In the summer of 2012, US Central Command awarded a contract worth more than $456,000 to an Afghan construction company to build a police training facility in the eastern province of Wardak. Four months later, that building was “disintegrating” and overseers of the project were nowhere to be seen.
The story of how Qesmatullah Nasrat Construction Company (QNCC) bilked the US government out of half-million dollars is one that regularly plagues the Afghan reconstruction effort, and is documented in the latest report, released on Thursday, by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The construction of the “dry firing range,” built to look like a typical Afghan village, was awarded to the Khost-based company. The facility was to play host to a training regimen for special police forces.
But the plan, quite literally, scattered to the wind, while company managers laughed all the way to the bank. SIGAR found that QNCC used “defective construction methods and materials” and “poor planning,” which resulted in water leakage, and the walls to eventually “disintegrate” within months. A representative with US Central Command’s regional contracting office said “the facility is completely unsafe… It appears the contractor intentionally used different materials and construction standards to cut costs or/and fraud the government.”
Aside from the shoddy work itself, SIGAR laid a lot of blame for the project’s failure on the Pentagon’s doorstep.
“Construction was plagued by poor government oversight throughout all phases of the contract,” the report said. Contract officers “failed to ensure proper design of the facility and failed to hold the contractor accountable for its work.”
After the building began disintegrating, overseers of the project demanded repairs from QNCC. Between June and November 2013, the company sent e-mails to the contracting office claiming it had completed the necessary repairs. SIGAR, however, “found no evidence that [contracting officers] verified that the repairs were actually made, either through a site visit or by obtaining photos of the completed repairs.”
The report concluded that the Pentagon, “accepted work that did not fulfill the requirements of the contract, and then failed to hold the contractor fully accountable for correcting all of the range’s structural deficiencies before the contract warranty expired.”
Poor oversight routinely cripples reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. The Sentinel has chronicled the findings of numerous SIGAR reports blasting US agencies for not keeping track of billions of dollars that have flowed into contractors tasked with developing and reconstructing the war-torn country.
Last month, the inspector general warned that the overarching development strategy is at risk, and Afghanistan will likely be a client state of the US for years to come.
In the case of the Wardak training center, SIGAR recommended that US Central Command identify when QNCC did not complete work according to standards, and told the military to “recoup those funds.” It also asked CENTCOM to identify why the range wasn’t built to standards in the first place and what sort of disciplinary actions can be taken.
The agency agreed with all of SIGAR’s recommendations.
You can read SIGAR’s full report here, and view picture of the deteriorating range here.
