Last week I wrote a post about an inspector general report that suggested Afghan VIPs were flying out of Kabul with U.S. aid money stuffed in their suitcases at the rate of about $10 million bucks a day. What was perhaps more disturbing about that July 27 report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction was the sentence that announced that the United States has “limited visibility over U.S. cash that enters the economy — leaving it vulnerable to fraud and diversion to the insurgency.”
Diversion to the insurgency means U.S. tax dollars going to people who kill U.S. troops.
The Washington Post today says U.S. aid money is not just vulnerable to diversion to the insurgency — it is being diverted to the insurgency, through a $2.16 billion transportation contract.
The unreleased investigation provides seemingly definitive evidence that corruption puts U.S. transportation money into enemy hands, a finding consistent with previous inquiries carried out by Congress, other federal agencies and the military. Yet U.S. and Afghan efforts to address the problem have been slow and ineffective, and all eight of the trucking firms involved in the work remain on U.S. payroll. In March, the Pentagon extended the contract for six months.
Isn’t there a saying about being angry enough to spit nails?
