Taking Afghan development with a pinch of salt

Since 2002, a year after it invaded Afghanistan, the United States has poured over 100 billion dollars into developing and rebuilding this country of just over 30 million people. This sum is in addition to the trillions spent on US military operations, to say nothing of the deaths of 2,000 service personnel in the space of a single decade.

Today, as the US struggles to salvage its legacy in Afghanistan, which critics say will mostly be remembered as a colossal and costly failure both in monetary terms and in the staggering loss of life, many are pointing to economic and social gains as the bright points in an otherwise bleak tapestry of occupation.

But the diligent work undertaken by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) suggests that "much of the official happy talk on [reconstruction] should be taken with a grain of salt - iodized, of course - to prevent informational goiter."

Formed in 2008, SIGAR is endowed with the authority to "audit, inspect, investigate, and otherwise examine any and all aspects of reconstruction, regardless of departmental ownership." In a May 5 speech, John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General, called the reconstruction effort a "huge and far-reaching undertaking" that has scarcely left any part of Afghan life untouched.

Funding drive

"Unfortunately," Sopko said, "from the outset to this very day large amounts of taxpayer dollars have been lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.

"These disasters often occur when the US officials who implement and oversee programs fail to distinguish fact from fantasy," he added.

In one of the most recent examples of this disturbing trend, two Afghan ministers cited local media reports to inform parliament about fraud in the education sector, alleging that former officials who served under President Hamid Karzai had falsified data on the number of active schools in Afghanistan in order to receive continued international funding.

"SIGAR takes such allegations very seriously, and given that they came from high-ranking individuals in the Afghan Government, and also that USAID has invested approximately 769 million dollars in Afghanistan's education sector, SIGAR opened an inquiry into this matter," a SIGAR official told IPS.

Submitted on June 18 to the Acting Administrator for USAID, the official inquiry raises a number of questions, including over widely cited statistics that official development assistance has led to a jump in the number of enrolled students from an estimated 900,000 in 2002 to more than eight million in 2013.

While USAID stands by these figures, sourced from the Afghan Ministry of Education's Education Management Information System (EMIS), it is unable to independently verify them.

Last year SIGAR reported that the education ministry continues to count students as 'enrolled' even if they have been absent from school for three years, suggesting that the actual number of kids in classrooms is far below the figure cited by the government, and subsequently utilized by US aid agencies.

- IPS