Stunned anew by reports that waste and corruption in Afghanistan has consumed up to 50 percent of U.S. taxpayer spending there, Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday called for a full U.S. withdrawal and a funding shift to America’s infrastructure.
In a hearing where the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John F. Sopko, listed wasteful projects and said the Taliban was taking over huge swaths of the nation, Paul said it is time to leave the war torn nation after 16 years.
“I have long been a critic of both our current lack of strategic mission in Afghanistan, and of the colossal waste of taxpayer dollars there. So recently, I sent a bipartisan fact-finding team, which included two of my senior staff to Afghanistan to see and observe first-hand,” said Paul of the team that included his Deputy Chief of Staff Sergio Gor and Gregory McNeill, majority staff director of Paul’s Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management Subcommittee for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“They went alongside the Inspector General’s team, and what they saw only reinforced my belief that it is past time to get out. We must focus on rebuilding America and get out of Kabul,” said Paul, a Kentucky Republican.
President Trump is considering a withdrawal. It is expected that the U.S. will spend $45 billion in Afghanistan this year.
Gor took the witness stand to describe his recent trip with McNeill and alongside Sopko’s team.
He described rampant corruption and fraud that has cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
“One of the questions which I asked every individual or group we met with was, ‘What part of funding goes to corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse?’ The answers varied from a low of 20 percent to a high of 50 percent,” he said in his prepared remarks.
“Corruption is so rampant, it has been accepted as the norm. There are efforts to root out some of it, but as a State Department official explained, it is also part of the culture and will never be eradicated. Corruption can range from literally billions of dollars disappearing, to preferential hiring and nepotism. Ministers tend to hire from within their own tribes, their own villages, or quite literally from their immediate family,” he explained.
He added that corruption is “a way of life” in Afghanistan and that members of Sopko’s group have described the terrorist hotbed as “the most corrupt nation in the world.”
Gor cited corrupt projects, including a $750 million electrification in which U.S. taxpayers fund the rebuilding of towers regularly destroyed by the Taliban, $87 million project to build a Marriott and apartment building that is less than 30 percent complete, a $210 million boondoggle for the country’s Ministry of Interior.
And he said, “While we have incredible men and women on the ground who are trying to better the lives of Afghans, vast corruption, waste, fraud and abuse still exists. The American taxpayer demands better oversight. We can’t afford to just simply waste millions of dollars year after year.”
He also raised concerns about an Afghan brain drain of thousands to the U.S., leaving the country without many experienced and educated citizens.
In calling for an end to special visas for Afghans, Gor said in his remarks, “Afghanistan will never be able to succeed if the smartest individuals are all leaving for the United States and Europe. Over 50,000 individuals have been resettled in the United States in the last 10 years.”
