Kabul addressing green-on-blue incidents

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 5 (UPI) -- Hundreds of members of the Afghan military were arrested or dismissed in an effort to prevent so-called green-on-blue attacks, a military official said.

Afghan Gen. Abdul Manan Farahi, the top intelligence official in the Afghan Defense Ministry, was quoted by The Washington Post as saying military members were vetted in a confidence-building measure.

"It involves hundreds of soldiers," he said. Afghan authorities offered few specifics to the newspaper, however.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. James Salome this week was quoted by Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military's official newspaper, as saying that corruption in the ranks of the Afghan military was "embedded like a tumor." His comments came after an Afghan colonel was suspected of providing information about U.S. troop movements to the Taliban and illegally selling military supplies.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last month called on Afghan President Hamid Karzai "to counter the insider attack threat, including augmented counterintelligence measures (and) even more rigorous vetting of Afghan recruits," the U.D. Defense Department said.

The Post reports that 15 U.S. and NATO troops were killed in August during green-on-blue incidents, the deadliest month for such attacks since 2007.