Afghanistan faces cash hole

http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/SOU-03-140313.html



Afghanistan faces cash hole
By Richard Sale
Mar 14, '13

WASHINGTON - Next year's drawdown of United States forces and decline in US aid will leave in its wake an Afghan political system lacking legitimacy and stability, according to interviews with Afghanistan experts, news reports and congressional studies.

Despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in US funding, Afghanistan's government has failed to sustain Washington-built development projects, experts here are warning, including the training and equipping of Afghan police and security forces.

Much of this is due to corruption on the part of US private contractors, lax US and Afghan government controls, and the innate weakness of Hamid Karzai's government. Without adequate security, reconstruction either comes to a halt or continues without the necessary oversight.

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In fact, corruption on the part of both Afghan and US private contractors consumes much of US aid to Afghanistan, according to studies, US officials and analysts. More than 100 cases of corruption, by both US contractors and Afghan subcontractors, have gone officially ignored, and when US Government Accountability Office auditors looked at the programs, they were not shown the uncompleted projects SIGAR found in 2011.