U.S. investigators say Afghan Local Police (ALP) are poorly supplied, hindering the units' ability to fulfill their mission.
ALP units, which employed some 28,000 personnel as of August, were established in 2010 to expand security by training rural Afghans to defend their communities against militants.
The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said in an audit report on October 26 that the logistics system that supports local police was inadequate, with supplies "often diverted, delayed, of inferior quality or heavily pilfered."
SIGAR investigators also found that local police are often misused or assigned tasks they are not supposed to perform, such as providing personal security for government officials.
The report said the U.S. military had spent about $470 million supporting ALP units and expects to spend another $420 million through 2018 to sustain the program.