Afghanistan needs a "stable security environment to prevent it from again becoming a safe haven for Al-Qaeda or other terrorists," a U.S. report says.

The report was released on January 11 by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which gives independent oversight of U.S. reconstruction funds for the country.

It says Afghan security forces have "not yet been capable of securing all of Afghanistan and has lost territory to the insurgency."

Most NATO-led foreign combat forces pulled out of Afghanistan in 2014, leaving nearly 10,000 U.S. troops behind.

Afghan forces have since struggled to fend off the Taliban, which has gained control of more territory than any time since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

SIGAR described corruption as "one of the most serious threats to the U.S.-funded Afghanistan reconstruction effort."

"Powerful drug networks, mainly run by close-knit families and tribes, bankroll the insurgency and launder money," it also said.

With reporting by AP </s> The Defense Department has told its inspector general overseeing the reconstruction of Afghanistan to hide what used to be public data on how much of the country is controlled by insurgent groups, the watchdog said in a report published Tuesday.

John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), called the policy change "troubling for a number of reasons, not least of which is that this is the first time SIGAR has been specifically instructed not to release information marked 'unclassified' to the American taxpayer."

The Pentagon responded to the report by blaming “human error” for the restrictions.

"In the most recent report, SIGAR indicated that Resolute Support restricted the public release of unclassified district, population and land-area control data that had been provided previously,” Capt. Tom Gresback, a spokesman for U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement.

“It was NOT the intent of Resolute Support to withhold or classify information which was available in prior reports. A human error in labeling occurred. The classification system, because it incorporates both a NATO and U.S. nomenclature, can be challenging, and a mistake was made. The data is not classified and there was no intent to withhold it unnecessarily.”

Since January 2016, SIGAR's quarterly reports have included tallies on how many of Afghanistan's 407 districts are controlled by the NATO-backed government. According to the most recent figures, published Oct. 30, just 231 of those districts (56.8 percent) were controlled or influenced by the Afghan government.

By comparison, SIGAR reported in October 2016 that 258 districts (63.4 percent of Afghanistan) were under government control or influence. The amount of districts controlled or influenced by the Taliban rose to 54 in the October 2017 report from 33 in the October 2016 report.

In the introduction to his latest report, Sopko wrote that "the number of districts controlled or influenced by the Afghan government had been one of the last remaining publicly available indicators for members of Congress ... and for the American public of how the 16-yearlong U.S. effort to secure Afghanistan is faring."

The report was published amid a wave of violence in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, that has been unleashed by the Taliban and its rival, ISIS. On Monday, ISIS militants attacked soldiers guarding a military academy, killing at least 11 troops and wounding 16 others.

On Saturday, a Taliban attacker drove an ambulance filled with explosives into the heart of the city, killing at least 103 people and wounding as many as 235.

The Taliban also claimed an attack a week earlier in which militants stormed a luxury hotel in Kabul, killing 22 people, including 14 foreigners, and setting off a 13-hour battle with security forces.

The Taliban have been waging an insurgency since they were driven from power by U.S. and Afghan forces in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks. They say they are open to direct peace talks with the United States, something Washington has long rejected.

The ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan emerged in 2014, as the U.S. and NATO were winding down their combat mission and around the time that ISIS declared its self-styled caliphate, headquartered in Syria and Iraq. Its followers have clashed with both Afghan forces and the Taliban.

The recent wave of violence in Afghanistan has unfolded after the Trump administration suspended nearly $900 million in counter-terrorism aid to Pakistan earlier this month. The Pentagon had accused Islamabad of not doing enough to reign in the Haqqani network and Afghan Taliban.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report. </s> KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan needs a stable security environment to prevent it from again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaida and other militants, but Afghan security forces have not yet become capable of securing all of the country by themselves, a U.S. report said Wednesday.

The report, by the U.S. government's Special Inspector General for Afghanistan, offered a high-risk list assessment for the war-torn country, two years after NATO-led foreign combat forces pulled out at the end of 2014, leaving only a smaller training and assisting mission behind.

SIGAR, which provides independent oversight of U.S. reconstruction funds for Afghanistan, also noted that despite the fact that more than half of all U.S. reconstruction funds since 2002 has gone toward building, equipping and training Afghan forces, they still have lost territory to the Taliban.

"The Afghan national defense and security force has not yet been capable of securing all of Afghanistan and has lost territory to the insurgency," SIGAR said.

Last August, the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, or USFOR-A, said only 63.4 percent of the country's territory was under government control — compared to the 72 percent that the military said was controlled by Kabul in November 2015.

SIGAR also noted at least seven other areas of concern in Afghanistan, including rampant corruption and drug trafficking.

"To combat the Taliban and other threats, the United States has provided more than $64 billion since 2002, including $3.45 billion in fiscal year 2016 alone, to support the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police, and the Afghan Air Force," the report quoted Inspector General John F. Sopko as saying.

SIGAR cited U.S. Defense Department reports that say Afghan forces are "generally capable and effective at protecting major population centers, preventing the Taliban from maintaining prolonged control of specific areas, and at responding to Taliban attacks."

The Taliban had declared their goal for 2016 was to take a provincial capital - something they failed to do despite several attempts.

However, militant groups in Afghanistan are still capable of launching large-scale attacks, including in major urban centers — such as two large bombings, including a suicide attack, on Tuesday that killed at least 38 people near the government offices in Kabul.

Also Tuesday, a bombing that targeted the provincial governor's guesthouse in the southern city of Kandahar killed five diplomats from the United Arab Emirates and six other people. The governor and the UAE ambassador to Afghanistan were among several people wounded in that attack.

In 2014, SIGAR issued its first "High-Risk Report," identifying areas it assessed need special attention in Afghanistan. The new report is likely intended to help inform the incoming U.S. administration of the most pressing reconstruction challenges in 2017 and beyond. </s> The Defense Department has told its inspector general overseeing the reconstruction of Afghanistan to hide what used to be public data on how much of the country is controlled by insurgent groups, the watchdog said in a report published Tuesday.

John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), called the policy change "troubling for a number of reasons, not least of which is that this is the first time SIGAR has been specifically instructed not to release information marked 'unclassified' to the American taxpayer."

Since January 2016, SIGAR's quarterly reports have included tallies on how many of Afghanistan's 407 districts are controlled by the NATO-backed government. According to the most recent figures, published Oct. 30, just 231 of those districts (56.8 percent) were controlled or influenced by the Afghan government.

By comparison, SIGAR reported in October 2016 that 258 districts (63.4 percent of Afghanistan) were under government control or influence. The amount of districts controlled or influenced by the Taliban rose to 54 in the October 2017 report from 33 in the October 2016 report.

In the introduction to his latest report, Sopko wrote that "the number of districts controlled or influenced by the Afghan government had been one of the last remaining publicly available indicators for members of Congress ... and for the American public of how the 16-yearlong U.S. effort to secure Afghanistan is faring."

The report was published amid a wave of violence in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, that has been unleashed by the Taliban and its rival, ISIS. On Monday, ISIS militants attacked soldiers guarding a military academy, killing at least 11 troops and wounding 16 others.

On Saturday, a Taliban attacker drove an ambulance filled with explosives into the heart of the city, killing at least 103 people and wounding as many as 235.

The Taliban also claimed an attack a week earlier in which militants stormed a luxury hotel in Kabul, killing 22 people, including 14 foreigners, and setting off a 13-hour battle with security forces.

The Taliban have been waging an insurgency since they were driven from power by U.S. and Afghan forces in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks. They say they are open to direct peace talks with the United States, something Washington has long rejected.

The ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan emerged in 2014, as the U.S. and NATO were winding down their combat mission and around the time that ISIS declared its self-styled caliphate, headquartered in Syria and Iraq. Its followers have clashed with both Afghan forces and the Taliban.

The recent wave of violence in Afghanistan has unfolded after the Trump administration suspended nearly $900 million in counter-terrorism aid to Pakistan earlier this month. The Pentagon had accused Islamabad of not doing enough to reign in the Haqqani network and Afghan Taliban.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report. </s> Thousands of 'ghost soldiers' likely still on Afghan payroll: US inspector

The Afghan army likely still has tens of thousands of "ghost soldiers" on its payrolls and Taliban commanders are apparently buying US-supplied weapons from local troops, a US government inspector said Wednesday.

US and NATO commanders in Afghanistan have long criticized endemic corruption in the Afghan security forces, but 15 years after the US-led invasion the problem remains persistent, said John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

"Afghan commanders often pocket the paychecks of 'ghost soldiers' for whom the US is paying salaries," Sopko said in prepared remarks to a Washington think tank.

"The number of ghost soldiers is significant, likely reaching into the tens of thousands."

He added there is evidence the Taliban have instructed field commanders to buy US-supplied weapons, fuel, and ammunition from Afghan soldiers.

"Because to do so is both easier and less expensive for the insurgents," he said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Afghan police and army units took over providing security for Afghanistan from NATO in 2015.

Their first year was something of a disaster, when they sustained more than 5,000 fatalities and saw the regional capital Kunduz briefly captured by the Taliban.

Numbers of casualties were significantly higher in 2016.

Sopko, who frequently delivers scathing reports detailing Afghan corruption and hapless US reconstruction efforts, delivered his latest assessment just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Just as President Barack Obama did eight years ago, Trump is inheriting an Afghan conflict that seems impossible to resolve any time soon.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, has called the situation a "stalemate."

Obama has cut the US troop presence to about 8,400 but Sopko warned of the consequences of drawdowns.

"Withdraw, and the democratic government may well fall. Stay, and continue what we have been doing and we may be faced with what General Dunford has described as a stalemate," Sopko warned.

Including war fighting, US costs for Afghanistan now total near $1 trillion. </s> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has criticized Pentagon officials for wasting as much as $28 million by making a questionable choice of forest camouflage-patterned uniforms for Afghan National Army soldiers.

The uniform pattern was selected without evaluating its effectiveness when only 2.1 percent of Afghanistan is covered by forests, the U.S. government's top watchdog on Afghanistan said in a report last month.

The Afghan minister of defense at the time "liked the woodland, urban and temperate patterns," the report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said.

It potentially cost up to an additional $28 million dollars between 2008 and 2017, the watchdog said.

In a memo sent out to senior Pentagon officials on Friday and seen by Reuters, Mattis said the SIGAR report was an example of a "complacent mode of thinking."

"Cavalier or casually acquiescent decisions to spend taxpayer dollars in an ineffective and wasteful manner are not to recur," Mattis wrote.

"Rather than minimize this report or excuse wasteful decisions, I expect all DoD (Department of Defense) organizations to use this error as a catalyst to bring to light wasteful practices - and take aggressive steps to end waste," Mattis wrote.

The U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee has a hearing scheduled for Tuesday that will look at Pentagon equipment and uniform procurement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Donald Trump is weighing sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to reverse the gains made by Taliban militants and support the fight against Islamic State and crafting a broader South Asia strategy.

In a sign of the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, a Taliban suicide attacker detonated a car bomb in the western part of Kabul on Monday, killing up to 35 people and wounding more than 40.

Nearly $110 billion has been appropriated in Washington for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2002, when U.S. forces drove the Taliban from power for harboring militants from al Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

In 2014, SIGAR said that more had been spent in current dollar terms on reconstruction in Afghanistan than had been spent on the Marshall Plan, which helped more than a dozen European countries after World War Two.

Read the original article on Reuters. Copyright 2017. Follow Reuters on Twitter. </s> Two years after NATO handed responsibility for Afghanistan’s security to local forces, the country remains crippled by corruption and its troops can barely hold the Taliban at bay, a US inspector said Wednesday.

Since US-led NATO troops stopped leading patrols and stepped into an advisory and support role at the end of 2014, Afghan army and police forces have suffered thousands of casualties and face continual assaults from a well-funded and well-armed Taliban.

“As much as I wish I could say much has improved in Afghanistan over the past two years, I cannot,” John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), told a Washington think tank.

Sopko was speaking as his agency published a list of high-risk threats to Afghanistan, less than two weeks before incoming President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Just as President Barack Obama did eight years ago, Trump is inheriting an Afghan conflict that seems impossible to resolve.

Trump has offered few indications of his plans for Afghanistan.

In a 2013 tweet, he said “Let’s get out” of the country and said the money America spends there would be better used at home.

Neither he nor his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton gave Afghanistan more than a passing mention during the presidential campaign.

Sopko noted the number of armed groups opposing the Afghan government is growing, and said the amount of Afghan districts under government control or influence dropped from 70.5 percent at the start of 2016 to just 63.4 percent by the end of August.

The Afghan army is “basically playing whack-a-mole following the Taliban around Afghanistan,” Sopko said.

“At a minimum, they’re playing defense and are not taking the fight to the Taliban.”

Underscoring the fragile security situation, bombings across three Afghan cities including Kabul killed around 50 people and wounded 100 others Tuesday, in a day of carnage as Taliban insurgents escalated their deadly winter campaign of violence.

To date, America has spent more than $115 billion in US taxpayer money on reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.

When warfighting costs are included, the United States has spent close to $1 trillion.

Complicating matters, a long-standing issue of Afghan commanders lying about troop numbers to swindle the payment system remains a stubborn problem.

The Afghan army likely still has tens of thousands of these phantom troops on its payrolls, Sopko said.

“Afghan commanders often pocket the paychecks of ‘ghost soldiers’ for whom the US is paying salaries,” he said.

He added there is evidence the Taliban has instructed field commanders to buy US-supplied weapons, fuel and ammunition from Afghan soldiers.

“To do so is both easier and less expensive for the insurgents,” he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noting that the Taliban were now part of the US-provided weapons “supply chain.”

The Taliban has plenty of cash, thanks to booming poppy production that is growing at near-record levels as eradication efforts falter.

CSIS expert Anthony Cordesman, who hosted Sopko, said in a report this month that it is “more than possible” Afghan forces will be locked in a war of attrition with no clear end, and that 2017 could mark “at least be the beginning of a major defeat” for them.

In 2015, Afghan police sustained more than 5,000 fatalities and saw the regional capital Kunduz briefly captured by the Taliban.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, has called the Afghan situation a “stalemate,” though commanders later tried to massage the assessment, calling it an “equilibrium.”

Obama has cut the US troop presence to about 8,400. Sopko warned the incoming Trump administration about the complexities of making further adjustments.

“Withdraw, and the democratic government may well fall. Stay, and continue what we have been doing and we may be faced with what General Dunford has described as a stalemate,” Sopko said.

Still, Sopko noted some signs of improvement.

He said both President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah had cooperated with US efforts to prevent waste and fraud.

He also highlighted an anti-corruption justice center that has begun to prosecute graft cases.

Repeated bids to launch peace negotiations with the Taliban have failed and a fierce new fighting season is expected to kick off in the spring </s> Afghan security forces have recaptured a southern district in the restive province of Helmand from the Taliban, as part of Kabul’s campaign to push the militant group from one of the key heartlands of insurgency and narcotics production.

In a two-day operation launched on Saturday, the security forces took the district center of Nawa to the south of the provincial capital city of Lashkar Gah, killing more than 50 militants and destroying their vehicles and equipment, Defense Ministry spokesman, General Dawlat Waziri, was cited as saying by Reuters on Monday.

The casualties announced by the Defense Ministry could not be immediately verified.

The security forces plan to continue the operation southward along the main road to the town of Garmsir, officials said.

The Taliban control large stretches of Helmand Province, which is considered the source of much of the world's illegal opium.

Afghanistan has been gripped by violence and insecurity since the United States and its allies invaded the country as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror in 2001. Many parts of the country remain plagued by militancy despite the presence of foreign troops.

During the past 16 years, the Taliban militants have been conducting terrorist attacks across the country, killing and displacing civilians.

In addition, the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, which is mainly active in Syria and Iraq, has recently managed to take recruits from Afghan Taliban defectors.

According to the mid-year report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan published on Monday, 1,662 people were killed and more than 3,500 injured in the war-torn country in the first half of 2017, showing a sharp rise in the civilian casualties. </s> Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has chided the Pentagon for its “cavalier or casually acquiescent decisions to spend taxpayer dollars in an effective and wasteful manner,” cautioning the department that such missteps are “not to recur.”

The memo, obtained Monday by Fox News, highlights a June report by the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan (SIGAR) which found that as much as $28 million had been wasted by the Pentagon over a ten-year period on uniforms for Afghan soldiers with a camouflage pattern deemed unsuitable for the country’s predominantly desert terrain.

“These actions connect directly to our mission and budget situation,” Mattis said in a July 21 memo to the Defense Department’s acquisition, policy and finance chiefs. “The purpose of equipping the Afghan National Army is to bolster the Afghan Government’s capacity to provide for its own security, and ultimately, to help defend our country from a terrorist attack.”

INSIDE AFGHANISTAN: ARE MORE U.S. TROOPS WHAT AFGHANS WANT?

The Defense Secretary goes on to state that, in his view, the SIGAR report not only “exposes waste” and “captures how funds were diverted away from other mission priorities” but also serves as an “example of a complacent mode of thinking.”

Mattis concludes the memo with a stern warning that such blunders must not happen again.

“This principle applies equally from the smallest procurement to the Department’s largest programs,” he added. “Rather than minimize this report or excuse wasteful decisions, I expect all DoD organizations to use this error as a catalyst to bring to light wasteful practices – and take aggressive steps to end waste in our Department. I’m counting on all hands to take effective action.”

TALIBAN CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY FOR KABUL BOMBING THAT KILLED AT LEAST 24

The Afghan uniform debacle is slated to be a key topic of discussion on Tuesday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

The U.S has been involved in the seemingly intractable Afghanistan war for almost 16 years, with the deployment of several more thousand troops likely in the coming months.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction releases a report on Afghanistan, saying that the Afghan Armed Forces are not capable of securing the country and have lost more territory to the Taliban, the most since the United States invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.