Guardian: Afghanistan - Military Quagmire And Government Money Pit

[Hissyspit]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/12/afghanistan-us-military

Afghanistan: military quagmire and government money pit
One reason US reconstruction work in Afghanistan is so fruitless is that oversight into where the billions go is wholly inadequate

Pratap Chatterjee
guardian.co.uk
Friday 12 November 2010

Louis Berger, a major construction company headquartered in New Jersey, has agreed to pay out a record $69.3m in fines (pdf), the largest ever such penalty imposed on a contractor working in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. The company has been awarded billions of dollars in contracts for the construction of roads, schools and electrical plants in Afghanistan.

Harold Salomon, a former senior financial analyst at the company, discovered that company officials were sending bills for items like the cost of the music system in its Washington, DC office to the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Salomon blew the whistle on estimated overcharging of up to $20m and took the company to court with the help of Phillips & Cohen, a trial law firm in Washington, DC.

- snip -

The litany of financial mismanagement goes on. In a fourth audit issued by Sigar in October, investigators reported that Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan was receiving millions of dollars in aid which local government officials were unable to properly oversee. "This haphazard approach to development assistance results in overlapping, or duplicate, projects, and also a lack of much-needed facilities because donors funnelling in millions of dollars do not know what specific projects the various donor countries are responsible for," Maj Gen Fields reported. "This is a recipe for a disaster, and a recipe for tremendous waste of money and resources."

Nine years after the invasion of Afghanistan, one has to ask the questions: why is there no proper way to manage money in Nangarhar (where the US has a major military base); why are police stations in Helmand and Kandahar (the two provinces with the largest military operations) unusable; and why is there, apparently, no way to tell whether or not the government salaries are being paid out properly; and what, finally, has happened to the last 18bn of US taxpayers' dollars spent in the country?

Yet, reconstruction funding is only part of the problem in Afghanistan. An estimated $14bn a year has been spent by the Pentagon and Nato on contractors to build bases and drive fuel trucks. Some of that money is believed to leak out into the hands of insurgent groups like the Taliban, according to an investigation conducted by the US Congress.

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[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. How does one say FUBAR in Pashtun?

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

2. oversight is inadequate - by design

its not a matter of "Oops where'd I mislay those $billions, its a matter
of payoffs, kickbacks and thievery.

[IcyPeas]

3. unbelievable...

you know what pisses me off? here we are in the U.S. bickering about social security and medicare and the economy and we are spending BILLIONS that aren't even accounted for. it's sickening. why isn't this article on the front page of every major newspaper here and/or the lead story on the MSM. Is our country asleep or what? - we never even hear that there's wars going on..... never mind all these kind of billion dollar details. Of course this article was from a non-u.s. paper. WHY ARE WE EVEN IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ? I am truly sick that there is not a louder call for us to get the hell out of these wars. I don't understand. The rest of the world should even be telling us to get the hell out.


another snip/

....Despite this investgation and settlement, a slew of new reports from the special inspector general for Afghanistan (Sigar) suggests that the US government still does not have a full grasp of what happens to the billions of dollars that are being funnelled into Afghanistan today....

:mad: