The investigative arm of the Defense Department is looking into allegations that the Pentagon spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars by housing U.S. personnel in private “villas” in Afghanistan rather than at military or embassy facilities.
The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Ash Carter last week asking for more information about allegations raised by former employees that members of the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations stayed in plush villas at a cost of nearly $150 million.
“If TFBSO employees had instead lived at DOD facilities in Afghanistan, where housing, security, and food service are routinely provided at little or no extra charge to DOD organizations, it appears the taxpayers would have saved tens of millions of dollars,” John Sopko, the special inspector general, wrote in the letter, which was released on Thursday.
The villas included queen beds in some rooms, a flat-screen TV in every room that was at least 27 inches, as well as a DVD player and mini refrigerator in each room, the letter said.
The villas also were staffed by contractors who provided 24-hour building security and food service that was “at least three stars,” with two entree choices and three side order choices for each meal. Staff also had access to “light snacks,” water, tea, coffee and sodas around the clock.
These amenities supported “only a handful” of staff, between five and 10 most of the time, according to the investigative group’s findings so far.
By comparison, it would have cost about $1.8 million for 10 staff members to live at the embassy in 2014.
The main compound was in Kabul, though the task force also rented smaller villas in Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad, the letter to Carter said.
The letter found that the decision to house task force staff in private villas instead of on military bases was made by Paul Brinkley, the former deputy undersecretary of defense and first director of the task force.
Brinkley wrote in a book that he decided not to place task force staff on military bases to show private companies based outside Afghanistan that they could succeed without needing military support and encourage them to begin operating in the country, the letter said.
The Boston Consulting Group found that living off-base allowed staff on the task force to meet with officials in the field, not on base, and have more freedom of movement to conduct their operations, the letter said.
The letter to Carter requested more information on what, if any, cost-benefit analysis was conducted, who at the Defense Department authorized the decision to live off-base in Afghanistan and if any investors did invest in Afghanistan, as Brinkley claimed was the goal.
Brinkley, who no longer works for the government, has not cooperated with the request for more information, according to a press release.
The task force is the same group being investigated by SIGAR for building a $43 million gas station in Afghanistan when building comparable infrastructure in Pakistan cost less than $500,000.
Members on both sides of the aisle slammed the gas station as an exorbitant waste of taxpayer dollars.
“There are few things in this job that literally make my jaw drop,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement last month. “But of all the examples of wasteful projects in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Pentagon began prior to our wartime contracting reforms, this genuinely shocked me.
“It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous waste of money than building an alternative fuel station in a war-torn country that costs 8,000 percent more than it should, and is too dangerous for a watchdog to verify whether it is even operational,” she continued.
