The United States is poised to give billions more in funding to Afghanistan with no benchmarks or anticorruption standards in place so the Afghan government can continue its ongoing war effort against the Taliban.
“There was discussion last year about having some specific benchmarks before the Warsaw summit, but I think the allies felt it was impractical,” General Gordon Davis told the Washington Post. Davis explained it would have taken months just to agree on exact anti-corruption standards to implement, saying, “There just wasn’t enough time.”
Davis justified the aid to Afghanistan because it is meant to ensure Afghan Defense forces can operate effectively. Gen. John Nicholson submitted his first 90-day assessment of the NATO effort in Afghanistan June 10. The Taliban currently controls more territory in Afghanistan than at any point since 2001. The Islamic extremist insurgent group has seen unprecedented gains since the end of NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan in 2014.
The U.S.-led effort will continue to fund Afghan security forces at a full strength level. The funding will continue despite reports by numerous watchdog organizations that many Afghan security forces exist only on paper. These forces are referred to as “ghost police” and are a method of extracting billions of dollars in aid from the U.S. and its allies.
“According to my information, 40 to 50 percent of the [police] force did not exist physically when we asked for help during operations. Salaries of ghost soldiers had been received during the past eight months and the money has gone to personal accounts,”Agha Noor Kintoz, the new provincial police chief, told Tolo News.
Cities throughout southern Afghanistan that were occupied for years by NATO forces are now under Taliban control. The Taliban also seized control of the northern city of Kunduz in September, 2015, marking the first insurgent seizure of a major city since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Conditions have deteriorated so badly that the Obama administration is mulling keeping troop levels at their current number of 9,800 until the end of President Barack Obama’s presidency.
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