After the retreat from 300,000 government troops in Afghanistan, it is said that the number was limited to papers and in fact, the Afghan troops were much lower than that and they were not being paid salaries and food at the time of the Taliban attack.
The Guardian, the British newspaper, on Monday published an article by Zack Kopplin, a researcher involved in a government anti-corruption plan in the United States, which said that the majority in Afghanistan were a ghost or fictitious soldiers whose salaries were paid by militant commanders. Afghan political elite and the U.S. defense were going into the pockets of contractors.
In his article, Zack Kopplin cites the fall of Dr. Ashraf Ghani as one of the most high-level government-level corruption in Afghanistan and the looting of U.S. defense contractors. The article states that after Dr. Ashraf Ghani fled to the UAE, one of his own ambassadors accused Dr. Ashraf Ghani of taking 16 169 million with him. Zack Kopplin disagreed with President Joe Biden’s statement that the Afghan people were responsible for the Taliban’s occupation of Kabul, saying Dr. Ashraf Ghani’s government had failed to gain public confidence and that is why the people refused to stand with.
Regarding corruption in Afghanistan, he writes that it was not a covert thing and in 2020, the International Anti-Corruption Organization Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as one of the 20 most corrupt countries in the world. Zack Kopplin writes that the Afghan army that was being mentioned at about 300,000 had a much smaller workforce. In July this year, President Biden claimed that there were 300,000 troops in the Afghan army, but the US Pentagon was well aware that the numbers were not factual.
Afghanistan’s military commanders are heating their pockets with money taken in the name of fictitious soldiers. According to John Spoke, an official with the US Special Inspector Journal of Afghan Reconstruction, the number of fictitious soldiers was in the tens of thousands. A West Point report released in January said the strength of the Afghan army’s actual fighting force did not exceed 96,000. At the time of the Taliban’s invasion of Kabul, these soldiers were neither paid nor fed. Not just that That the Afghan army existed on paper, but the US military’s defense contractors and the Pentagon were ignorantly providing financial resources to the Taliban.
A 2009 report in the US magazine The Nation quoted U.S. military officials as saying that 10 to 20 percent of the money provided by the Pentagon for Pentagon logistics contracts in Afghanistan, which amounted to several million dollars. Is the Taliban Goes into the hands of? The newspaper added that Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, The Nashville Director of Security, had warned the US military about the matter. But ten years later no action was taken, and the money was still reaching the Taliban In 2019, some families whose loved ones were killed in Afghanistan filed a lawsuit against various defense contractors for paying the Taliban, which is still ongoing.
News of the imprisonment of militant chiefs and criminal gangs with financial support provided by the US government was very common, and Iqarab Parvi had eroded public confidence in the administration. Another source of funding for the Taliban, with the support of the Pentagon and the Afghan elite, was the mining of Afghan minerals. In April this year, Zack Kopplin participated in the preparation of an investigative report under a plan to report organized crime and corruption, in which relatives of the Afghan president plundered Afghanistan’s mineral resources with the connivance of US military defense contractors. I was found involved.
There is an estimated 1 trillion dollars’ worth of mineral treasures in Afghanistan. Prior to the Taliban’s domination, private companies in Afghanistan were legally banned from buying minerals from unregistered small mines. One reason for this was that many small mines were in the possession of the Taliban, various terrorist groups, or militant chiefs.
Buying minerals from them meant providing financial resources to enemies. But our investigation revealed that there was a company that managed to get an exemption from the law, and apparently the exemption was granted with the approval of former President Dr. Ashraf Ghani. A subsidiary of a U.S. defense contractor from the president’s office was allowed to buy key metal chromite from illegal mining in six Afghan provinces. The company is on the outskirts of Kabul, a crushing factory to export chromite. The company had close ties to the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. The investigation report also found that Dr. Ashraf Ghani’s brother Hashmat Ghani also had a 20% stake in the company.
Corruption has hollowed out Afghan government agencies, leaving the Afghan people unwilling to stand with the government. This government also exploited the people of Afghanistan like the Taliban from theft, corruption, extortion, and nepotism. The only difference was that the Taliban exploited them with coercion and force. Deals from US private companies show that not only were the top officials of the Afghan government involved but also influential US companies were making money.
To give was not ready for the report added: But they cannot be held responsible. The Afghan government collapsed because what the American and Afghan elites could have returned and fled, leaving Afghan citizens unscrupulous, who fights for a broken system? “
