“What we’re talking about are policemen, Afghan policemen, Afghan military, Afghan civil servants who don’t exist or they have multiple identity cards and we’re paying their salaries.”
By Kara Pendleton; Independent Journal Review:
President Donald Trump has inherited at least part of the mess that’s been a global problem for years. In 2014, news came out about at least 50,000 “ghost soldiers” in Iraq getting paid.
John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, sat down with Sharyl Attkisson of “Full Measure” to explain that the ghost soldier problem is rampant in Afghanistan as well:
“We’ve been raising this concern about ghosts going back a number of years. Actually, I want to say we heard about it from Ashraf Ghani years ago, before he became president, he warned me about “ghosts,” so we started looking three years ago. […]
What we’re talking about are policemen, Afghan policemen, Afghan military, Afghan civil servants who don’t exist or they have multiple identity cards and we’re paying their salaries. By ‘we,’ I mean the United States and the international community. And we started finding out that we had no capacity to measure the number of soldiers, teachers, doctors, military people who we are paying their salaries.”
Sopko explained a bit about how the scheme worked:
“[It’s] major fraud. And what’s happening is the commanders or generals or other higher officials are actually pocketing the salaries of the ghosts. And I remember President Ghani again, at that time he wasn’t president, saying, ‘John, you, the United States government, are paying the salary of an Afghan who’s a teacher, he’s a civil servant, he’s a doctor, he is a policeman, and he’s a soldier. And it’s the same Afghan. And he doesn’t exist.’ […]
It’s not just the salaries. But we’re funding schools based upon the number of students, so if you invent or inflate the number of students, you’re going to be paying more money. On the soldiers and the police, we’re paying for extra boots, for food, for everything else, logistics for numbers that don’t exist.”
John Sopko head of SIGAR claimed that Afghan army commanders are selling fuel, food & even weapons of the to Talibanhttps://t.co/MzqG0ezzY7
— Aasia Ishaque 🇵🇰 (@aasia_ishaque) March 26, 2017
To read rest of article visit Independent Journal Review.
