"You" Are Corrupt, "We" Just Misplace Things (Like Top-Secret Laptops)0

Update: U.S. officials looking into irregularities in the early portion of the $125 billion U.S.-led effort to rebuild Iraq have expanded the inquiry to include senior U.S. military officers who oversaw the program....Officials told the [New York] Times several criminal cases in recent years pointed to widespread corruption within the operation run by the men being investigated."


Amidst the growing Washington campaign against Afghan President Hamid Karzai over corruption, you can classify this story from Thursday under I for Irony:

The Pentagon has lost track of some 87,000 weapons handed out without proper accounting to Afghan army and police units, federal investigators reported today. The weapons included rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers, shotguns, mortars and other weapons, the Government Accountability Office said.

OK, maybe you can pin that one of the Afghans as well: just can't trust the locals, can you? (N.B. Surprisingly, nowhere in the story do the words "black market" occur.) It's harder, however, to pass the blame in this incident in Peshawar, Pakistan, reported by Shahan Mufti of GlobalPost:

I was recently able to purchase a U.S. military laptop for $650 from a small kiosk, which is known as the “Sitara Market,” on the western edge of the sprawling open-air markets on the edge of Peshawar. The laptop, which has clear U.S. military markings and serial numbers, contained restricted U.S. military information, as well as software for military platforms, the identities of numerous military personnel and information about weaknesses and flaws in American military vehicles being employed in the war in Afghanistan.

Longtime observers of the region and military experts say the open market on U.S. military hardware and technology is increasingly compromising the American military supply route that runs from the Pakistani seaport in Karachi through the Khyber Pass and into neighboring Afghanistan.

"This kind of trade has been happening in the past, but not so openly," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Peshawar-based journalist who has reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan for several decades. "In the past few months this has started in a big way," he added.

(Hat-tip to reader Beth)