Also in today’s Jolt, more bad news out of Afghanistan, if you haven’t become numb to that already . . .

Afghanistan, Land of 157,000 National Police & 300,000 National Police ID Cards
This morning, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction unveiled its audit of salary payments for the Afghan National Police, which the U.S. funds at $300 million annually.
It’s increasingly easy for Americans to shrug at yet another tale of mismanagement and corruption and incompetence in the Afghan government, but the scale of this one is pretty epic. For starters, the inspector general found “there are almost twice as many ANP identification cards in circulation as there are active police personnel.”
Pretty easy pickings for infiltrating Taliban agents and jihadists, huh?
SIGAR found that “as of February 2014, the Afghanistan Ministry of Interior had distributed around 300,000 ANP identification cards. At that time, the ANP had fewer than 157,000 assigned personnel, so that nearly half of these cards were not held by active personnel.”
Wait, there’s more:
After 9 years of effort, an electronic human resources system has still not been successfully implemented.
Reports have disclosed inflated police rosters, payments being made to more police personnel than are authorized in particular locations, and police personnel receiving inflated salaries.
20 percent of ANP personnel are at risk of not receiving their full salaries because they are paid in cash by an MOI-appointed trusted agent, where as much as half of these payments are possibly diverted.
U.S. officials confirmed that over the past year they accepted, without question, all personnel totals provided by the Afghan Ministry of Interior.
The United Nations Development Program’s independent monitoring agent may have artificially inflated the percentage of successfully verified ANP personnel from 59 percent to as much as 84 percent.
As U.S. forces draw down, the U.S. government will have increasingly limited visibility over ANP data collection processes.
Unless the MOI develops the capability to ensure and verify the accuracy of ANP personnel and payroll data, there is a significant risk that a large portion of the over $300 million in annual U.S. funding for ANP salaries will be wasted or abused.
Yeah, there’s significant risk all right.
Above: U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction checking the ID cards of policemen.