Gun control fails in Afghanistan

Stars & Stripes reports that the US and the government of Afghanistan has lost tens of thousands of weapons. The Washington Post reports that hundreds of thousands of weapons may be unaccounted for by the Afghan government. From S&S;

Of the nearly half a million weapons registered in a U.S. Department of Defense database called OVERLORD, more than 40 percent of the entries had missing or duplicated information, investigators with the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a report released on Monday.

Another U.S. government inventory database had similarly incomplete information, the report found.

Since 2004 the United States has provided Afghan security forces with more than 700,000 weapons and auxiliary equipment worth about $626 million, SIGAR said. Now however, inconsistencies in the methods used by both the U.S. and Afghanistan to track those weapons have left potentially tens of thousands of weapons unaccounted for.

The US government, of course, says that it’s the responsibility of the Afghan government to account for the rifles, but if we’re supposed to be training them how to be a functioning government with a functioning military, how is it that they’re not sharing a compatible record-keeping system? And whose fault is it that they’re not using a compatible system?

When those unaccounted weapons turn up on the grounds of a US embassy with some dead American bodies attached, whose fault is it then?

Category: Terror War