Posted on 11/10/2021 9:37:18 AM PST by george76
Afghanistan's ex-finance minister has blamed the government's fall on corrupt officials who invented "ghost soldiers" and took payments from the Taliban.
Khalid Payenda told the BBC that most of the 300,000 troops and police on the government's books did not exist.
He said phantom personnel were added to official lists so that generals could pocket their wages.
The Taliban rapidly seized control of Afghanistan in August, as US forces withdrew after 20 years in the country.
Mr Payenda, who resigned and left Afghanistan as the Islamist group advanced, said records showing that security forces greatly outnumbered the Taliban were incorrect.
"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," he told Ed Butler, presenter of the BBC's Business Daily programme.
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,
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
In some ways, the US Government did succeed in creating a government in Afghanistan that looks just like Fed.gov
And that is why I don’t care about Afghanistan and the Afghanis.
If they wanted something better that what they have, they should have fought harder.
I wonder where the Afghani government got the money to pay those ghost soldiers?
Just kidding. The money came from the bank accounts of hard-working Americans. (The U.S. sent $4.9 billion in “aid” to Afghanistan in 2019 alone.)
Afghanistan was a lost cause from the start. Only idiots thought it might turn out differently.
Should have called them the Bernie Madoff Brigades.
-—well—that’s part of what happened to George Custer. too—the Indian Agents were getting money for food for people supposedly on the reservations, pocketing it while the Indians were really out and about—
—times never change for dishonest government agencies—
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