Last March, CJ Chivers reported that an Army contractor was giving the Afghan National Security Forces obsolete, faulty ammunition. Now, he’s reporting on yet more ammunition troubles for the Afghan forces:
Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.
The presence of this ammunition among the dead in the Korangal Valley, an area of often fierce fighting near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, strongly suggests that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.
Leave it to Chivers to interview arms dealers. Anyway, the whole thing’s worth a read—and probably speaking to a deeper issue of corruption, professionalism, etc. You’ve heard all that before.
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