U.S. cut off from Afghan projects

After troop pullout, site visits unsafe, so officials must rely on private contractors

WASHINGTON — As coalition forces withdraw from Afghanistan, U.S.-funded reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars in far-flung regions of the country will soon be impossible for American officials to safely visit and directly inspect.

The planned removal of more than 40,000 troops and the closure of dozens of bases over the next year will shrink the protective umbrella for U.S. officials to keep tabs on construction work, training programs and other initiatives in the corruptionplagued nation. Only about 20percent of the country will be accessible to U.S. civilian oversight personnel in 2014, according to an analysis conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and obtained by The Washington Post.

Instead of curtailing projects, the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development plan to rely on private contractors to mon- itor the work of other private contractors on the taxpayerfunded projects. In a document soliciting firms to help with inspections, USAID said it intends to use satellite photos and crowdsourcing experiments that will solicit feedback on progress from Afghans whoare supposed to benefit from U.S.-financed work.

The inability of U.S. government personnel to inspect development projects is prompting worry among lawmakers and government inspectors that millions more dollars could be squandered in what has become the costliest reconstruction of a single country in American history.

“I would be shocked if this doesn’t have an unhappy ending,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who has been critical of reconstruction programs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

By plotting some of the largest civilian and military projects on a map generated by the inspector general’s office, The Washington Post found that at least 15 major reconstruction initiatives, projected to cost more than $1 billion, are expected to be beyond the reach of U.S. government personnel next year.

“Many of these projects will never be seen by an American government employee, and that’s a concern,” said John Sopko, the special inspector general. “We need to ensure that tax dollars for these programs are properly spent.”

On-site monitoring by the State Department, USAID and the Pentagon, as well as audits by inspectors general, led to dozens of projects being redesigned or scaled back over the past few years.

The ability of civilian governmentofficials andmilitary personnel to visit projects depends on the proximity of troops able to respond to an attack — and on the ability of medical personnel to transportthewoundedto coalition hospitals within an hour. As U.S. troops pull back to a handful of bases next year, travel will be circumscribed to areas within the radius of a 30-minute helicopter flight from those facilities.

Those areas almost certainly will shrink further by the end of next year.

President Barack Obama has not yet decided how many troops, if any, he will keep in Afghanistan in 2015 and beyond, but even under the Pentagon’s most optimistic scenarios, the remaining U.S. forces would be clustered in just four or five bases.

A senior USAID official said the agency is confident it can adequately monitor its work without U.S. military protection.

“This isn’t anything new for USAID,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

“Most of AID’s work is done in the absence of a military presence.”