(SIGAR John Sopko confers with U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan, July 14, 2015. Original image via DVIDS. Graphic by Code and Dagger.)
The U.S. government watchdog that has uncovered millions in waste, fraud and theft of American tax dollars in Afghanistan suggested that its work will continue, somehow, despite the withdrawal of American troops from the increasingly violent nation.
A spokesperson for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as the SIGAR, told Code and Dagger recently, “SIGAR’s mission and funding levels are not tied to the number of U.S. military and civilian personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.”
The official pointed to SIGAR’s legislative mandate (PDF), which says the office will only be terminated six months after the U.S. government budgets less than $250 million for reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. And the U.S. is not even close to that, sitting on billions still to pump into the southwest Asian nation.
“For reference,” the spokesperson said by email, “as of December 31, 2020, approximately $8.23 billion of the amount appropriated to the eight largest reconstruction funds remained for possible disbursement.”
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But the spokesperson declined to answer an obvious follow-up question: How would SIGAR be able to investigate anything on the ground there without the protection of U.S. troops? The SIGAR, John Sopko, was not made available for an interview.
President Joe Biden announced in mid-April a full drawdown plan of U.S. forces to be completed by Sept. 11, 2021 – 20 years after the 9/11 attacks that prompted the U.S. invasion in the first place.
And while the debate will rage for years over America’s final legacy there, SIGAR already released a report about what a former ambassador called America’s “ultimate failure”: rampant corruption by the billions.
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The report, published in 2016, said the U.S. did not “fully appreciate the potential for corruption to threaten the security and state-building mission in Afghanistan” and “failed to recognize that billions of dollars injected into a small, underdeveloped country, with limited oversight and strong pressures to spend, contributed to the growth of corruption.”
It was a failure SIGAR chronicled in dozens of smaller reports covering failed multi-million-dollar projects, from Afghan police stations that sit empty to $230 million in spare vehicle parts that weren’t accounted for.
Often those reports came with photos of the projects in question, clearly taken by teams on the ground.
“Time and time again, we have found the reconstruction effort plagued by problems of poor planning and poor oversight,” Sopko said in 2013. “Unfortunately, all too often we are not asking the simple questions before we pump money into a project, such as, do the Afghans want it? Do they need it? Can they sustain it? And can we oversee it? We can get this right, but we need to be diligent with taxpayer funds and individuals need to be held accountable.”
But with thousands of U.S. troops on their way out, and the country descending deeper into violence, there’s a very open question about how much the U.S. will be able to oversee – and Sopko will be able to uncover – from here on out.
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