The Cipher Brief sat down with John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, to discuss how the U.S. reconstruction effort should proceed in Afghanistan. According to Sopko, “Oversight has been a problem since day one in Afghanistan,” and “agencies should provide effective and honest oversight as the first line of defense” to combat corruption that has thus far plagued U.S. reconstruction endeavors.
The Cipher Brief: What is the role of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)?
John Sopko: Our organization focuses on reconstruction in Afghanistan. Basically, we are looking at the $115 billion that’s been authorized by Congress for reconstruction. We are not talking about the $600 billion or a trillion dollars for the actual fighting of the war in Afghanistan.
What makes us unique is that we are not housed in any one agency. Our task is to look at the “whole of government” approach. Any U.S. government agency that spends money on reconstruction in Afghanistan, we get a right to look at. Congress was very smart in setting up an entity like that.
The other thing that makes us unique is that we have a large number of people on the ground in Afghanistan, about 30-40 people there, all of them serve minimum of a year, and most of them 2-3 years. We have institutional memory, which really helps.
Our job is to give your traditional Inspector General (IG) audits, inspections, and investigations. But what makes us really unique is our presence, historical knowledge, and the fact that we have developed a really close working relationship with the Afghan government, particularly with the new government. We had a very limited relationship with the old government.
We also have a very close working relationship with our allies, particularly with the law enforcement elements and the auditing elements of the British, the German, the Canadian, and Australian governments.
TCB: The U.S. has spent millions funding educational institutions and infrastructure projects across Afghanistan. What is your assessment of the progress made in these areas?
JS: It’s hard to tell in part because of the security situation and in part because the U.S. government didn’t really keep good records and assessments of what we were doing there. There was a tendency among some of the agencies to over-puff their successes. Particularly USAID, we’ve criticized them in the past, and we are going to have some reports coming out in the healthcare field that will talk about the puffing of data on success.
Let me just caution you. I’m not saying that there has been no success, there has been a lot of success in Afghanistan, particularly in the areas of health, education, and security. As bad as the security situation is, overall, you have a functioning military that goes and takes the fight to the enemy where it can and tries to hold ground. That has been a tremendous improvement from what it was when we came in 15 years ago.
But we could have done more, we could have done it better, we could have done it faster, and we could have done it cheaper if we had done proper planning, stuck to our strategies, done good oversight, and held the Afghans’ feet to the fire with strong conditionality, which is something we have failed to do until recently in Afghanistan.
TCB: What is the level of oversight for these projects? What role does SIGAR play in deciding which projects to approve and in distributing these funds?
JS: Oversight has been a problem since day one in Afghanistan. In part because we spent too much money too fast, and we just didn’t have the oversight capability. By that I don’t mean the IG community or the Government Accountability Office (GAO), because we come in after the fact and do an audit after most of money has been stolen or the program has failed. It’s like those TV detective shows where Colombo shows up and the body has already been removed, all you have left is a chalk outline on the floor. That’s sort of the way we operate.
Oversight should be built into all of the programs and the agencies should provide effective and honest oversight as the first line of defense. One of our criticisms that we’ve had of these agencies is that they didn’t consider where they were working, and they didn’t design programs that took into account that this is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. In Afghanistan corruption is endemic, it’s institutionalized, and there is a rental economy where people rent their jobs in the government, basically, so they can steal. We should have designed programs accordingly.
We issued a management alert letter before Thanksgiving about Overseas Private Investment Company (OPIC), which was supposed to build this fancy hotel right across the street from the U.S. embassy. They never went out to kick the tires and never went to check and see what was going on before they made the last payments. They gave away 100 percent of the money and got 50 percent of the building. Now we’re stuck with a shell of a structure, the contractors have disappeared with all of the money, and the U.S. government now has to send over guards, 24 hours per day, to guard the abandoned site from being used by terrorists to attack our embassy.
TCB: Is there a way to uniform the oversight structure across these different U.S. government agencies?
JS: The agencies themselves have their own processes in place and some are effective and some are not. Some are more effective than others. I don’t think you can come up with one universal structure where it’s one size fits all.
A lot of it is just plain old common sense. Let’s say you live in Washington, DC. If you own a house and hire a contractor to come in and repair your house or put a roof on, you don’t give him 100 percent of the money before he starts the work. You hold back. You go out and take a look at it. When you buy a car, you don’t sign the paperwork without first seeing if there is a car there, a car that has an engine and it runs. If you do, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn for you to sell. That’s what has happened.
Part of it is that we have a disincentive to oversee the way the money is spent because our contracting officers are rewarded at the end of the year by how much money they put on contract, not by how wisely they do. Our agencies are rewarded by spending down to the bottom of the appropriations amount every year or every two years, not on slowly contemplating it.
What we have here is a problem of broken systems inherent to the U.S. government. Not so much so that we sent a bunch of evil, banal people to Afghanistan – we sent pretty honorable people there working for the military, the corps of engineers, the contractors, and the State Department officials – but we gave them a box of broken tools. Now we wonder why it doesn’t look to good.
TCB: What should be some of the priorities for the next U.S. administration in Afghanistan, particularly related to reconstruction?
JS: First of all, I don’t do policy, I do process. Inspectors General shouldn’t do policy – I’m a firm believer in that. So I can’t tell you on a policy point of view whether we should be in Afghanistan, or we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan. or whether we should be doing reconstruction.
I look at the process. Tell me what the goals are and I’ll have my team go out and see if the goals have been met and have they been met in an efficient and effective way.
What I would say to the administration and Congress is they should seriously focus on Afghanistan. Afghanistan hardly ever came up in the last presidential debate. I don’t remember seeing it mentioned at all in any of the debates or advertisements or anything like that. Again, I don’t want to sound like I do policy but it’s time to take a look at the longest war we’ve fought, the largest reconstruction effort we’ve paid for, and the policymakers should sit down and think about what we should do going forward.
How we can give them assistance in that is by telling them what has worked and what hasn’t, and what are some of the pitfalls of going forward. That’s what our reports are all about. We came up—within the first nine months I was on the job—with seven questions you should ask before you embark upon a program or policy in Afghanistan. These are basic questions such as: Do the Afghans want the program? Do they need the program? Can they use the program?
If they don’t want it, it’s probably not going to succeed. Can they sustain the program? Does this policy or program take into consideration the corruption out there? Does it take into consideration the whole security problem? You may never be able to go out and take a look at the program on the ground because it’s just too dangerous.
When General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was running our military operations in Afghanistan, he stopped all construction by army corps engineers and said, “I want to take a look at every program or every construction process or infrastructure program we have ongoing or planned, and see if we need.” After he did that assessment, I believe he cut about $1 billion worth of unnecessary programs. Now I’m not recommending that’s what needs to be done, but that’s what General Dunford did, and I thought it was pretty wise, because he basically said, “We are shutting down bases so why we are building a waste-water system when we are planning on leaving? Why are we building roads, and my troops will never be there?”
He was asking those fundamental questions and Congress and the new administration should be asking.
Afghanistan is an important area. It’s not just because I’m working in it, touting my own horn, or trying to keep full employment for my agency. We have spent a lot of money in Afghanistan. It is a major national security issue for our country. It deserves the thoughtful time of the new leaders in Congress and the executive branch to focus on it, read our reports, talk to other people, talk to the generals, talk to the ambassadors, and figure out if we should change our policy in Afghanistan or continue as is. But now is a good time to hit the pause button and assess where we go from here.
TCB: Have better relations with the new Afghan government assisted in the effort to root out corruption?
JS: Yes, absolutely. That again is something that makes us really unique because we have developed a very good working relationship with the National Unity Government and with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. This has allowed us to get access to certain individuals and records, and it allows us to work with them in developing better capability to handle and oversee procurement and to then fight the corruption.
We are working very closely with the Afghan government in creating what’s called The Major Crimes Task Force and also working with the new Afghan Attorney General in trying to set up a unique judicial center, which handles the major corruption cases. It’s in its infancy, but it’s because we are there and we work closely with the President. I go and meet the President and CEO of Afghanistan two or three times a year. My people go there and sit in on the procurement meetings once a week.
We are the only U.S. government agency that has gotten access to the all of the Kabul bank records. Officially we got access to them when President Ghani, based upon my negotiations with him, signed a presidential decree granting us, SIGAR, access to the records so we could try to track down any of the ill-gotten gains and if money was laundered.
TCB: What is your assessment of the current economic state of Afghanistan?
JS: It’s not good and in part its because of the drawdown in coalition and U.S. forces, which has had a direct impact on the amount of money being spent over there. That’s had a negative impact.
The security situation has had a negative impact on the economy. People are afraid to invest, foreigners are afraid to invest if they are going to be kidnapped or things blown up.
The national unity government is behind the eight ball because of all of the corruption that existed before.
You need good laws that are enforced fairly, honestly, and openly. You need courts that work. You need to have all those things that brings foreign investment and that helps locals invest their money, rather than take their earned money and move it out of the country.
They are in a difficult strait right now. This is also an important thing that the new U.S. administration and the new Congress have to consider. Perhaps maybe they can change the focus of reconstruction efforts to help the economy more.
