Against advice Obama wasted $80 million US taxpayer dollars on a building in Afghanistan now being abandoned. How do we get our money back?

.
"A cautionary tale of wishful thinking, poor planning"... $2 billion US taxpayer dollars a week go to this scam and no one says a word.

5/5/12, "U.S. abandons consulate site in Afghanistan, citing security risks," Washington Post, E. Londono

"After signing a 10-year lease and spending more than $80 million on a site envisioned as the United States’ diplomatic hub in northern Afghanistan, American officials say they have abandoned their plans, deeming the location for the proposed compound too dangerous.

Eager to raise an American flag and open a consulate in a bustling downtown district of the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, officials in 2009 sought waivers to stringent State Department building rules and overlooked significant security problems at the site, documents show. The problems included relying on local building techniques that made the compound vulnerable to a car bombing, according to an assessment by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that was obtained by The Washington Post.

The decision to give up on the site is the clearest sign to date that, as the U.S.-led military coalition starts to draw down troops amid mounting security concerns, American diplomats are being forced to reassess how to safely keep a viable presence in Afghanistan. The plan for the Mazar-e Sharif consulate, as laid out in a previously undisclosed diplomatic memorandum, is a cautionary tale of wishful thinking, poor planning and the type of stark choices the U.S. government will have to make in coming years as it tries to wind down its role in the war....

The embassy memo says the facility was far from ideal from the start. The compound, which housed a hotel when the Americans took it on, shared a wall with local shopkeepers. The space between the outer perimeter wall and buildings inside — a distance known as “setback” in war zone construction — was not up to U.S. diplomatic standards set by the State Department’s Overseas Security Policy Board. The complex was surrounded by several tall buildings from which an attack could easily be launched."...

-----------------------------------------

Commenter to above article:

---------------------------------------

woodyag

"The whole thing reeks of money. All those "exceptions" to policy - put big American bucks into some local pockets- and some American ones. An exceptional opportunity for a Congressional investigation, don't you think? So... where is it? A little corruption here; a little corruption there... pretty soon you're talking real money, as Everett Dirksen did not say."

=====================

6/6/11, "US Spends Two Billion Dollars a Week in Afghanistan"

.