A new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is offering some of the first looks at three years worth of audits of Afghan management of the aid provided by USAID.
Anyone whose paid even cursory attention to Afghanistan’s legendary level of corruption could expect the audits were bad, but they turned out to be so bad that USAID officials tried to keep SIGAR from disclosing them for years,
The report detailed 107 “major risks” to providing aid money directly to the Afghan government, mostly critical and mostly centering around how millions of dollars in cash have a nasty tendency of disappearing in Afghanistan.
SIGAR issued a secondary report at the same time about the Salang Hospital in Parwan Province, a rural, US-built facility that cost over half a million dollars, and which was not built to standard. The hospital, which has neither clean running water nor electricity, is operating “more as a medical clinic than as a hospital” as it was supposed to. The report detailed that the lack of water meant staff would bathe patients in untreated water drawn from a nearby river.
The US has thrown billions of dollars in aid at Afghanistan during the occupation, but between fraud by officials, fraud by contracts, and ill-conceived planning, the plans have accomplished very little, leaving the nation with crumbling roads and infrastructure, and a lot of recently constructed buildings that are of no use.
And Obama is hell bound on setting up shop there.
And no one will be held accountable. Even if SIGAR should actually name those responsible, none will do time in prison.
And I suspect that those responsible for allowing this report to see the light of day will have their careers shortened and then the report will be shelved and described by those who might talk about it as biased and unreliable because they used faulty parameters.
America the new progressive liberal soviet style nation builders on a grand scale. Where ever the us goes massive corruption follows and only 20% of what is payed for works. Why do we repeat history.
Sadly, this 'news' is- or should be- common knowledge. I would be hard-pressed to find many- or any- recipients of US aid who use it wisely or at least for its stated purpose. On the other hand, I imagine a great deal of aid from the US- regardless of the receiving nation- goes into the pockets of the well-connected set.