"not very nice, but necessary"

The US and Afghan governments have bungled record-keeping for more than 747,000 AK-47 rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and other weapons for Afghan forces since 2004, worth about $626 million. There is “real potential for these weapons to fall into the hands of insurgents,” says a SIGAR report published in July.

The US was flooding Afghanistan with small arms, some 112,000 more than Afghan forces needed, said the report. Record-keeping suffered from incompatible databases, missing serial numbers and poor inventory processes.