The final US budget included substantial cuts to USAID operations in Afghanistan, and has USAID and its allies griping about the cuts “punishing the Afghan people” and impacting their nominally vital work.
Yet USAID’s record in Afghanistan is so disastrously bad it’s amazing they can keep a straight face saying this, and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is constantly issuing new reports reflecting USAID’s wasteful, unproductive nature.
Today’s SIGAR example comes from Mazar-e Sharif, where in 2008 USAUD decided to create a teacher training facility. Five and a half years later, there is still no training facility.
There are some buildings, kind of. Yet SIGAR notes that USAID briefly allowed the unfinished facility to open and almost immediately had to vacate it pending repairs, with major safety concerns about the haphazard construction on the site.
USAID’s operation are a laundry list of such failures, with big projects never completed, or never used, or never wanted, or some combination thereof. Their operations are a virtual black hole from which money never returns, and a 50 percent cut basically amounts to a 50 percent cut in money squandered by them.