The US combat mission in Afghanistan was scaled down at the end of last year. But American taxpayers can expect new tales of misadventure about the war-torn country to emerge over the coming years.
John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Monday, with harsh words for federal agencies in charge of US development projects in the nation. He warned Washington-led reconstruction was under the leadership of “horrendous” mismanagement, which has failed to ask simple questions or use basic accounting before doling out billions of dollars in the country.
Speaking about the Pentagon, the State Department, and USAID, Sopko said that “a lot of these agencies have not had aggressive independent inspector generals” and, thus, have developed “sloppy” and “bad” management practices that have bred monumental waste
Already more than $100 billion has been spent on rebuilding efforts, and another $14 billion is set to be spent on top of $8 billion appropriated over the next decade for Afghan development.
Yet, the federal agencies spending all of this money aren’t keeping track of the individual programs and how successful they are. Both the SIGAR and the Government Accountability Office have unsuccessfully tried to obtain such a master list.
“That is horrendous. Thirteen years into this, we don’t have a list of all the programs, all the projects, all the bridges, all the schools, all the clinics,” Sopko said.
He added that his office has had particular problems with USAID, which has been “unable to show how the money they spend leads to the successes they claim.”
The Sentinel previously covered a SIGAR report on the agency’s mismanagement of funds focused on empowering Afghan women. Sopko said it was unable to provide a list of its ten most successful reconstruction programs. When asked to provide a list of any number of successful programs, USAID was, again, unable to do so.
Sopko also said efforts to limit opium production in Afghanistan were woefully deficient. “If you use any metric…we failed,” he said referring to multiple measures showing a surge in poppy production
The SIGAR relayed another anecdote in which the Pentagon spent more than $500 million on a fleet of Italian cargo jets for Afghanistan, only to watch as those planes were never flown, and instead sat outside the Kabul airport with “weeds growing around them.”
“They couldn’t fly them,” Sopko said. “Afghans called them deathtraps.”
In the end, the fleet of 20 planes costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars was sold off for $30,000 in scrap metal.
Sopko stressed that problems like this happen because “simple questions are not being asked by a lot of the people in our development community.”
He gave a few examples, “Before you spend money over there, does it meet our mission. Have you talked to the Afghans, do you they want it do they need it? Do you take into consideration the security issue?”
As The Sentinel reported last December, the SIGAR said corruption, a thriving narcotics industry, and inadequate security place the entire reconstruction project at risk, and will likely leave Afghanistan unable to govern itself long after the US presence dissipates.
Sopko reiterated those concerns on Monday. Blaming development agencies for contracting out projects that are too large for the economy to maintain, Sopko warned that Afghanistan “will be a client state for years to come.”
The SIGAR maintains a staff of roughly 200 people with dozens of inspectors based in Afghanistan. Sopko, who boasted that he’s a believer in small government since 1982, said that he’d like to see his position and office go away soon. By statute, the SIGAR is supposed to be dissolved when US reconstruction aid drops to less than $250 million annually.
But with tens of billions still slated to go out over the next decade, Sopko admitted, “we may be around for a while.”
“Somebody needs to be taking a look at all that money,” he said.
Next month, his office will release its findings from an inspection of a law enforcement trust fund used to pay the salaries of Afghan police.
