afghanistanepidemic proportions, turning Kabul into one of the most polluted cities
in the world.
Between 2002 and 2017 the United States ‘obligated an estimated $714
billion for all spending – including war fighting and reconstruction – in
Afghanistan over more than 15 years’, 29 but most of this money has been
assigned to military operations, the training of security personnel and
a counter-narcotics programme. According to Oxfam only about 10 per
cent of u.s. aid has been spent on humanitarian assistance, while the sum
total of all international assistance after 2001 fell a long way short of that
provided by the international community to other post-conflict countries.
In 2008 the total of all humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan was around
$7 million per day, while per capita aid averaged $57 per person, a fraction
of that provided in Bosnia ($679) or East Timor ($233). 30 Furthermore,
40 per cent of all foreign aid returned to donor countries in the form of
salaries for foreign consultants, aid workers, profits for private contractors
and the purchase of equipment from donor nations.
In 2008 the u.s. Congress, concerned about the lack of accountability,
established the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
(sigar) to audit the activities of usaid, the u.s. military and the prts.
sigar’s monthly and quarterly reports make grim reading as they docu-
ment a litany of failures in dozens of multi-million-dollar programmes.
Indeed, nearly all the programmes sigar has reported on to date reveal
major cost blowouts, millions of dollars either frittered away on uncom-
pleted projects or paid in advance for work that never got off the ground.
Even projects that were completed suffered from shoddy workmanship
and more often than not did not fulfil all the contractual requirements or
conform to United States codes of compliance or best practice protocols.
sigar repeatedly notes the lack of basic accountability or supervision by
the u.s. military, usaid and its many subcontractors, as well as a culture of
false invoicing and lack of even a minimal paper trail for auditing purposes.
The scale of waste and corruption documented by sigar runs into
the millions of dollars, yet to date few Afghan or foreign contractors have
been prosecuted and no u.s. military or usaid personnel have been called
to account for their lack of supervision of state funds and projects. A few
subcontractors have been required to hand back sums inappropriately
claimed, but overall there has been little interest in enforcing accountabil-
ity. Even more worrying is the fact that, despite sigar’s damning reports,
there has yet to be any fundamental shift in the paradigm adopted by u.s.
military strategists in respect of the prts, or the cosy but compromising
relationship between the u.s. military and usaid. Instead, the solution,