Travis J. Tritten – Stars and Stripes: “U.S. post-war efforts to rebuild Afghanistan could collapse in a defeat similar to the fall of Saigon in 1975, the federal auditor overseeing reconstruction said Wednesday. The country’s future — and the $62 billion American investment — is threatened by the military’s chronically poor intelligence on Afghan security forces and an anemic central government in Kabul that is unable to operate on its own, said John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, during a speech at a Washington think tank. Sopko has been a top critic of waste and dysfunction in the country since he was appointed three years ago as a watchdog by the Obama administration and has now turned his oversight toward the post-war operations aimed at building up Afghan police and army troops. “We have all heard observations that are intended to be encouraging, such as that the Taliban cannot seize and hold Afghan provincial capitals,” Sopko said. “That may be true, but I would note that the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies never took and held a provincial capital in South Vietnam until January 1975 — almost 30 years into their campaign to reunify the country as a communist state.” A similar fate could fall on Kabul because the U.S. has no good data on the capabilities of Afghan security forces to use for its security handover goals. The most recent reporting this year found Afghan security forces have not reached any of the highest training benchmarks set by coalition forces, Sopko said. That comes after a decade of measuring the progress and past reports claiming the forces had achieved the training successes.”