Close but no SIGAR Commentary:By ARNAUD DE BORCHG UPI Editor at Large

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/de-Borchgrave/2011/01/14/Commentary-Close-but-no-SIGAR/UPI-18271295011907/

 

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 (UPI) -- After no less than 10 quarterly reports to Congress, 40 percent of $56 billion -- $22.4 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds -- allocated to civilian projects in Afghanistan cannot be accounted for by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.

The original amount for civilian aid is now being increased to $71 billion.

Corruption and outright theft are rampant in the projects SIGAR supposedly inspects but SIGAR's top cop, retired U.S. Marine Maj. Gen. Arnold Fields, kept coming up empty handed as he labored to protect his 150-person organization (32 of them stationed in Afghanistan, most of whom don't speak any local language).

SIGAR employs 50 auditors, many of them "double-dippers," who collect both government pensions and six-figure salaries, but none of them ever conducted required forensic or contract audits. More than 100 cases of corruption -- both U.S. contractors and Afghan subcontractors -- were ignored. U.S. Government Accounting Office auditors look at programs but are not shown the uncompleted completion.

U.S. Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., led a team of Senate investigators that spent two years looking into what became the SIGAR scandal. But Fields kept parrying their attacks by laying his reputation as a black Marine general on the line. The persona he displayed at the congressional witness table was disarming. It was a look of hurt innocence and Marine rectitude.

Fields was also expert at deflecting suggestions of malfeasance in the ranks of SIGAR with references to his poor humble beginnings as a deprived black child in South Carolina.

"I raised up hard, ladies and gentlemen, in poverty myself," he told the senators. "I worked for less than $1.50 a day -- about what the average Afghan makes today in year 2010," Fields told a packed Senate Committee room. Voice shaking, he added, "I wish that someone had brought $56 billion to bear upon my life."