Why does the Taliban have American bullets?

Posted By Christian Brose Wednesday, May 20, 2009 - 1:58 PM Share

When it comes to the reporting C.J. Chivers is doing from Afghanistan, I'm with Tom Ricks: The guy is indispensable -- a fearless correspondent and a masterful writer, with sound judgment to match. Which is all the more reason I was so puzzled reading his front-page piece in the New York Times today:

Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.

The presence of this ammunition among the dead in the Korangal Valley, an area of often fierce fighting near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, strongly suggests that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.

Parsing the media's coverage of national security is more Peter Feaver's domain than mine, but "stongly suggests"? We're talking about 17 rifle magazines here, and even then, only some individual rounds of ammunition within them. Couldn't this strongly suggest, I don't know, maybe that of the hundreds and hundreds of Afghan army and police forces killed over the past few years, the Taliban has made off with some of their U.S.-provided ammunition? After all, they are both using the same model of weapon.

I'm not saying it's impossible that Afghan forces somewhere are leaking their American munitions to the Taliban. I'd almost be surprised if some of them weren't. Still, this seems like an unbelievably small set of data from which to draw such strong conlcusions about one explanation, when a host of others are equally plausible, if not more so.

EXPLORE:AFGHANISTAN, MILITARY

(1)

HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE

TYRTAIOS

11:52 PM ET

May 20, 2009

Excellent comments J. Thomas.

Excellent comments J. Thomas. We really should have turned this over to a dedicated, honest, professional Afghan national police force years ago, and not the Afghan Army.

That said, during the Russian occupation there were full time Muj (mujahedeen) and part time Muj, and in some cases a mixture of Taliban and Muj.

The part timers were always less well armed and sophisticated, but all had to hand over the lion's share of the loot taken with their leaders.

Anecdotally, the U.S. has contracted with some dubious suppliers to provide and ship ammunition, some being ChiCom (which is illegal I believe) to the Afghan Army. In some instance the ammo was shipped ungraded and turned out to be crap. One such supplier was barely out of his teens, operating out of an unmarked building in Florida.

In addition, our supply lines all the way from the Port of Karchi into Afghanistan are vulnerable to - shall we say, pilferage.

Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.