Afghan troops and police visiting the US for military training gone ‘absent without leave’ (AWOL) much more often than military trainees brought to the US from other countries, a fresh report revealed.
“Nearly half of all foreign military trainees that went AWOL while training in the United States since 2005 were from Afghanistan,” said a report by Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), published yesterday.
According to the paper, 152 of the 320 foreign trainees (or 47 percent) who fled the programme over the course of the last 12 years were from Afghanistan, raising concerns about the program’s procedures.
SIGAR found that the rate of asylum seekers among Afghan military trainees rose in recent years as violence in the Islamist Taliban insurgency spread across Afghanistan and security forces sustained heavy casualties.
Only 27 of the Afghans who left their training have been arrested or removed by US police, SIGAR said, with most of the other 83 either unaccounted for or having fled the United States. Between 2005 and 2017 the US military brought more than 2,500 Afghan soldiers and police to the United States for training, including programs that trained pilots for the nascent Afghan Air Force and Special Forces, according to SIGAR.
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