Jubilee Post News & Views
Special Desk
Ghost soldiers were made to fight against Taliban in Afghanistan in August, when Taliban took over the country. Well the revelation comes from Afghanistan’s ex-finance minister who told so to a new agency.
The former minister blamed the government’s fall on corrupt officials who invented “ghost soldiers” and took payments from the Taliban.
Khalid Payenda told the agency that most of the 300,000 troops and police on the government’s books did not exist.
Ghost soldiers or ghost battalions are names appearing on military rolls, but who are not actually in service, generally in order to divert part of the soldiers’ salaries to an influential local entity.
The practice, weakens the military and makes it susceptible. Ghost soldiers have been cited in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries.
He alleged phantom personnel were added to official lists so that generals could pocket their wages. The Taliban rapidly seized control of Afghanistan in August, as US forces withdrew after 20 years in the country.
Mr Payenda, who resigned and left Afghanistan as the Islamist group advanced, said records showing that security forces greatly outnumbered the Taliban were incorrect.
“The way the accountability was done, you would ask the chief in that province how many people you have and based on that you could calculate salaries and ration expenses and they would always be inflated,” he told.
The former minister said the numbers may have been inflated, said the minister. Payenda said that troops who did exist were often not paid on time, while there were leaders of government-backed militias who were double-dipping – taking their government wage, and then also accepting payments from the Taliban to give up without a fight.
He said he did not think former President Ashraf Ghani was financially corrupt. 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 opportunity lost”
