Audits: Afghan aid lacks accountability

After seven years of work in Afghanistan, the U.S. government's premier development agency continues to pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually to private contractors that frequently fail to demonstrate results, according to aid workers, former diplomats and audits by the agency's inspector general. President Obama said last week he was "committed to refocusing attention and resources on Afghanistan and Pakistan." He named special envoy Richard Holbrooke to oversee aid and diplomacy in those countries. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she wants the U.S. Agency for International Development to assume development tasks ceded to the Pentagon. Yet USAID's multibillion-dollar Afghanistan reconstruction effort continues to struggle. Of six different audits conducted in the last year by the agency's inspector general, only one found a program working largely as it was supposed to. * A $219 million contract for technical and management advice to government ministries and other institutions produced "a lack of evidence" of results after the agency and the contractor "spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to define the program's activities and priorities." * The success of a $37 million contract to help small businesses could not be measured because "the contractor's performance data … were not reliable." * A $102 million contract to promote agriculture led to defective buildings, the spraying of pesticides without studying their impact and the failure to implement a major farm program in time for last summer's planting season. "As a result, the mission may not be able to provide planned jobs to local Afghans, and sales from crop harvests may not materialize," the August 2008 audit said. The new Special Inspector General for Afghanistan said in a report released Friday that the broader reconstruction effort, which includes the Defense Department and other entities, has "major weaknesses." In a phone interview from Kabul, Michael Yates, USAID's Afghanistan mission director, said the $7.9 billion his agency has spent in Afghanistan since 2002 has produced "remarkably powerful impacts" in health, education, agriculture and more. "The audits have identified areas of weakness, but we then take concrete steps to address those areas," he said. Yet critics such as Ann Jones, who wrote a 2006 book about her four years as an aid worker in Afghanistan, say the effort has been bedeviled by waste and mismanagement. More than half of the assistance money goes to overhead and profits for private U.S. contractors who hire Afghans to perform the work, Jones says. "It's hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure of American reconstruction in Afghanistan," she said.