ONE THIRD of all the weapons procured for the Afghan security forces are missing and can be presumed sold onto the black market. Worth roughly $40 million at wholesale cost (and weighing in excess of 200 tons) to the Pentagon, would anyone like to guess at the black market value? The report has been compiled by congressional auditors, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

It found that, in the four years up to June 2008, the US military failed to keep complete records on some 222,000 weapons entering the country.

The report will be discussed in the US House of Representatives on Thursday.

It states that weapons supplied by the US to the Afghan military "are at serious risk of theft or loss".

The report says:

• US military officials failed to keep proper records on about 87,000 rifles, pistols, mortars and other weapons sent to Afghanistan between December 2004 and June 2008 - about a third of all the weapons sent
• There was a similar lack of management of a further 135,000 light weapons donated to Afghan forces via the US military by 21 countries
• The military failed even to record the serial numbers of some 46,000 weapons, making it impossible to confirm receipt of weapons or identify any which had fallen into the hands of militants
• The serial numbers of 41,000 weapons were recorded, but US military officials still had no idea where they were

"Lapses in accountability occurred throughout the supply chain," concludes the report, which is due to be discussed on Thursday at a panel hearing of a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee.

In response, the Pentagon agreed that it needed more people to help train the Afghanistan government to track the weapons, the AP news agency reported.

Which is to say the Pentagon didn't figure that much out after the first time this happened.

Continue reading »

  Dr. Christopher A. Ford, the U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, has joined the exodus from the Bush administration, and headed straight for neocon think-tank The Hudson Institute. Ford has been one of the administration's leading shills in demonizing Iran for supposedly contravening the NPT by doing what the NPT says it can - enriching uranium - while utterly ignoring the non-NPT possession of nukes by the likes of India, Pakistan and Israel. In February 2007 he told a Vienna audience that Iran "has tried to hijack legitimate discussions of the NPT's Article IV and twist them into a politicized form designed to give cover to Tehran's nuclear weapons ambitions." Of course, by the end of the year the Bush administrations own NIE concluded that Iran had no weapons program - something that still has the wingnuts in a tizzy.

The man who has been in charge of Bush's "nonproliferation" efforts (hah!) should feel right at home at Hudson. It was founded in 1961 by several hardline Cold Warriors including Herman Kahn, a nuclear strategist famous for his efforts to develop "winnable" nuclear war strategies. It's currently also ideological home to John Bolton apologist Herbert London, Giuliani's foreign policy advisor Norman Podhoretz (The Case For Bombing Iran) and Supreme Court wingnut Robert Bork.

Like many a Bush administration neoconservative before him, Ford intends disappearing back into the think-tank woodwork for now.