Afghanistan’s ghost soldiers undermined fight against Taliban – ex-official

Khalid Payenda told the BBC that utmost of the colors and police on the government’s books didn’t live.

He said phantom help were added to sanctioned lists so that generals could pocket their stipend.
The Taliban fleetly seized control of Afghanistan in August, as US forces withdrew after 20 times in the country.

Mr Payenda, who abnegated and left Afghanistan as the Islamist group advanced, said records showing that security forces greatly outnumbered the Taliban were incorrect.

“The way the responsibility was done, you would ask the chief in that fiefdom how numerous people you have and grounded on that you could calculate hires and portion charges and they would always be inflated,”he told Ed Butler, presenter of the BBC’s Business Daily programme.

The former minister said the figures may have been inflated by further than six times, and included” derelictions (and) killers who were noway reckoned for because some of the commanders would keep their bank cards”and withdraw their hires, he contended.

There have long been questions over Afghan troop figures.

A 2016 report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar) claimed that”neither the United States nor its Afghan abettors know how numerous Afghan dogfaces and police actually live, how numerous are in fact available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their functional capabilities”.

In a more recent report, Sigar expressed” serious enterprises about the sharp goods of corruption. and the questionable delicacy of data on the factual strength of the force”.

Mr Payenda said that colors who did live were frequently not paid on time, while there were leaders of government- backed regulars who were” twice- dipping”- taking their government paycheck, and also also accepting payments from the Taliban to give up without a fight.

The whole feeling was, we can not change this. This is how the congress works, this is how the governors work. Everybody would say the sluice is murky from the veritably top, meaning the very top is involved in this,”he said.

He said he didn’t suppose former President Ashraf Ghani was”financially loose”. Responding to allegations of corruption within the finance ministry, Mr Payenda said”I agree with that to a certain extent but in these issues, absolutely not.”

He added that the West was” part of”some of the failures in Afghanistan, and described the US and Nato’s involvement in the country as”a great occasion lost”.