The US has lost tens of thousands of AK-47s in Afghanistan
After more than a decade of weapons supplies, cumulatively worth some $626 million, to Afghan security forces, US inspectors have discovered a problem: the Afghan National Army and Police have more weapons — up to 100,000 more — than they need. What’s worse? No one is keeping proper track of the surplus weapons, most of which are Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles.
Global arms-trading rules require dealers to issue a license for weapons use and attempt to monitor it—and this new report (pdf) shows that the Afghan government’s efforts to track US-supplied weapons are, at best, woeful.
This is especially worrisome because of the tendency for surplus arms to find their way into the black market and, from there, into the hands of bad actors. It would not be the first time that happened in Afghanistan: when the Taliban first fought their way to power in the 1990s, it was with weapons left behind by the Soviet Union and arms provided to guerrilla fighters by the US.
The new arms surplus, which dates back to shipments made before 2010, is blamed on two choices made by NATO and the Afghan government. The first was a decision to switch from distributing AK-47s to weapons more commonly issued to NATO forces, such as M16 and M4 rifles. There was no accompanying program to recover the Kalashnikovs already handed out. The second was the decision to reduce the size of the standing Afghan army, once expected to be as large as 352,000 personnel but now slated to fall to 228,500 by 2017.
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http://qz.com/241374/the-us-has-lost-tens-of-thousands-of-ak-47s-in-afghanistan/
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