Money as a Bottomless Pit

Commanders spent half of their money on big-budget ventures that pushed the limits of CERP.

The program was intended for quick, urgent projects that rang up expenses of less than $500,000, but commanders blew through $1 billion on far pricier undertakings with lofty, if quixotic, goals.

There was the $4.5 million study to identify potential water resource projects, and the $7 million spent on millions of textbooks for Afghan school kids to “[contribute] to the effects of not just the spread of knowledge, but of a more capable and prepared citizenry.”

There was the $733,000 green space and beautification project for recreational activities that would “not only give the community a clean and healthy place to meet and enjoy a feeling of tranquility but also allow the local residents recognize a sense of change and stabilization in the area.”

There was the 26-kilometer road in Helmand that cost an estimated $6.3 million--12.5 times the ideal CERP cap--and the $1.3 million paving project in Kandahar.

Neither CERP nor troops were meant to take on such high-ticket development, according to Congress, inspectors general, many military officers and others. Service members are untrained to handle that scale of project, units tend to rotate out of the country before the projects can be completed, and outcomes, especially long-term, are often poor.

Part of the problem is these kind of ambitious, U.S.-led projects are unsustainable for the Afghanistan government, and the planning often lacks common sense, such as failing to budget for operation and maintenance costs, many studies by inspectors general and others have found.

“You have a nice gleaming highway,” said Afghanistan expert Andrew Wilder, “it starts having potholes in year two. Year three or four it’s in pretty poor shape. And then people are cursing you.”

Since 2008, there have been about 460 $500,000-plus projects, as well as 44 projects that cost just a hair under that threshold.

Those expensive projects at times fell so short that they seemed to achieve the exact opposite of their goals.

In rural northeastern Afghanistan in 2009, troops decided to spend $597,929 on a 20-bed hospital to “improve the health among mothers and children” and meet “needs that require more than a basic health clinic.” They noted, too, that “providing adequate medical care will also strengthen the legitimacy of the [Afghan government] in the Salang District.”

But after four years and the supervision of three different military task forces, what the Afghans were finally given was an unfinished building lacking key equipment that left them with almost the same insufficient health care they had before, a SIGAR investigation found. At the new hospital, newborns had to be washed in untreated river water. A small generator--with fuel paid for by the staff-- lit a single light bulb in each room. Mold covered many of the walls, and a jerry-rigged cooler was all staff had to keep medications cold.

“How can you have any basic health care facility without power? Even by Afghan standards it was medieval,” said Scott Harmon, who investigated the project for SIGAR and spoke to ProPublica after leaving the agency.

The hospital project also was hobbled by unrealistic expectations of the Afghan government’s ability to operate it. There were far fewer doctors than the military had told the community there would be and none of them were surgeons, leaving the empty operating room as a reminder of broken promises.

The military also said it would finish the building and provide the equipment with more money from CERP. That never happened, and t he military told SIGAR during its investigation that since the Afghans had accepted the facility, providing for it was now their responsibility--the “no-take-backs” policy of U.S. development. (The military maintained in a press release that the hospital was a gleaming success despite dentists resorting to pliers to pull out teeth.)

Real development wasn’t necessarily always the goal of CERP, though, military officials pointed out to SIGAR recently. Instead, what was important was not the project itself, but gaining support in fighting the insurgency.

In 2014, as the military significantly pulled back its Afghanistan operations, there was only one proposed project over $500,000 added to the database, and it wasn’t approved. Though commanders are spending a fraction of the CERP money they once did, Congress recently required the military to notify it of projects over $500,000.