Down the drain in Afghanistan: Column

David A. Andelman

USAID and the Pentagon have poured millions into inefficient, corruption-riddled projects.

The United States is flushing hundreds of millions of dollars a year down the drain in programs in Afghanistan that often seem only to be aiding and abetting the Taliban or squandering U.S. taxpayer funds on items of little or no use to the Afghan people. Those are the conclusions in a succession of reports to Congress by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction that rarely attract much attention or action.

One State Department agency, USAID, pumped more than $137 million from 2011 to September into one program called, in typical Washington bureaucratese “Stability in Key Areas” or SIKA. The result? “The relationship between USAID stability programs and the insurgency ... found increased support for the Taliban when USAID stabilization programs were implemented in Taliban-controlled villages. Additionally, violence increased in government-controlled villages that received USAID stability projects,” the inspector general’s office observes.

Why might this be happening? Well, the report continues that “insurgents will purposely target villages because of stability projects,” and indeed suggests that the “Taliban substantially boosted its local popularity by allowing programming to take place in these villages.” None of this should be especially astonishing to anyone who understands what has been going on since the start of hostilities in America’s longest war — 14 years and counting. While, as in the case of the Iraq War, U.S. forces were initially welcomed as liberators, the United States all too quickly turned into occupiers. While American programs might have been intended to help build local infrastructure and industrial self-sufficiency, all too often they blundered into blind alleys.

One inspector general report points out that Afghanistan has vast mineral resources that could lead to economic self-sufficiency. Yet, as a result of competition and bungling between Defense and State Department initiatives, “the $488 million U.S. government investment in efforts to develop Afghanistan’s extractive industries could be wasted, and Afghanistan may not be able to generate the additional revenues it needs to meet its long-term budgetary requirements without continued international assistance.”

Then there’s the outright criminality. Last year, the inspector general’s office found contractors bidding on a nearly $1 billion Afghan Ministry of Defense fuel contract had met in Dubai to rig their bids and inflate prices for the fuel. After evidence was presented to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, the contract — worth $200 million in U.S. Army funds — was canceled. “With billions of dollars at stake, many times we have observed the absence of rudimentary management skills that should have been grounded on proper planning and a sound strategy,” said Special Inspector Gen. John Sopko, in response to questions from USA TODAY. Indeed, the waste and fraud embedded in many U.S. funded programs uncovered by Sopko’s investigators is staggering. Together, just his group’s investigations directorate, the federal law enforcement component of the agency, has accumulated $944.5 million in criminal fines, restitution, forfeitures, civil settlement recoveries and government cost savings.

“Among the best practices for development assistance includes determining that the intended recipient actually wants and needs the project in question,” Sopko added.

A special after-conflict United Nations assessment group led by a top German academic, Michael Daxner, went into village after village that had been “liberated” during the height of the conflict and found tales of ham-handedness that only led to bitterness and resentment. In one case, U.S. forces decided it would be “good” for a liberated village to have an elaborate new bridge in the middle of nowhere, far from the one destroyed in the fighting, instead of on the well-traveled path where the original bridge was located.

But it’s not only the misuse of funds; it’s the utter squandering of them. Take the inspector general’s latest revelation — that the Department of Defense's Task Force for Business and Stability Operations "spent nearly $43 million to construct a compressed natural gas (CNG) automobile filling station in the city of Sheberghan.” A similar station in neighboring Pakistan cost $500,000. But there’s more. Seems that Afghanistan doesn’t even have a natural gas transmission and local distribution infrastructure to support a viable market for CNG cars. And converting a car to run on CNG instead of gasoline costs $700 in a country where the average annual income is $690.

You would think that the least we could learn in a 14-year-old war is how to help the Afghan people without making our enemies more popular in the process. It would appear that the, very expensive, record suggests we haven't learned very much at all