U.S. wasting treasure but not saving Afghans

The U.S. is flushing hundreds of millions of dollars a year down the drain for programs in Afghanistan that often seem to be aiding and abetting the Taliban or squandering funds on items of little or no use to the Afghans. Those are the conclusions in a succession of reports to Congress by a special inspector general.

One State Department agency, USAID, pumped more than $137 million from 2011 to September into a program called, in typical Washington bureaucratese “Stability in Key Areas.” The result?

“The relationship between USAID stability programs and the insurgency ... found increased support for the Taliban when USAID stabilization programs were implemented in Talibancontrolled villages. Additionally, violence increased in government-controlled villages that received USAID stability projects,” a report says.

None of this should be especially astonishing to anyone who understands what has been going on since the start of hostilities in America’s longest war — 14 years and counting. While U.S. programs might have been intended to help build local infrastructure and industrial self-sufficiency, all too often they blundered.

One report points out that Afghanistan has vast mineral resources that could lead to economic self-sufficiency. Yet, as a result of competition and bungling between Defense and State Department initiatives, a report says, “the $488 million U.S. government investment in efforts to develop Afghanistan’s extractive industries could be wasted.”

“With billions of dollars at stake, many times we have observed the absence of rudimentary management skills that should have been grounded on proper planning and a sound strategy,” said Special Inspector Gen. John Sopko, in response to questions from USA TODAY.

Just his group’s investigations have accumulated $944.5 million in criminal fines, restitution, forfeitures, civil settlement recoveries and government cost savings.

But it’s not only the misuse of funds; it’s the utter squandering of them. Take the inspector general’s latest revelation — that the Department of Defense’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations "spent nearly $43 million to construct a compressed natural gas (CNG) automobile filling station in the city of Sheberghan.” A similar station in neighboring Pakistan cost $500,000. But there’s more.

Seems that Afghanistan doesn’t even have a natural gas transmission and local distribution infrastructure to support a viable market for CNG cars. And converting a car to run on CNG instead of gasoline costs $700 in a country where the average annual income is $690.

You would think that the least we could learn in a 14-year-old war is how to help the Afghan people without making our enemies more popular in the process. It would appear that the very expensive record suggests we haven’t learned very much at all.