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Originally published on ZeroHedge
Former Afghani finance minister, Khalid Payenda, says that most of the 300,000 Afghan troops never existed, and were in fact “ghost” solders who were fabricated by corrupt officials who then pocketed their wages, according to the BBC.
So – corrupt Afghan officials lied about their fighting force, while US President Joe Biden was pressuring former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani to lie about the US pullout and say that the Taliban wasn’t winning “whether it is true or not.” Ghani refused to lie, and the rest is history – the Taliban spread throughout the country like wildfire and toppled the government within a matter of days.
“The way the accountability was done, you would ask the chief in that province how many people you have and based on that you could calculate salaries and ration expenses and they would always be inflated,” the former finance minister told BBC‘s Ed Butler.
The former minister said the numbers may have been inflated by more than six times, and included “desertions [and] martyrs who were never accounted for because some of the commanders would keep their bank cards” and withdraw their salaries, he alleged.
There have long been questions over Afghan troop numbers.
A 2016 report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar) claimed that “neither the United States nor its Afghan allies know how many Afghan soldiers and police actually exist, how many are in fact available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities”. -BBC
More recently, Sigar expressed “serious concerns about the corrosive effects of corruption… and the questionable accuracy of data on the actual strength of the force.”
Ex-finance minister Payenda, meanwhile, said the ‘ghost’ soldiers were often not paid on time, while leaders of government-backed militias frequently ‘double-dipped’ by taking both a government wage, and accepting bribes from the Taliban to give up without a fight.
“The whole feeling was, we cannot change this. This is how the parliament works, this is how the governors work. Everybody would say the stream is murky from the very top, meaning the very top is involved in this,” he said, adding that while he didn’t think former President Ghani was “financially corrupt,” that there were definitely accusations of corruption within the finance ministry.
In closing, Payenda said that the West was “part of” some of the failures within the country, and that the United States and NATO’s involvement was a “great opportunity lost.”
I won’t do this kind of retard commenting for any amount of money. No thanks.
Cathy please get in touch with Ahson Indian Dalit boy working in Amsterdam as Rent a boy in his brown stained smelly dhoti he make more than you in couple hours Why work so hard when Ahson is there to show you how to make more eh
Best BS I have read and if you belive Khalid Payenda who is part and parcel of corrupt despots imposed by USA/NATO than you are are a fool
Vorbildlich! Weiter- und Wiederverwendung des zurückgelassenen Materials. Schonung der Ressourcen.
Not even – remember they added fuking POLICE to the army, as well as, the local people… there were only around 130k “soldiers” who were unpaid and were trained by white pigs – yanquis.
P.S. most of it is thanks to yanquis who let child rapes Afghans to take the leadership – and the army. It is so funny.
Old trick: the Afghan leaders boasted 300,000 troops to pocket 300,000 salaries each month for many years.
Guess who taught them – the Pakis! LoL