Government agencies charged with rebuilding Afghanistan have put the mission at “unnecessarily high levels of risk,” and have left the country completely incapable of governing itself without international assistance, according to a new inspector general report released on Wednesday.
Citing the absence of rule of law, a booming narcotics industry, and inadequate security forces, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) blamed the agencies for “widespread failure to anticipate problems and to implement prudent countermeasures.”
The inspector general said that American policy may have doomed Afghanistan from the onset of the occupation, criticizing the initial US strategy of flooding the Afghan government with enormous amount of military weaponry and aid, saying it had the affect of “foster[ing] a political climate conducive to corruption.” It also said a lack of “political will” on the part of the Afghan government and the international community “resulted in a culture of impunity that frustrated anticorruption efforts.”
SIGAR bemoaned that fact that every one of its quarterly reports to Congress, since the office was created in 2008 has highlighted the threat of corruption–“from the looting of the Kabul Bank and the failures of Afghanistan’s Attorney General to prosecute senior officials, to the illegal land seizures and endemic extortion of ordinary Afghans for everyday services.”
What also has the inspector general particularly worried about corruption is that it erodes the sustainability of US efforts. .
In 2013, Afghanistan’s government could only muster up funding for 37% of its projected budget. It relied on international assistance to makeup the shortfall.
“Much of the more than $104 billion the United States has committed to reconstruction projects and programs risks being wasted because the Afghans cannot sustain the investment without massive continued donor support,” the report said.
“The evidence strongly suggests that Afghanistan lacks the capacity—financial, technical, managerial, or otherwise—to maintain, support, and execute much of what has been built or established during more than a decade of international assistance,” it added. The government, it noted, “would likely be incapable of fully sustaining [Afghan National Security Forces] after the transition in 2014 and the expected decrease in US and Coalition support.”
One of the more glaring breakdowns in the reconstruction effort chronicled by the inspector general is US failure to rein in Afghanistan’s narcotics trade. The US has spent nearly $8 billion on counter-narcotics, yet “Afghan farmers are growing more opium than ever before.” In some cases, efforts to improve “irrigation, roads, and agricultural assistance…actually led to increased opium cultivation.” The sale of opiates accounted for roughly 11% of the country’s GDP in 2013, and is likely to increase this year, the report predicted.
The systemic failures have been exacerbated by profiteers. While SIGAR praised some contractors for “indispensable support,” it said the mission in Afghanistan created “massive opportunity for waste, fraud, and abuse, and an enormous challenge to effective oversight of funding and performance.” The total amount of money handed out to contractors in the rebuilding effort can’t be known within precision – not even by the IG – because the federal government has no central database of the information, which spans a number of agencies.
Last month, the Sentinel reported on a State Department’s inspector general report, which estimated that over $125 million in funds to contractors assisting the US mission in Afghanistan were lost and might never be recovered.
The SIGAR investigation comes on the heels of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report–a more high profile probe on the failure and crimes of contractors, also reported on by the Sentinel. Unlike the CIA torture program, which was ended by President Obama in 2009, the mission in Afghanistan, smaller though it may be, is set to continue indefinitely.
Read the entire SIGAR report here.
