The Drug Enforcement Agency and Department of Defense spent $86 million on a spy plane to use in Afghanistan, but haven’t and will never fly it on a single mission there.
Part of a program called “Global Discovery,” the aircraft cost the agencies four times what they initially projected. It was described by the Justice Department inspector general (OIG) as being “currently in an un-flyable state.”
“The aircraft has never flown in Afghanistan as originally intended and, because the DEA removed all aviation operations from Afghanistan in July 2015, it likely never will,” OIG noted in a report published Wednesday.
The probe also found that the Pentagon continued to spend taxpayer money on the ATR-500 as of this month “in an effort to make the aircraft operational and flyable.”
The Justice Department auditors said they referred findings about military oversight to the Department of Defense’s own inspector general. Their probe mostly focused on DEA aviation activities in Afghanistan from Oct. 2012-Nov. 2014.
Global Discovery was effectively launched by DEA in July 2008, during the dying months of the Bush administration. Its goal was “to modify one DEA transport aircraft and provide it with advanced surveillance capabilities for use within the combat environment of Afghanistan,” according to OIG.
The watchdogs said that they were tipped off about the boondoggle by a whistleblower complaint. That grievance came in the form of an anonymous tip to the US Office of Special Counsel, an agency created to oversee the integrity of the civil service.
The anonymous tipster had accused DEA of misusing money given to it by the Pentagon “by misdirecting, diverting, and spending the money for purposes unrelated to the DEA’s Afghanistan aviation operations.” Investigators did not directly substantiate this, but said DEA did not follow federal rules or its own agency guidelines on contracting when executing Global Discovery. It also found DEA “was unable to perform a meaningful review and analysis” of its success in Afghanistan because the agency “did not accurately track its performance.”
US counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan have been, objectively speaking, a monstrous failure. Since American forces first occupied Afghanistan in 2001, Washington has spent $8 billion to stifle the cultivation and production of Afghan opium—made with Afghanistan’s bountiful poppy crops. In recent years, the country has been producing more heroin than ever before.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John Sopko, raised this point in a Congressional hearing held earlier this month, citing data from 2014.
“If this is winning, what is losing the drug war?” he asked rhetorically.
