US auditor finds taxpayer money flowing to Taliban, Al Qaeda - but Army refuses to act

By artappraiser on Tue, 07/30/2013 - 9:40pm |

By Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor, July 30, 2013

The US military has been ignoring warnings that its spending in Afghanistan is funding Al Qaeda and the Taliban. And John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), appears to have had enough.

He issued a blistering cover letter with SIGAR's quarterly report to Congress today that called into question what "appears to be a growing gap between the policy objectives of Washington and the reality of achieving them in Afghanistan." [....]

But Sopko's greatest degree of scorn is reserved for ongoing contracting with businesses that his office is convinced finance the insurgents trying to topple the US-supported Afghan government and kill US troops. [....]

Also see:

Al Qaeda, Taliban backers win US contracts in Afghanistan
By Tony Capaccio, Dawn.com by arrangement with Washington Post-Bloomberg News service, July 31, 2013

IG calls Afghan aid plan "bad value" for taxpayers
By Jaime Dupree, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 29, 2013

Afghanistan Audits Reveal Billions in U.S. Taxpayer Waste
By Allen McDuffee, DangerRoom @ wired.com, July 25, 2013

Report: More should be done to prevent US money from going to terrorists
By Heath Druzin, Stars & Stripes, July 25, 2013

URL:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2013/0730/US-auditor-finds-taxpayer-money-flowing-to-Taliban-Al-Qaeda-but-Army-refuses-to-act

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Follow-up story today:

Do we know how much US money is going to the Taliban in Afghanistan?
The short answer is 'no.' But there are worrying signs to be found in US auditing of its own contracting practices in Afghanistan.

By Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor, August 6, 2013

Last week I wrote about the clearly frustrated letter John F. Sopko, the US government's Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, wrote to Congress about the difficulty the US seems to have with stemming the flow of US taxpayer money to the Taliban and Al Qaeda [....]

Since then, I've done some more reading about the specific allegations over Pentagon, US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other branches of the US government giving lucrative contracts to supporters of the very people that US soldiers are in Afghanistan to fight. [....]

by artappraiser on Tue, 08/06/2013 - 4:20pm

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