After troops leave, U.S. to lose access to Afghan reconstruction projects worth billions

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/after-troops-leave-us-to-lose-access-to-afghan-reconstruction-projects-worth-billions/2013/10/26/5a9212a6-3d9c-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines



Afghan National Army soldiers eat a meal in their barracks at Combat Outpost Monti in Kunar province.

After troops leave, U.S. to lose access to Afghan reconstruction projects worth billions
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Scott Higham, Published: October 26

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 corruption-plagued nation. Only about 20 percent 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 those projects, the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development plan to rely on teams of private contractors to monitor the work of other private contractors on the taxpayer-funded projects. In a document soliciting firms to help with inspections, USAID said it also intends to use satellite photos and “crowdsourcing” experiments that will solicit feedback on progress from Afghans who are 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.



unhappycamper comment: Like the $17 billion dollars we spent on MRAPs (that are now being shredded in Afghanistan), our private contractors will extract as much as they can as long as they can from Uncle Sugar