„Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction“ – Bearbeiten

{{Infobox Behörde
| Staat                = 
| Behörden-Bezeichnung = Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
| Keine-Behörde        = 
| Behörden-Abkürzung   = SIGAR
| Behörden-Logo        = 
| Staatliche-Ebene     = [[Bundesregierung (Vereinigte Staaten)|Regierung der Vereinigten Staaten]]
| Stellung             = 
| Rechtsform           = 
| Aufsicht             = 
| Periode              = 2008
| Vorläufer            = 
| VorläuferOpt         = 
| Nachfolger           = 
| Hauptsitz            = [[Crystal City (Virginia)|Crystal City, Arlington]], [[Virginia]]
| Haushalt             = 
| Breitengrad          = 
| Längengrad           = 
| ISO-Region           = 
| Leitungstitel        = Special Inspector General
| Behördenleiter       = [[John F. Sopko]]
| Anzahl-Mitarbeiter   = 197 (Oktober 2014){{veraltet|seit=2014}}
| Homepage             = [http://www.sigar.mil/ www.sigar.mil]
}}

'''Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction''' ('''SIGAR''') ist die [[Aufsichtsbehörde]] der [[US-Regierung]] für den [[Krieg in Afghanistan seit 2001|Wiederaufbau Afghanistans]]. Der Kongress schuf das Büro des Sondergeneralinspektors für den Wiederaufbau Afghanistans, um eine unabhängige und objektive Überwachung der Mittel für den Wiederaufbau Afghanistans zu gewährleisten. Unter der Autorität von Section 1229 des ''National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008'' (PL 110-181) führt SIGAR Audits, Inspektionen und Untersuchungen durch, um die [[Wirtschaftlichkeit]] von Wiederaufbauprogrammen zu fördern und Abwege, Betrug und Missbrauch von Steuergeldern zu erkennen und zu verhindern. SIGAR verfügt auch über eine Hotline, über die Einzelpersonen mutmaßlichen Betrug melden können.<ref> SIGAR Fraud Hotline, [http://www.sigar.mil/investigations/hotline/report-fraud.aspx]</ref>

Die Aufgabe von SIGAR ist es, „die Wirtschaftlichkeit und Effizienz von US-finanzierten Wiederaufbauprogrammen in Afghanistan zu fördern und Betrug, Verschwendung und Missbrauch durch unabhängige, objektive und strategische Audits, Inspektionen und Untersuchungen aufzudecken und zu verhindern“.

== Vierteljährliche Berichte ==
Das öffentliche Gesetz 110-181 weist SIGAR an, dem Kongress einen vierteljährlichen Bericht vorzulegen.<ref>Public Law 110-181 directs SIGAR to submit a quarterly report to Congress.[http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/legislation/pl-110-181handout.pdf Public Law 110-181]</ref> Dieser vom Kongress in Auftrag gegebene Bericht fasst die Prüfungen und Ermittlungsaktivitäten von SIGAR zusammen. Der Bericht bietet auch einen Überblick über die Wiederaufbaumaßnahmen in Afghanistan und enthält eine detaillierte Aufstellung aller mit dem Wiederaufbau verbundenen Verpflichtungen, Ausgaben und Einnahmen.<ref>SIGAR’s Quarterly Reports, [http://www.sigar.mil/quarterlyreports/]</ref>

Im Rahmen seines gesetzgeberischen Mandats verfolgt SIGAR im Quartalsbericht den Status der US-Mittel, die für Wiederaufbaumaßnahmen in Afghanistan bereitgestellt, verpflichtet und ausgezahlt wurden.

Zum 30. September 2019, akkumuliert seit 2002, hat der US-Steuerzahler rund 132,55 Milliarden [[US-Dollar]] für Hilfe und Wiederaufbau in Afghanistan ausgezahlt. Diese Mittel werden in vier Kategorien dargestellt:
* 82,55 Milliarden US-Dollar für Sicherheit (4,57 Milliarden US-Dollar für [[International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement]] (INCLE) Bekämpfung von [[Betäubungsmittel]]/[[Drogenhandel]])
* 34,46 Milliarden US-Dollar für Governance und Entwicklung (4,37 Milliarden US-Dollar für International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) Anti-Drogen-Initiativen [[Drogenhandel]])
* 3,85 Mrd. US-Dollar für humanitäre Hilfe
* 11,70 Milliarden US-Dollar für zivile Operationen.<ref>SIGAR Interactive Funding Tables, facts and figures, [http://www.sigar.mil/quarterlyreports/fundingtables/]</ref>

== Geschichte ==
=== Inspector General ===
[[Datei:Special Inspector General John F. Sopko Speaking at the Atlantic Council (13314530964).jpg|mini|John F. Sopko bei einem Vortrag des [[Atlantic Council]] 2014]]
2012 ernannte Präsident [[Barack Obama]] John F. Sopko zum Generalinspektor. Sopko verfügt über mehr als 30 Jahre Erfahrung in Aufsicht und Ermittlungen als Staatsanwalt, Kongressberater und leitender Berater der Bundesregierung. Zu SIGAR kam er von ''Akin Gump Strauss, Hauer & Feld LLP'', einer internationalen Anwaltskanzlei mit Sitz in Washington, DC, wo er seit 2009 Partner war. Neben seinen Erfahrungen in der Exekutive verfügt er über 20 Jahre Erfahrungen in Stäben der Gesetzgeber.

Er war im Stab des [[Repräsentantenhaus der Vereinigten Staaten]] für [[United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce]], sowie im Stab des [[United States Senate]]: ''United States Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations''.<ref>John F. Sopko, brookings.edu, [https://www.brookings.edu/author/john-f-sopko/]; ''sigar.mil Leadership'', [https://www.sigar.mil/about/leadership/leadership.aspx?SSR=1&SubSSR=2&Sub2SSR=1&WP=IG%20SIGAR]; ''[[C-SPAN]]'', [https://www.c-span.org/person/?johnsopko]; [[The Washington Times]], [https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/john-f-sopko/]</ref>

=== Amtsvorgänger ===
[[Datei:Arnold Fields.jpg|mini|Arnold Fields Major General, USMC]]
* Juni 2008 bis Januar 2011: [[Arnold Fields]]<ref group="A">Major General Fields is the former U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and a retired US Marine Corps Major General who served over 34 years on continuous active duty.

<!--He was the Deputy Commander of Marine Corps Forces in Europe and Africa at the time of his retirement in January 2004. He was advanced to brigadier general in September 1996 and assigned to U.S. Central Command where he assumed dual responsibilities as commander of Central Command’s forward headquarters while also serving as Central Command’s inspector general. Following this tour, General Fields was ordered to Hawaii where he took command of all Marine Corps Bases in Hawaii. He was selected for promotion to major general while serving in Hawaii and received orders to Headquarters Marine Corps at the Pentagon where he served as Director of the Marine Corps Staff. Fields’ colonel assignments included Commanding Officer of Camp Fuji Japan and its Headquarters Battalion and Chief of the Evaluation and Analysis Division of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff’s Plans and Interoperability Directorate.

In June 2008, The President of the United States [[George W. Bush]] appointed General Fields to create and head the office of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a new congressionally mandated government oversight agency. While in this capacity, he provided oversight of all U.S. funds appropriated for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, which had risen to over $56 billion when he departed SIGAR in February, 2011. Leading an agency of top level auditors and criminal investigators, he published over 35 fully scoped audits, initiated over 90 criminal or civil investigations, and made over 90 recommendations to the U.S. Congress that would help improve the accountability of funds appropriated for Afghanistan’s reconstruction. His audit and investigation work uncovered over $180 million in waste, fraud, and abuse of U.S. appropriated funds and resulted in several arrests and prosecutions.--> </ref>
* 10. Februar bis  4. August 2011:  [[Herb Richardson]]<ref group="A">Herb Richardson (1950) [https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/08/04/exclusive-top-afghan-oversight-official-stepping-down/]

Präsident [[Barack Obama|Obama]] ernannte Fields zum stellvertretenden Generalinspekteur, Herb Richardson. Richardson, ein 61-jähriger ehemaliger FBI-Spezialagent, der als stellvertretender Generalinspektor im Energieministerium tätig war, hat sich bei SIGAR einen Namen gemacht, weil er seine Macht konsolidiert, mit fester Hand führt und Kontrolle ausübt. Richardson, ein ehemaliger Champion-Ruderer, der bürokratischer geworden ist, lehnte sich während eines Interviews am 3. Februar in seinem Stuhl zurück und sprach mit offenkundiger Genugtuung über seinen Ruf als starker Agent. Richardson, der am 8. November von einem Regierungsaufsichtsrat ernannt wurde, um eine so genannte „Top-to-Bottom-Überprüfung“ der Organisation durchzuführen, sagte, er plane nun, einen muskulöseren und effektiveren Kurs für die Agentur festzulegen. Während Richardson viele Bewunderer innerhalb von SIGAR hat, die seinen No-Nonsense-Ansatz begrüßten, sind nicht alle an Bord.
<!--
Mission incomplete,  [[Jason Horowitz]], ''[[The Washington Post]]'', 11. Februar 2011, [https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post/20110211/291692705121758]

Richardson, a 61-year-old former FBI special agent who served as principal deputy inspector general at the Department of Energy, has gained a reputation within SIGAR for consolidating power, leading with a firm hand

The day before Arnold Fields left his position as the government’s top official for detecting and preventing the waste of taxpayer money in Afghanistan, he serenaded his staff with one last song. “Thank you all for your service,” retired Maj. Gen. Fields said at a farewell luncheon in Crystal City after completing 100 push-ups and playing the final chord of “The Impossible Dream” on his guitar. “And remember the mission.”

Fields, a decorated Marine combat veteran who, at 64, has military posture, bifocal glasses and a gentlemanly manner, resigned from his position atop the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) last month in the wake of a scathing peer review and a brutal congressional hearing at which senators called for his head. On the morning of Feb. 3, he sat in a freshly wallpapered corner office amid packed boxes, polished furniture and his guitar case to discuss what went wrong and what lay ahead.

“There is a certain amount of relief,” Fields acknowledged, blaming political pressures and a lack of early funding for debilitating his leadership. “I’m going to be frank with you, sir. Much of this that I have experienced in this capacity, I did not expect.”

In a war where countering corruption is critical to success, the watchdog agency tasked with examining the more than $56 billion in Afghan reconstruction funding is, according to some of its own officials, in need of oversight. Accusations of influence-buying, internal debate over whether auditors should put dollar figures on waste and arguments about which reconstruction proj-

Arnold Fields, charged with targeting Afghan fraud, came under fire from outside and within

ects deserved investigation led to the formation of bitter factions and intense office politics.

“I don’t feel that I was set up to fail,” said Fields, “but I don’t feel that I was set up for success.”

On June 12, 2008, President George W. Bush appointed Fields, who commanded a Marine infantry battalion in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and had a role in the reconstruction effort there.

Former national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones, who called Fields “a great leader who rose to the rank of major general and raised his hand to serve his country again,” said that he wondered why the Bush administration chose Fields for the job.

“The missing piece is what led them to hire him,” Jones said. “Why wouldn’t you get an accountant, or someone who has been a businessman, rather than a field Marine? You would have looked for somebody with a more technical background in major financial issues. It’s an odd fit.”

Within SIGAR, Fields is widely considered an honest and decent soldier deeply committed to the oversight mission. The general consensus is that indecision, an inability to forcefully articulate SIGAR’s case to its critics on the Hill, a lack of experience navigating Washington’s competing political agendas and internecine conflicts cost him dearly. The distractions kept the watchdog agency from keeping as close an eye as possible on the government’s reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.

Transition of power

Last Friday, President Obama named Fields’s deputy, Herb Richardson, to replace him as the acting inspector general.

Richardson, a 61-year-old former FBI special agent who served as principal deputy inspector general at the Department of Energy, has gained a reputation within SIGAR for consolidating power, leading with a firm hand and exercising control. A former champion rower who has assumed a more bureaucratic build, Richardson leaned back in his chair during a Feb. 3 interview and spoke with evident relish of his reputation as agency strongman.

Appointed by a government oversight council on Nov. 8 to conduct what he called a “top-to-bottom review” of the organization, Richardson said he now planned to chart a more muscular and effective course for the agency.

While Richardson has many admirers within SIGAR who welcomed his no-nonsense approach, not everyone is onboard. Most notable among his critics is the inspector general’s special adviser Peter Kaivon Saleh, a gregarious veteran of Afghanistan policy who the Richardson faction accused of having exercised a Svengali-like influence over the general.

On Jan. 12, the rift between Richardson and Saleh broke into the open after the two top officials accompanied Fields to a meeting in the Rayburn offices of Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio).

In the meeting, according to several participants, Saleh talked about a June 2010 letter obtained by a SIGAR staffer from the Afghan attorney general to the Ministry of Public Works, which reported that an $8 million hospital in Khost remained uninhabited, had structural damage covered with patching material and needed to be rebuilt. He also mentioned another lead, that the Takhar province health ministry had recently reported to their superiors that employees from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) came to check on two health centers built with American funds but found nothing.

“It was a shocking story,” Kucinich said.

After the meeting, Richardson grew angry at Saleh for bringing up these issues without having any proof to back them up.

“It was certainly something I’d be interested in knowing more about,” said Richardson, whose supporters said that Saleh had a track record of unsubstantiated claims. He then said to Saleh, “ ‘Do you have any supporting documentation you can give me, because if this is a problem I need to look at it.’ And I didn’t get any.”

In an interview, Saleh, who speaks Farsi, said that he had, indeed, provided supporting evidence of the alleged fraud, along with his translations of the documents, to Fields, who, he said, “assured me that Richardson received the documentation.”

Saleh added, “I remain dismayed that Mr. Richardson has never bothered to discuss with me those cases, or many others that I am aware of, regarding waste, fraud and abuse in Afghanistan.”

Rising concerns

The problems at SIGAR started early.

Fields said he had his “hands tied and my feet tied” by a delay in initial funding that made it difficult for him to staff up, especially considering the relatively small pool of qualified applicants willing to spend time in Kabul. The departments of Defense and State were far from generous in providing staff, as the office’s enabling legislation suggested they do. The chief auditor only came on in January 2009.

And then Joseph Schmitz entered the picture.

A dozen years ago, Schmitz’s closest brush with controversy had come as brother to Mary Kay Letourneau, the Washington state teacher whose affair with a 12-year-old student landed her in prison and on tabloid front pages.

In the years following the scandal, Schmitz climbed the government ranks and became the Defense Department’s inspector general. In July 2005, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) informed Schmitz of an investigation into whether he had blocked two criminal investigations. When Schmitz left his position as inspector general shortly thereafter, he did so under a cloud, but a 2006 investigation under the auspices of the President’s and Executive Councils on Integrity and Efficiency concluded that Schmitz had committed “no wrongdoing.”

In January 2009, he joined the D.C. office of the independent risk-management group Freeh Group International Solutions, run by former FBI director Louis Freeh.

According to Schmitz, he and Freeh met with SIGAR officials, including Fields, in the fall of that year to discuss how they could quickly boost the watchdog’s maligned investigative capability. The Freeh Group said it ultimately backed out for logistical reasons. In July 2010, a peer review deemed SIGAR’s investigative unit substandard, creating the possibility that Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. could strip the agency of its investigative authority. At that point, Richardson says, the Freeh Group referred them to Schmitz. Patti Bescript, a managing director for the Freeh Group, said that Schmitz’s formal association with the company had concluded on April 30 of that year, and that there was no such referral or recommendation to SIGAR.

If everyone involved wants distance from Schmitz’s hiring, they want even more from the details of his no-bid contract, priced at a level that required fewer signatures — and less oversight — for approval. According to Schmitz, SIGAR leadership told him the agency needed someone to come onboard quickly and conduct an independent assessment, and asked him if he could price the contract under $100,000. “There was something about they could do a sole source if it was under $100,000,” Schmitz said.

Richardson said Schmitz initially asked for more than $300,000, a figure of which Schmitz said he “cannot find any record.” Richardson said the final $95,000 had to do with reducing cost, not oversight. “There was no collusion,” Richardson said.

Schmitz sent letters notifying the members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on contracting oversight about his contract and inviting them to raise any concerns. Five days later they did, and a conference call was arranged for 4 p.m. Minutes before it started, the senators made public a letter calling on Obama to remove Fields. The letter cited the Schmitz contract as a cause for alarm.

SIGAR officials canceled the conference call.

‘Murder board’

Fields’s prospects for maintaining command of SIGAR looked bleak, and it quickly became apparent that his make-or-break moment would be an upcoming hearing before the subcom-

“I don’t feel that I was set up to fail, but I don’t feel that I was set up for success.”

— Arnold Fields

Comittee. Fields needed to be ready.

“We prepared what is called a murder board,” Fields said.

On Nov. 15, a dozen staffers filed into Fields’s sunny corner office at 9:30 a.m. to play the roles of hostile senators and prepare him with a barrage of questions. The staff had compiled a 40-page document, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, which included anticipated questions and proposed answers, addressing everything from the agency’s “terrible turnover rate” to Fields’s definition of “acceptable leadership.” The plan was to accentuate the positive. Since its inception, SIGAR had performed investigative and audit work in 22 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, conducted 34 audits and analyzed the construction of multiple Afghan police stations. The watchdog had launched an audit of USAID’s $60 million cash-forwork program in Kabul, and prompted the Department of Defense to deploy more contracting officers to Afghanistan.

But as Fields sat behind his mahogany desk facing a panel of role-playing staffers, one name kept coming up again and again: Schmitz.

“Why did you hire Schmitz?” Richardson, playing the part of inquisitor, demanded. Fields floundered in his response, according to multiple staffers who were present. Several SIGAR officials suggested that Fields avoid mentioning Schmitz by name and only refer to an independent “company.” With the staff looking on, Richardson then urged Fields to say that he hired Schmitz because SIGAR needed to compensate for its gaps by tapping outside expertise. In an interview, Richardson acknowledged that his suggestion put “blame on the head of investigations as being weak.”

During the mock interrogation, the head of investigations, Raymond DiNunzio, countered that Fields should simply tell the truth: Fields hired Schmitz because the contractor’s professional association with ex-FBI director Freeh would convey an aura of credibility and professionalism to Holder and help preserve their powers. (DiNunzio declined to comment.) The suggestion, which smacked of influence-buying, prompted a nervous exchange of looks among staffers in the room.

Richardson, who was himself trying to figure out exactly what had happened, pressed Fields as to whether he had paid Schmitz $95,000 only to skirt rules that would have triggered greater oversight if the contract had surpassed $100,000. At that point, Bill Sharp, the contracts officer, interjected to explain that keeping the contract below $100,000 eased its approval. The advisers urged Fields to make clear that Schmitz set the fee and not the other way around.

Staffers who were present said the meeting confirmed their worst suspicions about the bad practices and questionable motives of the agency’s leadership. The entire exercise, according to one of those in attendance, amounted to a “sick-to-your-stomach moment.”

Congressional hearing

On Nov. 18, wearing a red tie and pinstriped suit, Fields marched into Room 428 of the Russell Senate Office Building. The congressional hearing was enemy territory. A chart on the dais showed that SIGAR, for which Congress had appropriated $46.2 million, had returned only $8 million to taxpayers. Fields opened by remarking, “I would say that it’s a pleasure, but I would be telling a lie if I were to say so.” Then he went off script. “My leadership has been referred to as ‘inept.’ That’s the first time, senator, that in all my life, a man of 64 years of age, who has supported this federal government for 41 straight years — of which 34 have been as a military officer. I don’t even allow my own auditors to refer to the people in Afghanistan as ‘inept’ because it’s too general a statement for any human being.”

That did not keep Sen. Claire McCaskill, the subcommittee’s chair, from eviscerating him. The Missouri Democrat accused Fields of not understanding the basics of auditing. She chided him for not using risk assessment to prioritize the agency’s watchdog work. She excoriated him for granting Schmitz a no-bid contract.

“It looked like you were trying to hire someone to help influence the attorney general of the United States,” she said. “As opposed to fixing the problem.”

Fields did make a point to correct McCaskill, though, when she said the contract was worth $100,000.

“No, Senator,” he said. “The contract was worth $95,000.”

“Well, you know, I got to tell you the truth,” McCaskill concluded. “Once again, I do not mean to be cruel. I do not mean to — this is not fun for me either. It’s — it’s very uncomfortable to say that I don’t think that you’re the right person for this job, General Fields — that I don’t think you were the right person for this job.”

Swan song

Sitting in his office, dressed in the same suit and tie as on his subcommittee appearance, Fields considered that painful suggestion: that he was not the right man for the job. After first characterizing the position as “much more to me a common-sense job than it is a technical-skill job,” he later allowed that appointing “someone with auditing skills would have an advantage.”

To Fields’s chagrin, SIGAR auditors demonstrated philosophical opposition to putting dollar amounts on waste. In some cases they said it was impossible. In others, they argued that there was simply no money to report.

In November, auditors declared that $190 million of military funding had been put to better use because of SIGAR’s work. If the number had come out sooner, Fields said, “It certainly would have helped.” (The office of Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has questioned whether SIGAR played a meaningful role in identifying the $190 million.)

There is a rare consensus throughout SIGAR that Fields suffered for his lack of relationships on the Hill. There’s less unanimity regarding the reason for it, and the explanations highlight the Richardson/Saleh divide.

On Jan. 7, when Fields’s situation looked gloomy, Kristen Gilley, SIGAR’s congressional liaison, proposed in an e-mail obtained by The Post that the SIGAR staff sit down with their most powerful critic, McCaskill.

“There is no sense to meeting with McCaskill. Especially with the IG out of town!” Saleh wrote, referring to Fields.

When he read the e-mail, Saleh said that he had long advocated that Fields build a better relationship with McCaskill and other senators on the subcommittee, but that the congressional liaison failed to do so. Instead, he said, SIGAR staffers often visited the Hill without Fields’s knowledge, and that he suspected them of undercutting the general.

Even as such infighting raged, Fields sought to keep spirits up.

In preparation for last year’s Christmas party, Fields assembled a “SIGAR chorus” to entertain the watchdog group’s employees with an Afghanistan-themed version of “Jingle Bells”:

A day or two ago / I thought I’d take a ride

And soon Inspector Fields / Was seated by my side

We headed towards Kabul / To help the good cheer flow And soon we were in Kandahar Where rockets come and go . . . OH!

“Music has been a part of my life,” said Fields, a bass-baritone, who was clearly hurt to hear that several staffers did not appreciate his pastime. “I forced no one to listen,” he said. “Nor to necessarily be present for any event at which I have elected to use music as a way of communicating to my staff.”

‘Where to fall’

On Jan. 3, his job in danger, Fields fired John Brummet, the head of audits, and DiNunzio, the head of investigations, saying he wanted “new blood.” “That was my call,” Richardson said. The day after the firings, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the president’s top Afghan policy adviser, called Fields to the White House. The meeting was interrupted, and Lute rescheduled for Friday, Jan. 7.

Minutes before the meeting, Fields busied himself with a briefing book he had ordered to help make his case, demanding brighter colors and bolder bullet points. But the briefing book didn’t help.

In their discussion, Fields said the White House suggested he consider his situation in the context of the major personnel changes imminent at the highest level of military and civilian leadership in Afghanistan.

“The dynamic of the discussion was, ‘In light of other folks moving on . . . senior leaders associated with management in Afghanistan,’ ” Fields said, before reciting some wisdom inherited from his mother. “You don’t have to throw me down to show me where to fall.”

Back in the office on Monday, Jan. 10, he read the White House version of his resignation on a government Web site.

Then he sang “The Long and Winding Road.”
-->
Mission incomplete,  [[Jason Horowitz]], ''[[The Washington Post]]'', 11. Februar 2011, [https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post/20110211/291692705121758]
</ref>
* 29. Dezember 2011 -2012: [[Steve J. Trent]]<ref>''[[The Washington Post]]'', 11. Dezember 2011, [https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post/20110211/291692705121758]</ref>

=== Deputy Inspector General ===
Seit 4. September 2012 ist Gene Aloise stellvertretender Generalinspektor von SIGAR.
Aloise verfügt über 38 Jahre Erfahrung beim [[Government Accountability Office]].

=== Beschäftigte und Dienstorte ===
SIGAR meldete im Oktober 2014 dem Kongress die Beschäftigung von 197 Bundesangestellten.
29 US-Bürger und drei Afghanen in der US-Botschaft in Kabul und acht weitere US-Bürger in [[Kandahar]],  [[Bagram Air Base]] und [[Mazar-i-Sharif]].

=== Anerkennung ===
* Im Oktober 2014 wurden mehr als zwei Dutzend Mitarbeiter des SIGAR bei der 17. jährlichen Verleihung der Auszeichnungen des ''[[Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency]]'' für herausragende Leistungen ausgezeichnet. Die Auszeichnungen umfassten den ''Sentner Award for Dedication and Courage'', zwei Auszeichnungen für hervorragende Leistungen im Bereich Wirtschaftsprüfung und zwei Auszeichnungen für herausragende Leistungen im Sonderbereich.<ref>Oktober 2014, [https://www.ignet.gov/content/awards]; Sentner Award for Dedication and Courage: [https://www.ignet.gov/sites/default/files/files/CIGIE_Awards_2014_final_rev_508_compliant(2).pdf]; SIGAR: 2014 CIGIE Awards, [http://www.sigar.mil/newsroom/ReadFile.aspx?SSR=7&SubSSR=28&File=pressreleases/14/2014-oct-21-pr.html] </ref>

* Im Oktober 2012 wurden die SIGAR Audit- und Ermittlungsteams die vom ''[[Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency]]'' für Awards for Excellence gekürt. Zu den Auszeichnungen gehörten der ''Sentner Award'', eine Auszeichnung für hervorragende Prüfungsleistungen und eine Untersuchungsauszeichnung für hervorragende Leistungen.<ref>SIGAR, Oktober 2012, CIGIE Awards, [http://www.sigar.mil/newsroom/pressreleases/12/2012-oct-17-pr.html]</ref>

* Im Mai 2012 erhielten die SIGAR-Spezialagenten vom U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia für ihre Arbeit in einem großen Bestechungsfall in Afghanistan einen Public Service Award.
* Im Oktober 2011 wurde einem SIGAR-Auditteam der Sentner Award für Engagement und Mut für seine Arbeit in der Provinz Laghman verliehen, bei der das Notfallprogramm des Kommandanten geprüft wurde.
* Im Oktober 2011 wurde ein weiteres SIGAR-Team für die Prüfung der Einrichtungen der afghanischen National Security Force mit einem Award for Excellence ausgezeichnet.<ref>[[Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency]], 2011 Award Program, {{Webarchiv|url=http://www.ignet.gov/randp/cigieawards11prog.pdf |wayback=20120306180032 |text=Archivierte Kopie |archiv-bot=2024-05-13 09:07:18 InternetArchiveBot }}</ref>

=== Information ===
Die Berichterstattung durch SIGAR fand bei den US-Gesetzgebern Aufmerksamkeit. Die Aufsichtsbehörde wandte Methoden an, welche wissenschaftlichen Standards genügen. Zu den beforschten Themen zählte:
die öffentliche Ordnung in Afghanistan, [[United States Agency for International Development]] in Afghanistan, Projekte in Afghanistan,  [[Korruption]] in Afghanistan und die [[Da Afghanistan Bank]].

=== Desinformation ===
SIGAR veröffentlichte zwei ''Lessons Learned''-Berichte, zum Thema [[Nationenbildung]], in einem verschleiernden Fachjargon und unterschlug die kritischsten Kommentare aus den [[Interview]]s. ''[[The Washington Post]]'' klagte auf Offenlegung der Originalinterviews basierend auf dem [[Freedom of Information Act]]. Die Richterin Amy Berman Jackson vom US-Bezirksgericht im Bezirk Columbia entschied auf Herausgabe der Originalinterviews. So konnte die ''The Washington Post'' diese Desinformation aufdecken.<ref group="A">Built to fail, [[Craig Whitlock]] in [[The Washington Post]], 9 Dezember 2019

Despite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get mired in ‘nation-building,’ it has wasted billions doing just that

DAVID GUTTENFELDER/ASSOCIATED PRESSABOVE: Campaign leaflets, dropped from a helicopter, float down during a 2009 rally for Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah in Kabul.
<!--
George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all promised the same thing: The United States would not get stuck with the burden of “nation-building” in Afghanistan.
In October 2001, shortly after ordering U.S. forces to invade, Bush said he would push the United Nations to “take over the so-called nation-building.”
Eight years later, Obama insisted his government would not get mired in a long “nation-building project,” either. Eight years after that, Trump made a similar vow: “We’re not nation-building again.”
Yet nation-building is exactly what the United States has tried to do in war-battered Afghanistan — on a colossal scale.
Since 2001, Washington has spent more on nation-building in Afghanistan than in any country ever, allocating $133 billion for reconstruction, aid programs and the Afghan security forces. Adjusted for inflation, that is more than the United States spent in Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Unlike the Marshall Plan, however, the exorbitant nation-building project for Afghanistan went awry from the start and grew worse as the war dragged on, according to a trove of confidential government interviews with diplomats, military officials and aid workers who played a direct role in the conflict.
Instead of bringing stability and peace, they said, the United States inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that remains dependent on U.S. military power for its survival. Assuming it does not collapse, U.S. officials have said it will need billions more dollars in aid annually, for decades.
Speaking candidly on the assumption that most of their remarks would not be made public, those interviewed said Washing
ton foolishly tried to reinvent Afghanistan in its own image by imposing a centralized democracy and a free-market economy on an ancient, tribal society that was unsuited for either.
Then, they said, Congress and the White House made matters worse by drenching the destitute country with far more money than it could possibly absorb. The flood crested during Obama’s first term as president, as he escalated the number of U.S. troops in the war zone to 100,000.
“During the surge there were massive amounts of people and money going into Afghanistan,” David Marsden, a former official with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told government interviewers. “It’s like pouring a lot of water into a funnel; if you pour it too fast, the water overflows that funnel onto the ground. We were flooding the ground.”
By some measures, life in Afghanistan has improved markedly since 2001. Infant mortality rates have dropped. The number of children in school has soared. The size of the Afghan economy has nearly quintupled.
But the U.S. nation-building project backfired in so many other ways that even foreign-aid advocates questioned whether Afghanistan, in the abstract, might have been better off without any U.S. help at all, according to the documents.
“I mean, the writing is on the wall now,” Michael Callen, an economist with the University of California at San Diego specializing on the Afghan public sector, told government interviewers. “We spent so much money and there is so little to show for it.”
Callen and others blamed an array of mistakes committed again and again over 18 years — haphazard planning, misguided policies, bureaucratic feuding. Many said the overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything.
Much of the money, they said, ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.s.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair, if they were built at all.
Some said the outcome was foreseeable. They cited the U.S. track record of military interventions in other countries — Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia — over the past quarter-century.
“We just don’t have a postconflict stabilization model that works,” Stephen Hadley, who served as White House national security adviser under Bush, told government interviewers. “Every time we have one of these things, it is a pickup game. I don’t have any confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better.”
Troubles plaguing many reconstruction programs in Afghanistan have been well documented, but the interviews obtained by The Washington Post contain new narratives from insiders on what went wrong.
“Once in a while, ok, we can overspend,” Douglas Lute, an Army lieutenant general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013, told government interviewers. “We are a rich country and can pour money down a hole and it doesn’t bust the bank. But should we? Can’t we get a bit more rational about this?”
In comments echoed by other officials who shaped the war, Lute said the United States lavished money on dams and highways just “to show we could spend it,” fully aware that the Afghans, among the poorest and least educated people in the world, could never maintain such huge infrastructure projects.
“One poignant example of this is a ribbon-cutting ceremony complete with the giant scissors I attended for the district police chief in some Godforsaken province,” Lute said. He recalled how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had overseen the design and construction of a police headquarters that featured a glass facade and an atrium.
“The police chief couldn’t even open the door,” Lute said. “He had never seen a doorknob like this. To me, this encapsulates the whole experience in Afghanistan.”
Ever since the war started, U.S. officials have debated — and decried — the expense of rebuilding Afghanistan. In 2008, as reports of fraud and excessive spending piled up, Congress created a watchdog agency to follow the money.
Since then, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, has carried out more than 1,000 audits and investigations, exposing wasteful projects and highlighting $2 billion in potential savings.
In 2014, SIGAR launched a special $11 million project — titled “Lessons Learned” — to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan. Agency staffers interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience in the war.
SIGAR published two Lessons Learned reports that focused on nation-building, but they were steeped in jargon and omitted the most critical comments from the interviews.
“The U.S. government’s provision of direct financial support sometimes created dependent enterprises and disincentives for Afghans to borrow from market-based financial institutions,” concluded an April 2018 report on development of the Afghan private sector. “Furthermore, insufficient coordination within and between U.S. government civilian and military agencies often negatively affected the outcomes of programs.”
In one of the hundreds of Lessons Learned interviews obtained by The Post, Robert Finn, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003, said Bush administration officials dismissed his early warnings that they needed to do far more to stabilize Afghanistan.
“This is a systemic problem of our government,” he said. “We can’t think beyond the next election. When we went to Afghanistan everybody was talking about a year or two, and I said to them that we would be lucky if we were out of here in 20 years.”
Of the three commanders in chief, Bush may have been the unlikeliest nation-builder. When he first campaigned for the presidency, he derid
ed the Clinton administration for committing to unpopular “nationbuilding exercises” in Somalia and Haiti.
“I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nationbuilding,” he said during a debate with Democratic nominee Al Gore in October 2000. “I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.”
A year later, Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan. Victory on the battlefield came swiftly. Coping with the aftermath would take longer than most expected.
No nation needed more building than Afghanistan. Desperately poor, it had been consumed by continuous warfare since 1979, when it was invaded by another superpower, the Soviet Union.
Few Afghans knew much about the outside world. A large majority were illiterate. The country’s ousted rulers, the Taliban, a movement of religious zealots, had banned many hallmarks of modern civilization, including television, musical instruments and equal rights for women.
“We were dealing with parts of a society who thought the king was still in power, never knew the Russians came, or that the Americans were here,” Jordan Sellman, who spent several years in Afghanistan working for USAID, told government interviewers. “They didn’t even use currency, but bartered for items. We were bringing 21st-century stuff to a society living in a different time period.”
Mindful of Bush’s campaign rhetoric, his administration initially tried to avoid responsibility for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, according to people interviewed for the Lessons Learned project.
The administration tried to get the United Nations, NATO and other countries to take charge of humanitarian aid and reconstruction. The United States agreed to help train a new Afghan army but pushed to keep it small, because the Pentagon and State Department did not want to bear the long-term costs.
Eventually, however, officials interviewed for the Lessons Learned project said, the Bush administration recognized it had a duty to help Afghanistan build a new economy from scratch. Although Afghanistan had scant experience with free markets, the United States pressured the Afghans to adopt American-style capitalism.
Yet several U.S. officials told government interviewers it quickly became apparent that people who would make up the Afghan ruling class were too set in their ways to change.
“These people went to the communist school,” said Finn, the former ambassador. A common Afghan fear, he recalled, was “if you allow capitalism, these private companies would come in and make profit.”
Richard Kraemer, a former senior program officer for Afghanistan at the National Endowment for Democracy, told government interviewers that Afghan bureaucrats “were in favor of a socialist or communist approach because that’s how they remembered things the last time the system worked.” Afghanistan was run by communists from 1978 until 1992.
But Kraemer said U.S. officials suffered from an equally narrow mind-set. “We had all good intentions,” he added, “. . . but we had plenty of hubris. Dogmatic adherence to free-market principles led to our inability to adopt a nuanced, balanced approach to what Afghanistan needed.”
When it came to economics, others said the United States too often treated Afghanistan like a theoretical case study and should have applied more common sense instead.
Donors insisted that a large portion of aid be spent on education, even though Afghanistan — a nation of subsistence farmers — had few jobs for graduates.
“We were building schools next to empty schools, and it just didn’t make sense,” a Special Forces officer told government interviewers. He said local Afghans made clear “they didn’t really want schools. They said they wanted their kids out herding goats.”
U.S. and European officials also insisted that Afghanistan embrace free trade, even though it had almost nothing of value to export.
“What could we sell?” an Afghan official said in a Lessons Learned interview in March 2017. “A few grapes here or something of the like.”
Economic policies that might have helped Afghanistan slowly emerge from penury, such as price controls and government subsidies, were not considered by U.S. officials who saw them as incompatible with capitalism, said Barnett Rubin, a former adviser to the United Nations and State Department.
In developing countries, “the idea that there are perfectly functioning markets without subsidies is pure fiction, fantasy,” Rubin, a New York University professor and leading academic on Afghanistan, told government interviewers. “Every late-developing country happened by government picking winners.”
It didn’t take an Ivy League political scientist to see that Afghanistan needed a better system of government. Riven by feuding tribes and implacable warlords, the country had a volatile history of coups, assassinations and civil wars.
The Bush administration persuaded the Afghans to adopt a madein-america solution — a constitutional democracy under a president elected by popular vote.
In many ways, the new government resembled a Third World version of Washington. Power was concentrated in the capital, Kabul. A federal bureaucracy sprouted in all directions, cultivated by dollars and legions of Western advisers.
Under American tutelage, Afghan officials were exposed to newfangled concepts and tools: Powerpoint presentations, mission statements, stakeholder meetings, even appointment calendars.
But there were fateful differences. Under the new constitution, the Afghan president wielded far greater authority than the other two branches of government — the parliament and judiciary — and also got to appoint all the provincial governors. In short, power was centralized in the hands of one man.
The rigid, U.s.-designed system conflicted with Afghan tradition, typified by a mix of decentralized power and tribal customs. But with Afghanistan beaten down and broke, the Americans called the shots.
“In hindsight the worst decision was to centralize power,” an unnamed European Union official said in a Lessons Learned interview.
A German official echoed the point: “After the fall of the Taliban, it was thought that we needed a president right away, but that was wrong.”
An unidentified USAID official said he was astounded that the State Department thought an Americanstyle presidency would work. “You’d think they’ve never worked overseas,” he said. “Why did we create centralized government in a place that has never had one?”
A big reason is that U.S. leaders had a potential Afghan ruler in mind. Hamid Karzai, a tribal leader from southern Afghanistan, belonged to the country’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns.
Perhaps more importantly, Karzai spoke polished English and was a CIA asset. In 2001, a U.S. spy had saved his life, and the CIA would keep Karzai on its payroll
for years to come.
At first, to American eyes, the new system of government led by Karzai worked. In 2004, after serving as interim leader, Karzai was elected president in Afghanistan’s first national democratic election. He built a personal rapport with Bush; the two leaders chatted frequently by videoconference.
But relations gradually soured. Karzai grew outspoken and criticized the U.S. military for a surge of airstrikes and night raids that inflicted civilian casualties and alienated much of the population. Meanwhile, U.S. officials chafed as Karzai cut deals with warlords and doled out governorships as political spoils.
“After 2005, my impression was that the warlords were back because Karzai wanted them back and he only understood the patronage system,” Hadley, the Bush administration national security adviser, told government interviewers. “Karzai was never sold on democracy and did not rely on democratic institutions.”
Richard Boucher, who served under Bush as the State Department’s chief spokesman and later its top diplomat for South Asia, told government interviewers that Karzai’s governing instincts “were to rely on his friends. That is how Afghanistan works — relying on his friends, supporters and local potentates; powers that be, not just powers that the Americans created.”
“Getting him to use that governing structure that we put in place, that we told him he had to have, was really hard,” Boucher added. “We said, you have to work through this democratic, bureaucratic system just like we have in America.”
In 2009, Karzai won reelection, narrowly avoiding a runoff thanks to a massive ballot-box stuffing campaign that tainted the outcome. Many U.S. officials were appalled and pressed for an independent investigation. Karzai, in turn, privately accused the Obama administration of violating Afghan sovereignty and plotting to oust him from power.
In the end, U.S. officials swallowed their objections. After all, they had built the new nation and put Karzai in charge.
Afew weeks after Karzai’s reelection, Obama announced he would send 30,000 more U.S. troops to the war zone as part of a new strategy to defeat the Taliban and bolster the Afghan state.
In a December 2009 speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., Obama told Americans this would not mean a drawn-out extension of the nation-building campaign that had already dragged on for eight years.
“Some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort, one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade. I reject this course,” Obama said. “Our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended, because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”
Obama’s generals, however, held no illusions.
During a June 2010 hearing on Capitol Hill, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus was asked point-blank by skeptical lawmakers whether the United States was nation-building in Afghanistan.
“We are indeed,” said Petraeus, who at the time was the chief of the U.S. Central Command. “I’m just not going to evade it and play rhetorical games.”
In fact, a cornerstone of Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy was to build the Afghan government at breakneck speed — with unprecedented sums from the U.S. treasury.
Petraeus and other U.S. commanders were betting the Afghan people would choke off support for the Taliban if they felt Karzai’s government could protect them and deliver basic services.
But there were two big hurdles. First, there was not much time for the counterinsurgency strategy to work. Obama had given the Pentagon just 18 months to turn the tide of the war before he wanted to start bringing troops home.
Second, across much of Afghanistan, there was hardly any government presence to begin with. And where there was, it was often corrupt and hated by the locals.
As a result, the Obama administration ordered the military, the State Department, USAID and their contractors to build up the Afghan government as quickly as possible. In the field, soldiers and aid workers were given a virtual blank check to construct schools, hospitals, roads — anything that might win loyalty from the populace.
“Petraeus was hell-bent on throwing money at the problem,”
an unidentified U.S. military officer told government interviewers. “When Petraeus was around, all that mattered was spending. He wanted to put Afghans to work.”
An unnamed USAID official complained that he was always being asked “How much are you spending?” instead of “Are you winning the battle?” He added, “We were always chasing the dragon — always behind, never good enough.”
Another unidentified aid worker told government interviewers that the pace was unrealistic and unsustainable: “It was difficult to bring a region that is [a] hundred years . . . behind out in a few years.”
In a Lessons Learned interview, Petraeus acknowledged the spendthrift strategy. But he said the U.S. military had no choice given Obama’s order to start reversing the surge in 2011.
“What drove spending was the need to solidify gains as quickly as we could knowing that we had a tight drawdown timeline,” he said. “And we wound up spending faster than we would have if we felt we had forces longer than we did.”
Amid the haste to spend, U.S. agencies wasted large sums of money on ghost projects that never took shape.
Tim Graczewski was a Navy Reserve officer who oversaw economic development projects in southern Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. When he arrived for the surge, he told government interviewers, he had to hunt for a 37-acre project that appeared to exist only on paper.
Before his arrival, the U.S. government had signed $8 million in contracts to build an industrial park near Kandahar for 48 businesses. But after reviewing the files, Graczewski said, he could not even find the site.
“It blew my mind how much we didn’t know about the park in the first place when we embarked on this project,” he said. “It was impossible to get info on it, even where it was located. It was that much of a blank spot. Nobody knew anything about anything.”
Graczewski said he finally located the property, but there were no buildings — only some empty streets and sewer pipes.
“Don’t know who did it, but figured it was there, so let’s try to use it,” he recalled. Despite efforts to revive the project, he said, it “fell apart” after he left in 2010.
U.S. auditors visited the site four years later and found it largely deserted. A single company, an ice cream packing outfit, was open for business.
Undaunted, the U.S. government tried to connect the industrial park to an even more ambitious nation-building project — to generate electricity for Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-biggest city, and surrounding areas.
Hamstrung by a primitive electrical grid, Kandahar suffered from a scarcity of power. U.S. military commanders saw an opportunity. If they could generate a reliable flow of electricity, grateful Kandaharis would support the Afghan government and turn against the Taliban.
To do that, the U.S. military wanted to rebuild an aging hydroelectric power station at the Kajaki Dam, about 100 miles north of Kandahar. USAID had built the dam in the 1950s and installed turbines in the 1970s, but it quickly fell into disrepair.
The U.S. government had been trying to jump-start the project and add capacity since 2004 without much to show for it. The Taliban controlled the area surrounding the dam, as well as some transmission lines. Repair crews needed armed convoys or helicopters to access the site.
Despite the risks, by 2010, U.S. generals were lobbying to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the project, calling it a critical part of their counterinsurgency strategy.
Some development experts pushed back, arguing that it made no sense to finance a giant construction project in enemy territory. They noted that the Afghans lacked the technical expertise to maintain it in the long run.
They also questioned whether it would really help win the hearts and minds of Afghans accustomed to life without central power.
“Why did we think providing electricity to communities in Kandahar who had no concept of what to do with it would convince them to abandon the Taliban?” a senior USAID official said in a Lessons Learned interview.
In the end, the generals won the argument. Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, told government interviewers he had deep misgivings about the dam project but approved a portion of it anyway.
“I made the decision to go ahead with it, but I was sure it was never going to work,” Crocker said. “The biggest lesson learned for me is, don’t do major infrastructure projects.”
For the generals, the dam project was not enough.
It would take years to complete, and with the clock ticking on their counterinsurgency strategy, they wanted to supply electricity to the Kandaharis right away. So they drew up a temporary plan to buy giant diesel-fueled generators that could start humming in a matter of months, not years.
It was a horribly inefficient and costly way to generate electricity for an entire city. Expenses would run to $256 million over five years, mostly for fuel. Again, some people tried to push back.
An unidentified NATO official told government interviewers that he was given the task of trying to secure financing for the generators from international donors but got nowhere.
“Anyone who looked at this more closely could see that the math didn’t add up, that it was all nonsense,” he said. “We went to the World Bank [and] they didn’t want to touch it. . . . People look at it and they think it’s crazy.”
Another former U.S. ambassador said that he opposed the diesel generator plan, too, but that U.S. military commanders prevailed.
“Petraeus got the power back on in Iraq and wanted to do the same in Afghanistan,” the unnamed former ambassador told government interviewers. “But in Iraq, it made more sense; they had oil, engineers, and indigenous capacity; it was doable.”
By December 2018, the U.S. government had spent $775 million on the dam, the diesel generators and other electrical projects in Kandahar and neighboring Helmand province, according to a SIGAR audit.
Power generation at the dam has nearly tripled, but the projects are still plagued by dysfunction; last year, USAID determined that the Afghan public utility for Kandahar was not commercially viable and may never be able to operate without foreign subsidies.
Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House official under Bush and Obama, told government interviewers that such projects failed to achieve their objective — bringing peace and stability — and that U.S. military officials were guilty of “biting off more than they can chew.”
“There is a bigger question here — why does the U.S. undertake actions that are beyond its abilities?” Eggers said. “This question gets at strategy and human psychology, and it is a hard question to answer.”
The nation-building campaign was undone not only by white elephants. According to the Lessons Learned interviews, as well as audits from SIGAR, one of the most mismanaged pots of money was the Commanders’ Emergency Response Program, or CERP.
Authorized by Congress, it allowed military commanders in the field to bypass normal contracting rules and spend up to $1 million on infrastructure projects. But most cost less than $50,000 each.
Commanders told government interviewers that they were under so much pressure to spend that they blindly copied CERP paperwork from past projects, knowing that it was unlikely anyone would bother to inspect it afterward.
“You’d see the same picture of a [health] clinic posted to a hundred different clinic project reports around the country,” said one senior officer who worked at military headquarters in Kabul.
An Army brigade commander in eastern Afghanistan told government interviewers that he often saw CERP proposals that referred to “sheikhs” — a giveaway that they were cut-and-pasted from reconstruction projects in Iraq. (“Sheikh” is an Arabic title of respect but is generally not used in Afghanistan.)
At one point, the brigade commander recalled telling his staffers that if they could not show that a CERP project would be beneficial, “then the smartest thing to do is nothing.” In response, he said: “I
got crickets. ‘ We can’t build nothing,’ they said. I told them we might as well throw our money away.”
Brian Copes, an Army National Guard general who served as a civil-affairs commander in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan, likened the flood of aid to “crack cocaine,” calling it “an addiction that affected every agency.”
In a Lessons Learned interview, he said he came across a U.s.-built greenhouse that cost $30,000 and had fallen into disuse because the Afghans could not maintain it. His unit built a replacement greenhouse out of iron rebar that worked better and cost only $55 — despite pressure to spend far more.
“Congress gives us money to spend and expects us to spend all of it,” Copes said. “The attitude became we don’t care what you do with the money as long as you spend it.”
Despite its best efforts, the U.S. military could spend only about two-thirds of the $3.7 billion that Congress funded for CERP, according to Defense Department figures. Of the $2.3 billion it did spend, the Pentagon was able to provide financial details for only about $890 million worth of projects, according to a 2015 audit.
Officials from other agencies told government interviewers they were appalled at the waste and mismanagement.
“CERP was nothing but walking-around money,” said Ken Yamashita, USAID’S mission director for Afghanistan from 2011 to 2014, likening the payments to cash handouts for political purposes.
An unidentified NATO official called the program “a dark pit of endless money for anything with no accountability.”
Of all the flaws with the Afghanistan nation-building campaign — the waste, the inefficiency, the half-baked ideas — nothing confounded U.S. officials more than the fact that they could never tell whether any of it was actually helping them win the war.
An Army officer assigned to U.S. military headquarters in Kabul during the surge told government interviewers that it was hard enough to track whether CERP projects were actually built, let alone whether they made a difference on the battlefield.
“We wanted hard quantitative metrics that would tell us that X project is producing the desired outcomes, but we had a hard time defining those metrics,” he said. “We had no idea how to measure if [a] hospital’s existence was reducing support for the Taliban. That was always the last 10 yards that we couldn’t run.”
Even some of the most wellintentioned projects could boomerang.
Tooryalai Wesa, who served as governor of Kandahar province from 2008 to 2014, said U.S. aid workers once insisted on carrying out a public-health project to teach Afghans how to wash their hands.
“It was an insult to the people. Here people wash their hands five times a day for prayers,” Wesa told government interviewers. “Moreover, hand wash project is not needed. Think about employment, and think about enabling people to earn something.”
But that could backfire, too. For one project in Kandahar, U.S. and Canadian troops paid villagers $90 to $100 a month to clear irrigation canals, according to Thomas Johnson, a specialist on Afghanistan who works as a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.
It took a while for the troops to figure out their program was indirectly disrupting local schools. Teachers in the area earned much less, only $60 to $80 a month.
“So initially all the school teachers quit their jobs and joined the ditch diggers,” Johnson said in a Lessons Learned interview. He served as a political and counterinsurgency adviser to the Canadians from 2009 to 2010.
A similar problem arose in eastern Afghanistan, where one gungho Army brigade was so determined to make a difference that it promised to build 50 schools — but unwittingly ended up helping the Taliban, according to an officer in the brigade.
“There weren’t enough teachers to fill them, so buildings languished,” the unnamed U.S. military officer told government interviewers, “and some of them even became bomb-making factories.”-->
Built to fail, ''[[The Washington Post]]'' 12. Dezember 2019,  [https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post/textview].</ref>

== Aufsichtstätigkeit ==
=== Audits ===
Das Audits Directorate von SIGAR führt Audits und Inspektionen von Wiederaufbaumaßnahmen in Afghanistan durch. Diese Prüfungen zielen auf eine Reihe von Programmen und Aktivitäten ab, um das gesetzgeberische Mandat von SIGAR zu erfüllen. Sie identifizieren Probleme im Zusammenhang mit den Wiederaufbaumaßnahmen der Vereinigten Staaten und geben Empfehlungen zur Verbesserung der Effizienz und Effektivität.

Die Prüfungen von SIGAR reichen von der Bewertung der Programmrichtung bis hin zu engeren Prüfungen bestimmter Verträge oder Aspekten des Vertrags- und Programmmanagements. Bei den Inspektionen von SIGAR handelt es sich um schnelle Folgenabschätzungen, um festzustellen, ob Infrastrukturprojekte ordnungsgemäß erstellt wurden, wie beabsichtigt verwendet werden und aufrechterhalten werden können. SIGAR führt auch forensische Überprüfungen von Wiederaufbaumitteln durch, die vom Verteidigungsministerium, dem Außenministerium und der US-amerikanischen Agentur für internationale Entwicklung verwaltet werden. Diese forensischen Überprüfungen identifizieren Anomalien, die auf Betrug hinweisen können.

=== Ermittlungen ===
Das Investigations Directorate führt strafrechtliche und zivilrechtliche Ermittlungen in Bezug auf Verschwendung, Betrug und Missbrauch im Zusammenhang mit Programmen und Operationen durch, die mit US-Mitteln für den Wiederaufbau Afghanistans unterstützt werden. Die Ergebnisse werden durch strafrechtliche Verfolgung, zivilrechtliche Schritte, Einziehung von Geldern sowie Aussetzung und Aussetzung erzielt.

Um seinen Auftrag zu erfüllen, verfügt SIGAR über die volle Strafverfolgungsbehörde des Bundes durch seine Ermächtigungsgesetze, wie sie im National Defense Authorization Act von 2008 definiert sind. Die SIGAR Special Agents untersuchen Straftaten im Zusammenhang mit Beschaffungsbetrug, Vertragsbetrug, Diebstahl, Korruption, Bestechung von Regierungsangestellten und der Öffentlichkeit Beamte und eine Vielzahl von zivilrechtlichen Angelegenheiten im Zusammenhang mit Verschwendung und Missbrauch von US-Steuergeldern.

Der Quartalsbericht von Oktober 2014 berichtete von 322 laufenden SIGAR - Ermittlungen.<ref>Quartalsbericht von Oktober 2014 berichtete von 322 laufenden SIGAR - Ermittlungen  October 2014 SIGAR Quarterly Report, [http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2014-10-30qr.pdf]; List of Suspension and Debarment Cases, {{Webarchiv|url=http://www.sigar.mil/investigations/suspension-debarment-cases.html |wayback=20120724113937 |text=Archivierte Kopie |archiv-bot=2024-05-13 09:07:18 InternetArchiveBot }}; List of Criminal Cases, {{Webarchiv|url=http://www.sigar.mil/investigations/criminal-cases.html |wayback=20120724113932 |text=Archivierte Kopie |archiv-bot=2024-05-13 09:07:18 InternetArchiveBot }}</ref>

=== Spezialprojekte ===
Das SIGAR Special Projects-Team wurde gegründet, um aufkommende Probleme zu untersuchen und umgehend umsetzbare Berichte an Bundesbehörden und den Kongress zu übermitteln. Die Berichte des Special Projects decken eine breite Palette von Programmen und Aktivitäten ab. Das Büro besteht aus Wirtschaftsprüfern, Analysten, Ermittlern, Anwälten, Sachverständigen und anderen Spezialisten, die ihr Fachwissen schnell und gemeinsam auf aufkommende Probleme und Fragen anwenden können.<ref> SIGAR Special Projects Office, [http://www.sigar.mil/specialprojects/index.aspx?SSR=4]</ref>

=== Koordinierter Mittelabfluss ===
Gemäß seinem Mandat koordiniert sich SIGAR mit den anderen mit der Überwachung des Projektes Wiederaufbau Afghanistan befassten Generalinspektoren:

* [[Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense]]
* [[Office of the Inspector General of the Department of State]]
* [[Office of Inspector General, U.S. Agency for International Development]]

Gemeinsam wurde eine Strategie für die Überwachung des Mittelabflusses von 104 Mrd. USD des Projektes [[Krieg in Afghanistan seit 2001|Wiederaufbau Afghanistan]] gefunden.<ref>
Joint Strategic Oversight Plan for Afghanistan Reconstruction, FY13,  Strategic plan of SIGAR and the inspectors general[http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/strategicoversightplans/fy-2013.pdf]</ref>

=== Themenberichte ===
==== 6 Faktoren die zum Zusammenbruch der Afghanischen Regierung beitrugen ====
Die Institution bestand 2022 und veröffentlichte periodische und themenorientierte Berichte.<ref>[https://www.sigar.mil/allreports/index.aspx?SSR=5] https://www.sigar.mil/quarterlyreports/</ref>
Beispielsweise wurde berichtet, dass 6 Faktoren zum Zusammenbruch der Afghanischen Regierung beitrugen:
#Erstens versäumte es die afghanische Regierung zu erkennen, dass die Streitkräfte der Vereinigten Staaten tatsächlich aus dem Land abrückten.
#Zweitens hat der Ausschluss der afghanischen Regierung von den Gesprächen zwischen den USA und den Taliban diese geschwächt und untergraben und die ermutigten Taliban ermutigt, einen militärischen Sieg anzustreben.
#Drittens bestand die afghanische Regierung trotz ihrer geschwächten Position während der innerafghanischen Verhandlungen darauf, dass die Taliban in die Republik integriert werden, was Fortschritte bei den Friedensgesprächen behinderte.
#Viertens waren die Taliban nicht kompromissbereit, was das Potenzial für eine politische Verhandlungslösung weiter behinderte.
#Fünftens regierte Präsident Ashraf Ghani durch einen äußerst selektiven, engen Kreis von Loyalisten und destabilisierte die Regierung an einem kritischen Punkt.
#Schließlich trugen der hohe Zentralisierungsgrad der afghanischen Regierung, der Kampf um Legitimität und die endemische Korruption langfristig zu ihrem schließlichen Zusammenbruch bei und bereiteten die Bühne für das letzte Kapitel der Republik.<ref>SIGAR 23-05-IP	Why the Afghan Government Collapsed 	Tuesday, November 15, 2022, [https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/evaluations/SIGAR-23-05-IP.pdf PDF]</ref>

==== Ausgewählte Themenberichte ====
* Betäubungsmittel-Polizei in Afghanistan: US-Hilfe für Provincial Einheiten, Zuwendungen nicht vollständig nachvollziehbar, Formale Fähigkeitsbewertungen sind erforderlich.<ref>Counternarcotics Police of Afghanistan: U.S. Assistance to Provincial Units Cannot Be Fully Tracked and Formal Capability Assessments Are Needed, [http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/SIGAR-Audit-15-12.pdf] </ref>
* [[Pul-e-Charkhi prison]]: Nach 5 Jahren und 18,5 Millionen US-Dollar bleibt das Renovierungsprojekt unvollständig<ref>Pol-i-Charkhi Prison: After 5 Years and $18.5 Million, Renovation Project Remains Incomplete, [http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/inspections/SIGAR-15-11-IP.pdf]</ref>
* Sonderbericht: Mohnanbau in Afghanistan, 2012 und 2013.<ref>Special Report: Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan, 2012 and 2013, [http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/special%20projects/SIGAR-15-10-SP.pdf]</ref>
* Drei mobile Fernsehproduktionswagen für afghanische Fernsehsender.<ref>Inquiry Letter: Communication Trucks, [http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/special%20projects/SIGAR-15-09%20IL.pdf]</ref>
* Was wir lernen müssen: Lehren aus zwanzig Jahren Wiederaufbau Afghanistans.<ref>What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction, [https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-21-46-LL.pdf PDF]</ref>

== Einzelnachweise ==
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== Anmerkungen ==
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{{SORTIERUNG:United States Inspectors General Afghanistan Reconstruction}}
[[Kategorie:Krieg in Afghanistan 2001–2021]]
[[Kategorie:Haushaltsrecht]]
[[Kategorie:Informationsfreiheit]]
[[Kategorie:Regierung der Vereinigten Staaten]]
[[Kategorie:Organisation (Arlington County)]]
[[Kategorie:Gegründet 2008]]