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Afghanistan: More Pentagon Contractors Than U.S. Troops
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rwro-@yahoo.com
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Nov 03, 2009 06:24 PST
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http://en.trend.az/regions/world/ocountries/1571468.html
Trend News Agency
November 3, 2009
Still no count of U.S. contractors in Afghanistan
The U.S. government does not know exactly how many contractors it employs in Afghanistan, a U.S. commission said on Monday, raising basic questions about oversight of wartime operations, Reuters reported.
Contractors in Afghanistan outnumber U.S. troops there and scandals involving misconduct by employees of private firms on the U.S. payroll in Afghanistan and Iraq have prompted calls by Congress for greater accountability.
The Commission on Wartime Contracting, a bipartisan, independent commission mandated by Congress, presented data at a hearing showing major discrepancies in different accounting methods used to determine the number of U.S. contractors.
A traditional manual count by the U.S. military's Central Command turned up nearly 74,000 U.S. Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan as of June 30 - more than twice the number shown in another survey by the Pentagon.
"I kind of want to scream.... Why if it's so important, are we failing to do something so basic?" said Christopher Shays, a former Republican lawmaker and a co-chair of the bipartisan committee.
Gary Motsek, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense, acknowledged in testimony that U.S. efforts to create a system to better count the number of contractors in Afghanistan had so far come up short.
"We failed," Motsek said, calling for better funding and regulations to require all U.S. agencies to report figures for contractors. "You should be concerned about the gap, because we are concerned about the gap."
Motsek and Redding Hobby, deputy director of logistics, contracting, and engineering at Central Command, indicated that while the manual count system was not 100 percent precise, it was still the best gauge available.
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