“But that’s just not happened”
Iraq Auditor Warns of Waste, Fraud In Afghanistan
After five years of investigations and 250,000 pages of audits, Stuart W. Bowen Jr. wishes he could say that the $50 billion cost of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was money accounted for and well spent.
“But that’s just not happened,” Bowen said.
Instead, the largest single-country relief and reconstruction project in U.S. history—most of it done by private U.S. contractors—was full of wasted funds, fraud and a lack of accountability under what Bowen, the congressionally mandated special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, calls an “ad hoc-racy” of lax or nonexistent government planning and supervision.
And despite the Iraq experience, he said, the United States is making many of the same mistakes again in Afghanistan, where U.S. reconstruction expenditures stand at more than $30 billion and counting.
