Thousands of pages of secret information about U.S.-backed Afghan security forces that were the subject of a controversial classification push in January were made public Tuesday after a top Pentagon official reversed his previous decision just as abruptly as he had announced it.
John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, expressed concern in a Jan. 30 report to Congress with the Resolute Support Mission’s decision to classify information it had deemed publishable for the past six years.
For the first time since SIGAR’s inception, the watchdog was forced to attach an annex of classified data to its quarterly congressional report due to the volume of information that the Pentagon had suddenly decided to keep secret.
“Less than a week after we submitted our January 2015 report and the classified annex to Congress, I met in Afghanistan with General John F. Campbell, Resolute Support Commander, who informed me that [the Resolute Support Mission] had reversed itself and declassified the bulk of the material it had classified only a few days earlier,” Sopko wrote in the list of declassified information his office released Tuesday.
But Campbell’s reversal revealed a different set of problems with the spending numbers.
Hours before the declassified materials were slated for release, Campbell contacted SIGAR and informed the watchdog of an “accounting error” that skewed the data on Afghan Security Force strength between April and October 2014, the report said.
Campbell had alerted the Pentagon to the error in September but failed to notify SIGAR or submit the correct numbers for months, “despite the numerous times they had reviewed and approved SIGAR’s draft reports, including the January 2015 report,” Sopko wrote.
The original, incorrect numbers showed the Afghan National Army had shrunk by 16,336 troops during the last quarter of 2014. SIGAR discovered the force had actually lost 15,636 personnel over the course of three quarters, reflecting a much slower decline.
The U.S. has poured billions of taxpayer dollars into training and equipping Afghanistan’s security forces, which took control of the country’s security at the end of last year as the NATO-led coalition that once spearheaded the fight against the Taliban transitioned to prepare for withdrawal from the Southwest Asian country.
Changes in the way the military calculated and submitted security data obscured SIGAR’s ability to identify trends or problems in a number of areas, including the Afghan National Police and equipment costs for the Afghan National Army, SIGAR said in its report of declassified data.
Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee pressed then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on the massive and unprecedented classification in February after discovering the material Congress had long used to make decisions about how to fund Afghan security forces had suddenly been made secret.
“Inappropriately classifying information severely restricts the ability of Congress to conduct meaningful oversight and impairs the ability of the American people to know how billions of their taxpayer dollars are being spent in Afghanistan,” lawmakers wrote in their letter to Hagel.
