From our partners at The Agonist

After all when your dealing with Pentagon-level budgets in the hundreds of billions, what’s a measly half billion among friends?

The American and NATO training missions in Afghanistan have told United States government investigators that more than four years of financial records covering about $475 million worth of fuel purchases for the Afghan National Army may have been shredded, raising concerns about potential fraud. [Gee, ya thunk!? - SH]

Additionally, the agency also says that American and NATO forces have no proper system in place for estimating the Afghan Army’s future fuel requirements, a critical point now because control over the budget on fuel spending is about to be increased and handed over from United States and NATO authority to the Afghan government.

The findings come out of a report to be published Monday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the government agency charged with accounting for how billions of dollars in American reconstruction funds are being spent.

We will never know how much money was wasted in Afghnistan and Iraq, nor how much dropped into the pockets of corrupt officials – bot local and American. It’s amazing to me that generals like David Petraeus, who oversaw the haemorage of millions of dollars and over 140,000 weapons without trace from the training program in Iraq in 2004-05, and William Caldwell who oversaw a similiar loss in Afghanistan from 2009-11, got their extra star and more responsibility. So far, the US military seems to believe that criminal negilence and corruption stop at Lt. Colonel – and that even if it doesn’t it is OK to give generals just a slap on the wrist. Senior civilian officials get the same kind of pass for, at the very least, criminal incompetence in managing the nation’s resources.