Afghanistan

“De-scoping” Afghanistan

By Massimo Calabresi | November 16, 2010 | +

On Sunday McClatchy dropped its months-long investigation of U.S. construction projects in Afghanistan. The picture is not pretty and an unsettling metaphor for the nine-year war effort emerges:

A McClatchy investigation has found that since January 2008, nearly $200 million in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction projects in Afghanistan have failed, face serious delays or resulted in subpar work. Poor recordkeeping made it impossible for McClatchy to determine the value of faulty projects before then. The military tries to recover part of a project’s cost, but in many cases, the funds were already spent.

The investigation also found that:

  • In a rush to award contracts to Afghan companies, the Corps accepts bids that don’t cover the cost of a project, including the expense of security and a contractor’s profit.
  • Rather than scrap a project that’s failing, the government sometimes rewrites the contract to require only the work that’s been done and declares the effort a success. The process is called “de-scoping.”
  • At the same time, a vast majority of the companies that McClatchy found were doing shoddy work haven’t been banned from getting new U.S. contracts, according to government records. U.S. taxpayer dollars also continue to go to firms whose true ownership is hard to determine, making it difficult to hold anyone accountable.

Despite these challenges, the Corps’ work in Afghanistan is set to more than double in the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, to nearly $2 billion from $900 million in the northern half of Afghanistan alone, according to a recent presentation by Army Col. Thomas Magness, the commander of the Afghanistan Engineer District-North.

Re-writing expectations to meet disappointing results seems an uncomfortable but apt analogy for a project whose aims have steadily diminished since Bush first launched Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001. Watch for “de-scoping” in the December review of the war effort in Afghanistan.

Related Topics: Afghanistan, Uncategorized

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  • gysgt213

    Why we doing this again?

  • http://elvisberg.wordpress.com Elvis Elvisberg

    Inertia + the military-industrial complex + culture of jingoism.
    -
    Plus, the burdens fall on the tiny fraction of Americans who serve.

  • Cliff

    I’m glad Calabresi is highlighting this, but really, is anyone surprised?
    .
    We’ve known for years that contractors are treating the wars as direct pipelines into the US money supply.
    .
    The commenters here regularly highlight the huge multimillion dollar embassies we’re building, and the huge multimillion dollar facilities that no one in Afghanistan knows how to use.

  • doddeb

    Cliff:

    Not to mention, contract modifications occur all the time with American companies for many of the same reasons he outlines here. In my 26 years with the federal government, I can say that it happens fairly regularly from low dollar contracts all the way up to high. That doesn’t mean we should be happy with the practice in Afghanistan, but perhaps we should take a hard look at the system as a whole.

  • stuartzechman

    Thanks for bringing us this significant report, Massimo Calabresi.

  • textee

    What expertise does any useful idiot at al McClatchy have to “investigate” and judge any construction project?

    Answer: About as much expertise as any useful idiot at al McClatchy has to evaluate any military operation, to wit: none.

  • Cliff

    Absolutely the whole system needs to get revamped.
    .
    As I understand it, they’ve been pushing the idea that private enterprise is more efficient and cheaper for decades.
    So now we’re contracting all these functions out, and because our regulatory agencies are gutted, no one’s the wiser when the contractors start siphoning out money.

  • herby002

    1. You don’t know anything about the McClatchy people who did the study, so it’s dumb of you to say that they are without expertise.

    2. They weren’t evaluating “military operations” so much as the financing and construction of buildings and other installations. Your insinuation that McClatchy is reviewing combat tactics or strategy is a prime example of strawman arguments.

    3. Your offensive/defensive comments are surprising: Usually you would use information like this to malign President Obama, Democrats, liberals for another failed socialist war policy. What happened, are you ill?
    - Oh, wait…
    “since January 2008, nearly $200 million in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction projects in Afghanistan have failed, face serious delays or resulted in subpar work. Poor recordkeeping made it impossible for McClatchy to determine the value of faulty projects before then.”
    - You want to deflect attention from the fact that this waste of money probably occurred under Bush for at least seven years, but it’s hard to nail down facts because of “poor recordkeeping”.

    - Remind anyone of the big banks’ inability to document who really owns the properties that they’re foreclosing on, even when the mortgages are paid up?

    - Remind anyone of the billions of “construction” dollars we pissed away in Iraq?

  • michaelfury
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