own oversight requirements for sensitive equipment transferred to the Afghan government and ANDSF," while stating that the Pentagon had not inventoried 60% of defence articles with enhanced monitoring requirements between May 2019 and April 2020 due to security constraints and travel restrictions. These included articles containing sensitive technology.  

This implies that the US government is blank on how much of which military equipment was left behind in Afghanistan after the US decided to abandon its military campaign in the country. However, the fact made clear by the SIGAR report is that whatever equipment was left behind was worth at least $7.1 billion.  

Moreover, a DOD IG report published in August noted that at the time of the fall of the Afghan government, the ANDSF had in its stocks around 3,16,000 small arms supplied by the US since 2005, reported Sputnik. The report further noted longstanding problems with the Core Inventory Management System used to catalogue stocks at US military bases in Afghanistan, including the use of a chaotic system of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and even handwritten inventories citing that many of the military bases either did not have internet access or didn’t have electricity of any type.