As Afghanistan Contracting Surges, Who's Following the Money?

[G_j]

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/04-5


As Afghanistan Contracting Surges, Who's Following the Money?

U.S. Agencies Fail to Coordinate, Inviting Waste and Abuse
by Christine Spolar

In the past eight years, the United States has allocated $51 billion to rebuild and stabilize Afghanistan. But tracking that money sometimes seems as challenging as finding the leaders of the Taliban.

No one keeps an exact count of the number of private contractors working in Afghanistan -- even though Congress ordered that be done more than two years ago. There’s no central list of all the contracts now in force. Government auditors cannot determine with confidence if the reconstruction money is being properly spent or meets the stated objectives. And efforts to improve coordination among the key U.S. agencies managing the money -- the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development -- have lagged at best.

That is the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with auditors, contractors, congressional aides and inspectors general, who echo the findings of independent government reports over the past decade. Without rigorous record-keeping, they say, the contracting process is vulnerable to waste, duplication of effort and fraud.

The oversight task is growing more critical, because as the Obama administration boosts the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan it also is spawning a surge in contractors hired to build schools and government offices, to help farmers grow cash crops other than poppies that fuel heroin production -- and, in the most critical nation-building task, to train Afghan police and soldiers.


An estimated 56,000 more contractors—almost double the 30,000 additional troops to be deployed this year—are expected to be working in Afghanistan by the end of 2010, according to the Congressional Research Service. The number of contractors could top 160,000, exceeding the ranks of U.S. troops fighting the Taliban.

But that’s just an estimate. A key official in the inspector general’s office established to oversee Afghan reconstruction spending said that simply “defining the universe” of contractor spending has been difficult.

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[Solly Mack]

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Interesting article!

[G_j]

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