The Defense Department spent $43 million on a compressed natural gas fueling station in Afghanistan, while a similar project in Pakistan cost just $300,000 – and now the Pentagon can’t even account for who made the decisions behind the waste, according to an inspector general’s report being released Monday.
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Although [the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations] achieved its immediate objective of building the CNG filling station, it apparently did so at an “exorbitant cost to US taxpayers”, Special Inspector General John Sopko writes in the report.
The compressed natural gas station in Afghanistan that cost $43 million.
However, between 2011-14, the task force spent $42.7 million on the project, and $30 million went toward overhead costs, according to the report.
“If it had”, SIGAR says, “They might have noted that Afghanistan lacks the natural gas transmission and local distribution infrastructure necessary to support a viable market for CNG [compressed natural gas] vehicles”.
The Pentagon has said that SIGAR can view the documents, but only in a DOD-provided room with department computers, and only after the DOD reviews and redacts any requested documents.
In May, McCaskill criticized construction of a $36 million building intended for Afghan reconstruction that was never occupied.it was built despite the fact that the top Pentagon general in Helmand Province said it was not needed, according to a previous SIGAR audit. “Who’s in charge? Why won’t they talk?”. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the ranking member of its investigations subcommittee, sent her own letter to Carter on November 2.
The report blasts the Pentagon for claiming that it can no longer answer questions about the task force that financed the station’s construction. Its goal was to help Afghanistan harness its substantial untapped natural resources, which the task force said were potentially worth $1 trillion.
“This is one of the worst examples of poor planning and just sheer stupidity”, Sopko told NBC News, adding that he is “suspicious when I see something that cost 140 times more than it did and I find people trying to withhold or not cooperate with me”.
“It is totally incredible that you now have a ghost program in the Department of Defense”.
In short, the disastrously incompetent subdivision of the Department of Defense can’t provide any explanation of how and why it was so disastrous because it technically doesn’t exist anymore. The Task Force appropriated money to build the compressed natural gas facility to assist Afghanistan in cutting its dependence on expensive imported gas. The city is west of Mazar-e-Sharif, where the DoD task force hoped to expand the natural-gas fervor.
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While Sopko told NBC News he was not alleging obstruction, he called the justification “unreasonable” and “incomprehensible”, especially given that the task force was shut down months, not years, ago. Chuck Grassley pointed out that “under the law, government employees are not authorized to spend tax dollars without proper documentation like contracts, invoices, receiving reports and payment vouchers”. In a letter to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, Sopko said, “On its face, this project does not seem feasible for several reasons”.
