No Accounting for Waste

Is Afghanistan becoming a money pit like Iraq?

Army photo by Staff Sgt. Joshua T. Jasper.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


For the extended version of this article, read “Afghanistan: Oversight AWOL?

DURING HIS fourth trip to Afghanistan, in May, Arnold Fields, the retired Marine general who serves as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, or SIGAR (pronounced “cigar”), noticed a pattern. Each Afghan official he met gave the impression of being the only honest man in the country. “At least that’s how they perceive themselves,” he told me after his return. “Obviously that might not be the case.”

It’s not surprising that Fields can’t figure out whom to trust. Afghanistan places fifth in Transparency International’s annual ranking of the world’s most corrupt nations. (Iraq is tied for second.) Yet Fields, who’s in charge of ensuring that taxpayers’ dollars don’t end up lining the pockets of swindlers and opportunists, heads an office that’s ill equipped to deal with this level of graft. Which raises the question of just how serious Washington is about preventing Afghanistan from becoming a money pit like Iraq, where billions in reconstruction funds have gone missing.

SIGAR only got its start in July 2008, more than six years after the fall of the Taliban. (Previously, audits had been conducted solely by individual agency IGs.) By midsummer, Fields’ office was still operating at half-strength, employing 44 of the 90 staffers Fields says he needs. It has produced just one audit. Its counterpart, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), released more than a dozen within its first year—and acknowledges that it has provided only “an episodic story of waste.”

In March, when President Obama unveiled his new strategy for Afghanistan, he promised “robust funding” for Field’s anti-corruption efforts. But Fields says he needs at least one-third more than the $23 million Obama is giving him for 2010.

This spring, the Government Accountability Office warned that the sudden influx of money into the poorly regulated Afghan contracting system “increases the risk of corruption and the waste of resources.” But the Pentagon doesn’t seem too concerned: SIGAR’s first audit, released in May, revealed that the DOD had assigned a single representative to monitor a $404 million contract to train and support Afghan security forces. That officer had limited contracting experience, the auditors noted, and had yet to make any site visits.

Fields says a forthcoming audit will examine the Afghan government’s “capacity” to combat corruption within its own ministries. He refused to characterize the findings except to say that corruption “runs very deeply” and must be addressed: “Indications are that it has not.”

Fields has been working closely with Stuart Bowen, the Washington lawyer who heads SIGIR, the model for SIGAR. “Unless the expanding Afghanistan program draws upon the lessons learned in Iraq, substantial waste of taxpayer dollars will occur,” Bowen warned Congress in March as Fields sat at his side. SIGAR “is unsurprisingly uncovering problems similar to those we found in Iraq,” Bowen continued, lamenting that most of the $32 billion in US reconstruction funds budgeted for Afghanistan since 2001 have been spent “with little oversight.”

For now, few people in Washington even know who Fields is. That will soon change if he has his way. “It is my intent to take this to the limit,” he says. “I might take it to a point at which the Congress might say, ‘Fields, you have reached too far.'” Presently, though, accusations of overzealous oversight are the least of his concerns.

For the extended version of this article, read “Afghanistan: Oversight AWOL?

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate