In the wake of its initial military action in Afghanistan, and in spite of then-President George W. Bush’s prior opposition to “nation-building,” the U.S. embarked upon a large-scale effort to help reconstruct the war-torn nation. While there have been some successes, the Afghanistan reconstruction effort has been plagued by boondoggles and other forms of government waste, detailed in the most recent reports from a series of inspector general audits.
In the wake of its initial military action in Afghanistan, and in spite of then-President George W. Bush’s prior opposition to “nation-building,” the U.S. embarked upon a large-scale effort to help reconstruct the war-torn nation. While there have been some successes, the Afghanistan reconstruction effort has been plagued by boondoggles and other forms of government waste, detailed in the most recent reports from a series of inspector general audits.
Since 2002, the government has appropriated $104 billion for the Afghanistan reconstruction effort. After accounting for inflation, this is nearly as much as was spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild most of Europe after World War II.
Recent reports from the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction detailed how much of this money has been wasted on unnecessary and ill-advised projects.
Consider, for example, the $34.4 million spent to encourage soybean farming and consumption, despite the fact that Afghans do not have a taste for soybeans and produced so little of them that the vast majority of the crop had to be grown in America and shipped to Afghanistan. Then, there was the building of schools and health facilities that cannot be staffed or supplied.
SIGAR also uncovered Defense Department plans to purchase $772 million in aircraft that the Afghan military cannot operate or maintain. And who could forget the $34 million, 64,000-square-foot military headquarters facility at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province, which military commanders said was unnecessary — and remains unused?
Not all of the concerns about waste are merely fiscal. According to a SIGAR report last month, the Pentagon has spent $626 million providing more than 747,000 weapons and auxiliary equipment — mostly small arms — to the Afghan National Security Forces during the past decade. Of the 474,823 serial numbers on record, auditors could not account for 203,888 (43 percent) of them.
“Without confidence in the Afghan government’s ability to account for or properly dispose of these weapons, SIGAR is concerned that they could be obtained by insurgents and pose additional risks to Afghan civilians and the (Afghan National Security Forces),” the report noted.
During 2012, John Sopko’s first year on the job as inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, about $7 billion of the $10.6 billion in spending analyzed was identified as waste. “We’ve built schools that have fallen down, clinics that there are no doctors for; we’ve built roads that are falling apart. It’s massive,” Sopko told the French news agency AFP. “We spent too much money, too fast, in too small a country with little oversight.”
America’s “you break it, you buy it” policy on repairing the damage it causes during war is understandable — perhaps even admirable. But we should take better care to fix only what is necessary. We should also bear these examples in mind the next time a congressman protests about how we can’t make any cuts to the defense budget.
— Orange County Register