Corruption in Afghanistan and its role in the ongoing instability of the country has been discussed on this blog before (see, for example, here, here, and here), but for the most part in fairly general, strategic-level terms. In this post, I’m going to zoom in and explain in greater detail two particularly insidious types of corruption that plague the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF): 1) the problem of “ghost” soldiers, and 2) the pilfering of fuel, weapons, and other supplies intended for security force personnel. These forms of corruption leave Afghan security forces hollow and ill-equipped to accomplish the missions assigned to them. As long as pervasive corruption continues to undermine force capacity, readiness, and morale, the prospect of Afghan government forces gaining the upper hand on the Taliban and other insurgents remains slim.

“Ghost soldiers” are fictitious troops added to personnel rosters by corrupt officials who then collect the extra pay allocated for these (in some cases deceased, in some cases no longer active, and in some cases totally made-up) soldiers. To give a sense of the scale of the problem, consider the 215^th Corps of the Afghan National Army. In 2015, local officials suggested that up to 40 percent of names on the books did not correspond to actively-serving soldiers. For the 215^th Corps, with an authorized strength of 18,000, that would mean fewer than 11,000 soldiers were actually available to fight. Earlier this year, US Army Major General Richard Kaiser, commander of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CTSC-A), told the Wall Street Journal that the US had removed from the Afghan military payrolls more than 30,000 suspected ghost soldiers. That group of names amounted to over one-sixth of the Afghan army, significantly less than 40 percent but nevertheless a staggering figure. For reference, 30,000 is the same number of additional US troops President Obama sent to Afghanistan in December 2009 in a surge deemed necessary to turn the tide in the conflict.

Continue reading →