““The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan," one American official said, "was the United States.""...4/28/2013, NY Times
-------------------
3/10/15, "Afghans can't manage billions in aid, U.S. inspector finds," Bloomberg, Tony Capaccio, Washington
"Billions of dollars in U.S. and international aid for Afghanistan's security forces are at risk because the ministries that manage the money aren't preventing waste and corruption, the Pentagon inspector general found.
"Future direct assistance funds are vulnerable to increased fraud and abuse" because the Afghan government has "had numerous contract award and execution irregularities" and procurement-law violations, according to an audit labeled "For Official Use Only."
The Afghan National Security Forces remain dependent on U.S. and allied financing as foreign troops depart. The Pentagon has provided $3.3 billion in payments to Afghan ministries since October 2010, and an additional $13 billion in such military aid is projected through 2019, three years after President Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw all but a small number of U.S. troops.
The Feb. 26 audit bolsters assessments by the office of John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.
"The ministries did not adequately develop, award, execute or monitor contracts funded with U.S. direct assistance," Michael Roark, assistant inspector general for contract management, wrote to U.S. and allied commanders in a letter with the new audit.
The audit criticized the transition command for inadequately training the ministries to manage U.S. assistance and instead doing the work itself, creating a "continued dependence."
Officials with the command said "pressure to maintain hard-fought gains" on the battlefield "and not compromise" Afghan military operations "with poorly executed support contracts resulted in the coalition overlooking ministerial shortcomings."
U.S. Army Major General Todd Semonite of the transition command, wrote Jan. 28 in a response to the audit that his organization will continue to withhold funds when necessary as leverage when documentation is suspect.
Semonite also said he was ordering steps to improve capabilities, including imposing tighter temporary controls and hiring the Washington (DC)-based Oxus Consulting Group to work with the ministries.
"Improvement is expected in decision-making, procurement of goods and services and financial management," Semonite wrote.
The command is strengthening its program to train the Afghan military's financial management personnel at the corps and regional headquarters level, he said." via npr
====================
"Even as revelations of fraud and abuse stacked up, the United States continued shoveling money year after year."...
10/1/14, "Paying Afghanistan’s Bills," NY Editorial Board, 10/2 print ed.
"By
the end of the year, Congress will have appropriated more money for
Afghanistan’s reconstruction adjusted for inflation, than the
United States spent rebuilding 16 European nations after World War II
under the Marshall Plan. A
staggering portion of that money — $104 billion — has been mismanaged
and stolen. Much of what was built is crumbling or will be
unsustainable.
.
Well-connected Afghans smuggled millions of stolen aid
money in suitcases that were checked onto Dubai-bound flights. The
Afghan government largely turned a blind eye to widespread malfeasance.
Even as revelations of fraud and abuse stacked up, the United States continued shoveling money year after year because cutting off the financial spigot was seen as a sure way to doom the war effort....
The
United States and NATO partners recently agreed to spend $5.1 billion a
year to pay for the army and police, until at least 2017. Western
donors are expected to continue to give billions more for reconstruction
and other initiatives, recognizing that Afghanistan won’t be weaned off
international aid anytime soon. In fact, the government appears to be broke.
.
.
A
few weeks ago, Afghanistan’s Finance Ministry made an urgent plea to
the United States for a $537 million bailout, warning that it would
otherwise not be able to make payroll. That’s part of a broader,
worrisome trend. The International Monetary Fund estimates that
Afghanistan will face a financial gap of roughly $7.7 billion annually
between now and 2018....
Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, who took office on Monday,
has pledged to stamp out graft. “I am not corrupt, and I am not going
to encourage corruption, tolerate it or become the instrument,” the
president, a former World Bank executive, told the BBC in an interview.
.
.
Delivering a speech at Georgetown University recently, Mr. Sopko marveled at the Marshall Plan comparison. “What have we gotten for the investment?” he asked."
.
.
=====================
"Afghanistan is controlled by a structured mafiaesque system:"
"In early 2010, I was asked to make a presentation to a counter-narcotics symposium at the Marshall Center in Germany. In attendance were several hundred high-ranking military and law enforcement officers from around the world. I dutifully explained the opium economy in Afghanistan, which I've had a chance to observe during nearly a decade living and working in Kandahar. But I could not resist inserting two slides at the end of the talk. They depicted the phenomenon that really interests me: the increasingly structured capture of the Afghan government by what amounts to a set of interlocking, vertically integrated criminal networks.
.
I have watched the
phenomenon evolve over the last 10 years.... Over
time, the corruption expanded and evolved, and today, Afghanistan is controlled by a structured mafiaesque system , in which money flows
upward via purchase of office, kickbacks or "sweets" in return for
permission to extract resources (of which more varieties exist in
impoverished Afghanistan than one might think) and protection in case of
legal or international scrutiny. Those foolish enough to raise
objections are punished. The result is a system that selects for
criminality, excluding and marginalizing the very men and women of
probity most needed to build a sustainable state.
When I finished my presentation, to my astonishment, the participants rose in a standing ovation. Many came down to the front of the room to talk further. "You just described my country," they chorused....
As I spoke to these symposium participants (who came from Nigeria, the former Soviet republics, Pakistan and elsewhere), I couldn't help but notice a correlation between mafia government and the existence of violent religious extremism. And I realized that the phenomenon of public corruption — often pooh-poohed or viewed as a part of the ambient "culture" of South Asians, or Muslims or whomever — poses a substantial threat to international security....
Was mafia government, I began to wonder, also posing a threat to the entire phase of political history in which we live?"...
.............
"Sarah Chayes runs a cooperative that produces soap and skincare products in Kandahar, Afghanistan (www.arghand.org). She is the author of "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban" and designed an anti-corruption strategy for the command of the international forces.
.
======================
.
"Afghanistan is controlled by a structured mafiaesque system:"
9/25/11, "Government by crime syndicate," LA Times, Op-ed, Sarah Chayes
"In early 2010, I was asked to make a presentation to a counter-narcotics symposium at the Marshall Center in Germany. In attendance were several hundred high-ranking military and law enforcement officers from around the world. I dutifully explained the opium economy in Afghanistan, which I've had a chance to observe during nearly a decade living and working in Kandahar. But I could not resist inserting two slides at the end of the talk. They depicted the phenomenon that really interests me: the increasingly structured capture of the Afghan government by what amounts to a set of interlocking, vertically integrated criminal networks.
.
When I finished my presentation, to my astonishment, the participants rose in a standing ovation. Many came down to the front of the room to talk further. "You just described my country," they chorused....
As I spoke to these symposium participants (who came from Nigeria, the former Soviet republics, Pakistan and elsewhere), I couldn't help but notice a correlation between mafia government and the existence of violent religious extremism. And I realized that the phenomenon of public corruption — often pooh-poohed or viewed as a part of the ambient "culture" of South Asians, or Muslims or whomever — poses a substantial threat to international security....
Was mafia government, I began to wonder, also posing a threat to the entire phase of political history in which we live?"...
.............
"Sarah Chayes runs a cooperative that produces soap and skincare products in Kandahar, Afghanistan (www.arghand.org). She is the author of "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban" and designed an anti-corruption strategy for the command of the international forces.
.
======================
.
9/5/14, "Rare Earth: Afghanistan Sits on $1 Trillion in Minerals," nbcnews.com, Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience
““The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan," one American official said, "was the United States.""...
"For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases,
backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off
every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy
of the Central Intelligence Agency.
"Despite
being one of the poorest nations in the world, Afghanistan may be
sitting on one of the richest troves of minerals in the world, valued at
nearly $1 trillion, scientists say.
Afghanistan, a country
nearly the size of Texas, is loaded with minerals deposited by the
violent collision of the Indian subcontinent with Asia. The U.S.
Geological Survey began inspecting what mineral resources Afghanistan
had after U.S.-led forces drove the Taliban from power in the country in
2004.
.
.
In 2006, U.S. researchers flew airborne missions to conduct magnetic, gravity and hyperspectral surveys over Afghanistan. [Infographic: Facts About Rare Earth Minerals]
The aerial surveys determined that
Afghanistan may hold 60 million tons of copper, 2.2 billion tons of iron
ore, 1.4 million tons of rare earth elements such as lanthanum, cerium
and neodymium, and lodes of aluminum, gold,
silver, zinc, mercury and lithium. For instance, the Khanneshin
carbonatite deposit in Afghanistan's Helmand province is valued at $89
billion, full as it is with rare earth elements.
.
.
"Afghanistan is a
country that is very, very rich in mineral resources," geologist Jack
Medlin, program manager of the USGS Afghanistan project, told
LiveScience. The scientists' work was detailed in the Aug. 15 issue of
the journal Science.
.
.
In 2010, the USGS data attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Defense's Task Force
for Business and Stability Operations, which is entrusted with
rebuilding Afghanistan. The task force valued Afghanistan's mineral
resources at $908 billion, while the Afghan government's estimate is $3
trillion.
Over the past four
years, USGS and TFBSO have embarked on dozens of excursions to confirm
the aerial findings, resulting in what are essentially treasure maps for
mining companies.
.
.
The Afghan government
has already signed a 30-year, $3 billion contract with the China
Metallurgical Group, a state-owned mining enterprise based in Beijing,
to exploit the Mes Aynak copper deposit, and awarded mining rights for
the country's biggest iron deposit to a group of Indian state-run and
private companies."
.
.
===================
““The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan," one American official said, "was the United States.""...
.
4/28/13, "With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan," NY Times, Matthew Rosenberg
.
.
All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader....
.
.
The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides
of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered
directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far
greater impact on everyday governing.
.
.
Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the
influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the
cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining
Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.
.
.
“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan," one American official said, "was the United States."...
.
.
Much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off
warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and,
in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials
said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks
that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled
unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what
are basically organized crime syndicates....
.
.
While intelligence agencies often pay foreign officials to provide
information, dropping off bags of cash at a foreign leader’s office to
curry favor is a more unusual arrangement....
No one mentions the agency’s money at cabinet meetings. It is handled by
a small clique at the National Security Council, including its
administrative chief, Mohammed Zia Salehi, Afghan officials said."...
====================
"Millions of (US) contracting dollars have ultimately ended up in the hands of the Taliban."
4/26/13, "The US Is Still Spending Billions In Afghanistan, But No One Seems To Care," Fiscal Times, David Francis
"Hard-fought gains in Afghanistan over the last decade are at risk of being squandered – unless immediate action is taken to determine the fate of tens of billions of dollars in questionable reconstruction projects, the chief of the Afghan audit agency said.
In an exclusive interview with The Fiscal Times, John F. Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said that the Pentagon, aid agencies and the State Department must quickly evaluate these projects to determine whether the billions being spent in Afghanistan right now will yield the desired results or not. Many projects are simply not sustainable, he said – and continuing to spend money on them results not just in a wasted fortune, but very real risks to nearly 70,000 American soldiers who are still there.
“They have not thought about sustainability,” Sopko said, referring to the military, aid agencies and the State Department. “If you don’t think about that, you’re going to build a bridge and give it to the Afghans who can’t sustain it.”
He added, “There’s pervasive corruption throughout the country.”
These warnings from Sopko – who was appointed to his post last summer by President Obama – come as lawmakers, the public, and the policy community in D.C. have largely turned their attention away from the war and from the soldiers still fighting and dying there. Despite spending some $500 billion to fight in Afghanistan, the war is becoming invisible. Sopko and his team at SIGAR are among the few voices reminding the country about financial mismanagement, corruption and the continuing threat to American lives.
"Hard-fought gains in Afghanistan over the last decade are at risk of being squandered – unless immediate action is taken to determine the fate of tens of billions of dollars in questionable reconstruction projects, the chief of the Afghan audit agency said.
In an exclusive interview with The Fiscal Times, John F. Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said that the Pentagon, aid agencies and the State Department must quickly evaluate these projects to determine whether the billions being spent in Afghanistan right now will yield the desired results or not. Many projects are simply not sustainable, he said – and continuing to spend money on them results not just in a wasted fortune, but very real risks to nearly 70,000 American soldiers who are still there.
“They have not thought about sustainability,” Sopko said, referring to the military, aid agencies and the State Department. “If you don’t think about that, you’re going to build a bridge and give it to the Afghans who can’t sustain it.”
He added, “There’s pervasive corruption throughout the country.”
These warnings from Sopko – who was appointed to his post last summer by President Obama – come as lawmakers, the public, and the policy community in D.C. have largely turned their attention away from the war and from the soldiers still fighting and dying there. Despite spending some $500 billion to fight in Afghanistan, the war is becoming invisible. Sopko and his team at SIGAR are among the few voices reminding the country about financial mismanagement, corruption and the continuing threat to American lives.
“I believe in the mission in Afghanistan,” he said. “We lost too many lives and we’ve spent too much money” to ignore it.
Dollars to the Taliban
In recent months, SIGAR has been especially busy identifying waste, fraud and abuse. Earlier this month, it found that a $53 million USAID project meant to supply power to Kandahar was unsustainable.
It also found that millions of contracting dollars have ultimately ended up in the hands of the Taliban. As The Fiscal Times recently reported, the Pentagon did not have the required protocols in place to prevent 80 percent of all contracts from getting into the hands of the enemy.
A quarterly report issued by SIGAR in January said that the United States has spent more than half of the nearly $100 billion in Afghan reconstruction funds on developing the country’s police and security forces. But numerous reports have found that the Afghan forces are not ready to take over security responsibilities.
Two recent SIGAR reports also found that police and Army buildings built by the United States for $26 million in two key strategic provinces were underutilized or sat empty. One was even being used as a chicken coop.
All of this is especially troubling in the wake of a February 2013 GAO report that determined Afghanistan would essentially collapse without extensive U.S. financial support. Sopko painted a picture of a country with intractable corruption, a U.S. military that had not properly planned or executed countless projects, and an aid apparatus that has
failed to acknowledge realities on the ground.
.
“Afghanistan, according to Transparency International, is the most corrupt country [in the world] except North Korea and Somalia,” he said.
But there are also a myriad of problems on the American side. Sopko said poor planning and inadequate quality assurance practices make it nearly impossible to effectively implement reconstruction programs.
“What’s caused the extensive problems is something I emphasized in the last quarterly report: inadequate planning, poor quality assurance,” he said. “We’re not enforcing quality. The successful programs are the ones that [were] planned properly,” Sopko added.
“They had talked to the Afghans, they had worked out sustainability. They dealt with corruption.”...
He referenced a story written by The Fiscal Times’ Josh Boak when Boak was with The Washington Post. In 2011, Boak found that a school built by the U.S.in a remote region of Afghanistan had actually been taken over by the Taliban.
“You’ve got to go kick the tires. You’ve got to make certain someone we trust goes out and makes certain the money is spent the way it was intended,” Sopko insisted. “You’ve got to verify that the money you gave to buy fuel bought the fuel.”
.
Sopko said he is especially concerned about continued direct foreign assistance to the Afghan government. “It’s a big area of concern,” Sopko said of U.S. assistance to Afghanistan. “Afghans don’t have the capability to handle the direct assistance.”
.
The amount of money provided to Afghanistan is expected to exceed $100 billion by the end of the year – and the U.S. will need to fund the country far into the future if the government is to have any chance of success.
USAID also lacks the ability to effectively monitor money being given to the Afghan government, suggested Sopko. “When I talk to some of the people in USAID, they refer to direct assistance programs they’ve done in Egypt and Israel. They’re not Afghanistan. I’m looking for models where this has worked in a kinetic environment,” he said.".
==================================
"DynCorp is basically a private subsidiary of Uncle Sam."
4/24/14, "The Real Winner of the Afghan War Is This Shady Military Contractor," Daily Beast, Jacob Siegel
"DynCorp, one of the largest corporations working in the government’s army of private contractors, has long been known for corruption scandals and a questionable performance record. But none of that seems to have discouraged the U.S. government from awarding the company new contracts.
The State Department paid nearly $4 billion for projects to aid in Afghan reconstruction from 2002 to 2013. $2.5 billion of that went to DynCorp—69% of all the money awarded by the State Department over almost the entire duration of the war.
The figures on DynCorp’s earnings come from a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR), an auditing agency created by Congress to provide oversight on government spending in Afghanistan.
According to the SIGAR report, 89% of State Department funding, $3.5 billion, went to supporting large, so-called "rule-of-law" projects, like training and equipping the Afghan police force. And that was DynCorp’s primary focus in Afghanistan, too—although the firm also handled jobs like providing bodyguards for Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai.
“Dyncorp contracts dealt principally with training and equipping the Afghan National Police and counternarcotics forces. DynCorp contracts included police trainers, construction of police infrastructure, and fielding police equipment and vehicles,” the SIGAR report states.
The list of DynCorp’s job responsibilities, particularly in counter-narcotics and training the Afghan police force, gives a short rundown of some of the most difficult problems for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. But for all the billions the company has received to resolve these problems, there has been precious little progress. In the case of narcotics, it’s actually gotten worse in recent years, with opium production reaching record highs in 2013.
It might raise alarms that so much of the State Department’s budget was funneled directly into one entity. But DynCorp—which is owned by Cerberus Capital Management LP, a private equity firm based in New York—is used to relying on federal cash. With more than 96% of the company’s $3 billion in revenue coming from government contracts, DynCorp is basically a private subsidiary of Uncle Sam.
By itself, that might not be so bad; there are plenty of private companies that bring in public funds. The real problem with DynCorp is the company’s well-documented history of corruption investigations and subpar performance.
In July 2009, Forbes wrote that “Dyncorp has emerged as one of the big winners of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which now generate 53% of Dyncorp’s $3.1 billion of annual revenue.” Not long after, the “big winner” was called out in 2010 by the inspector general for Iraq for being unable, along with the State Department, to account for $1 billion spent training the Iraqi police force.
In 2011, the company was hit even harder in a joint report from Department of State and Department of Defense inspector generals citing failures that “placed the overall mission at risk by not providing the mentoring essential for developing the Afghan Government and Police Force.”
And that’s not even mentioning the allegations that DynCorp employees procured child prostitutes to entertain Afghan officials. It’s a claim that the company and State Department have both denied, but was serious enough to prompt worried emails from an Afghan politician asking that the story be kept secret."...
==============================
1/13/2010, "Afghanistan's Development Debacle," Mother Jones, Daniel Schulman
.
.
"The Obama administration is planning a surge of civilian personnel and
funding to address Afghanistan's formidable development challenges....Part of this effort will likely be
overseen and coordinated by a UN division that has been plagued by
allegations of waste and mismanagement and the US development agency
that has turned a blind eye to its transgressions.
A little-noticed report [PDF] by the Government Accountability Office, highlighted on Monday by Fox News, paints a bleak picture of what Obama's civilian surge is up against. It focuses on the US Agency for International Development's oversight of millions in reconstruction projects carried out by the UN's Office of Project Services (UNOPS), which has overseen efforts to build schools and medical clinics, rehab secondary roads, and construct bridges and hydroelectric plants....
.
UNOPS has had a very troubled track record in Afghanistan. To begin
with, the American official who directed its operations in the country
from 2002 to 2006, Gary Helseth, stands accused
of diverting around a half million dollars in development funds to
bankroll his own high-flying lifestyle—including renovating his home in
Kabul,
splurging on first-class travel and fancy restaurants, and
throwing lavish parties. And an investigation [PDF] by USAID's Inspector General, obtained by USA Today
in April, substantiated a host of serious allegations against UNOPS and
its parent agency, the UN Development Program. "The U.N. delivered
shoddy work, diverted money to other countries and then stonewalled U.S.
efforts to figure out what happened," the paper reported.
Despite UNOPS' well documented shortcomings, ramped up development efforts in Afghanistan raise the likelihood that the agency may take on an even greater role in managing reconstruction projects. If that's the case, the Obama adminstation should be planning for a surge of not just manpower and money, but oversight."
.
=====================
.
.
10/26/14, "Afghanistan’s Unending Addiction," NY Times Editorial Board
"Over
the last dozen years, the United States has poured $7.6 billion into
combating Afghanistan’s opium production, and the results are now clear:
The program failed.
This
effectively leaves the Afghan economy heavily dependent on criminal
enterprises....The
uncontrolled opium trade also provides the Taliban with up to $155 million annually....
.
.
The
value of last year’s yield was $3 billion, up from $2 billion in 2012, a
50 percent increase in a single year. One province, Nangarhar, was
declared “poppy-free” by the United Nations in 2008, but between 2012
and 2013, it had a fourfold increase in production....
.
.
One early order
of business is to figure out where the counternarcotics strategy went
wrong — why so much investment over the years has produced so little....
.
.
It must also be said, however, that American, European, Afghan and United Nations officials at times sabotaged their own mission by bickering over how the money should be spent and where best to focus resources."...
.
