Fast & Furious Was Child’s Play — Pentagon “Lost” 700,000 Guns in Iraq and Afghanistan
Over half of 1.4 million guns U.S. shipped into Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 are unaccounted for in DoD’s own records, watchdog discovers
A picture uploaded by Dutch al Nusra militant Abu Saeed al-Halabi shows a masked man holding what appears to be a US-made M240 machine gun
The
U.S. government has shipped over 1.4 million guns to Iraq and
Afghanistan since 9/11, according a new analysis by the U.K.-based
watchdog Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), but the Pentagon is only able
to account for fewer than half of them.
AOAV released its analysis of publicly available data on U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) contracts on Wednesday,
and added that when requested to provide its own accounting for the
small arms provided to the war-torn nations, “the DoD data shows that
over 700,000 small arms were sent from the U.S. to Iraq and Afghanistan
within these periods. However, this amount only accounts for 48 percent
of the total small arms supplied by the U.S. government that can be
found in open source government reports.”
AOAV
also noted that the total number of small weapons the U.S. provided to
Iraq and Afghanistan is likely to be far higher than even the group’s
count, as the Pentagon kept such shoddy records of the planeloads of
weapons it dispatched to those countries—if it kept any records at all.
“Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” observed C.J. Chivers in the New York Times Magazine, “the United States has
handed out a vast but persistently uncountable quantity of military
firearms to its many battlefield partners in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today
the Pentagon has only a partial idea of how many weapons it issued, much less where these weapons are. Meanwhile, the effectively bottomless
abundance of black-market weapons from American sources is one reason
Iraq will not recover from its post-invasion woes anytime soon.”
“This
failure shows the lack of accountability, transparency and joined up
data that exists at the very heart of the U.S. government’s weapon
procurement and distribution systems,” AOAV wrote.
Chivers added:
All together, the sheer size of the expenditures, the sustained confusion about totals and the multiple pressures eroding the stock combine to create a portrait of the Pentagon’s bungling the already-awkward role it chose for itself—that of state-building arms dealer, a role that routinely led to missions in clear opposition to each other. While fighting two rapidly evolving wars, the American military tried to create and bolster new democracies, governments and political classes; recruit, train and equipsecurity and intelligence forces on short schedule and at outsize scale; repair and secure transportation infrastructure; encourage the spread or restoration of the legal industry and public services; and leave behind something more palatable and sturdy than rule by thugs.Any one of these efforts would be difficult on its own. But the United Stateswas trying all these things at once while buying and flying into both countries a prodigious quantity of light military weapons and handing them out to local people and outfits it barely knew. The recipients were often manifestly corrupt and sometimes had close ties to the same militias and insurgents who were trying to drive out the United States and make sure its entire nation-building project did not stand. It should not have been a surprise that American units in disaffected provinces and neighborhoods, and their partners, could encounter gunfire at every turn.
Today,
“no one knows where many of the weapons are, until they turn up on
social media or announce themselves in combat or crime with the crack of
incoming fire, a reminder of tens of billions of dollars gone into
nations where violence and terrorism continue apace,” Chivers wrote.
“What to do?” the Times reporter wondered. “If past is precedent, given enough time one of the United States’ solutions will be, once again, to ship in more guns.”
Courtesy of The Free Thought Project
Originally published at Common Dreams
Laura J Alcorn
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