Editorial: U.S. drug war in Afghanistan has been miserable failure
▻http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/03/06/editorial-u-s-drug-war-in-afghanistan-has-been-miserable-failure
.... despite 15 years and $8.5 billion in taxpayer dollars spent to fight opium cultivation and trafficking, the illegal opium industry is booming and Afghanistan is its epicenter.
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Unfortunately, this is just one of the many whoops moments for the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. The rebuilding effort has been plagued by waste, fraud and corruption from the start.
Consider the $772 million the Defense Department spent to purchase aircraft that the Afghan military cannot operate or maintain, the $34 million for a 64,000-square-foot military headquarters facility that military commanders did not want and never used and the $34.4 million spent on a program to encourage soybean farming and consumption, despite the fact that Afghans generally do not like soybeans and produced so few of them that the vast majority of crops had to be grown in America and shipped to Afghanistan.
Those are but a few of the highlights.
“We’ve built schools that have fallen down, clinics that there are no doctors for, we’ve built roads that are falling apart,” Inspector General John Sopko told Agence France-Press in 2014, adding that the amount of waste is “massive.”
To offer a stunning bit of perspective about the size of this effort, the cost of reconstruction in Afghanistan has now surpassed the inflation-adjusted amount spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. To say that the results for all that expense are disappointing would be a grievous understatement.