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The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has found another tale of fraud, this time involving the "world's most expensive gas station":
"DOD charged the American taxpayer $43 million for what is likely the world's most expensive gas station." That's what Special Inspector General John F. Sopko found when he looked at the construction of a natural gas station in Sheberghan, Afghanistan.
According to the report, at most that station should have cost about $500,000. But in this case, the Department of Defense's Task Force for Stability and Business Operations awarded Central Asian Engineering a contract to build the station for a little under $3 million. But somehow the spending got out of control. Here's how the inspector general explains it in the report:
The Task Force spent $42,718,739 between 2011 and 2014 to fund the construction and to supervise the initial operation of the CNG station (approximately $12.3 [million] in direct costs and $30.0 [million] in overhead costs).
To make matters worse, the inspector general found that the Department of Defense didn't even study whether a natural gas station would be used in Afghanistan. And when the IG came asking questions, the Department of Defense said that all the people who worked on the project were gone, now, so they could not provide answers as to why a project that should have cost $500,000 ended up costing nearly $43 million.
NPR's article lists previous coverage of wartime corruption and waste in Afghanistan. For example, $7.6 billion has been spent on countering opium poppy production in Afghanistan, yet production reached an all-time high in 2013.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 04 2015, @09:49PM
"Action needed to be taken," said Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think-tank.
Bucci, who was unconnected to the Watson study, agreed with its observation that the forecasts for the cost and duration of the war proved to be a tiny fraction of the real costs.
"If we had had the foresight to see how long it would last and even if it would have cost half the lives, we would not have gone in," Bucci said. "Just the time alone would have been enough to stop us. Everyone thought it would be short."
More likely, they'd have glossed over that and just spun some propaganda about how they didn't know the occupation would take so long - like Bucci did just now.