By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus - The Washington Post
(NSI News Source Info) WASHINGTON — February 3, 2009: After five years of investigations and 250,000 pages of audits, 
Stuart Bowen wishes he could say the $50 billion cost of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was money accounted for and well spent.
"But that's just not happened," Bowen said.
Instead, the largest single-country relief and reconstruction project in U.S. history — most done by private U.S. contractors — was full of wasted funds, fraud and a lack of accountability under what Bowen, the congressionally mandated special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, calls an "ad hoc-racy" of lax or nonexistent government planning and supervision.
Despite the Iraq experience, he said, the United States is making many of the same mistakes again in Afghanistan, where U.S. reconstruction expenditures stand at more than $30 billion.
"It's too late to do the structural part and make it quickly applicable to Afghanistan," Bowen said. President Obama could take several steps to mitigate future damage, Bowen said. Instead of the "multiple versions" of the federal acquisition regulations (FAR) adopted and amended by "multiple agencies" operating in Iraq, Obama "could just issue a FAR regulation applicable to Afghanistan that everyone will follow" in issuing and supervising contracts, he said.
Bowen's office, SIGIR, is releasing a book today that recounts the Iraq experience and suggests how to avoid future mistakes. "Hard Lessons" is being published as the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting holds its first public hearing.
The commission will examine expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan and propose solutions.
"Hard Lessons," a draft of which was leaked in December, concludes the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was a failure, largely because there was no overall strategy behind it. Goals shifted from "liberation" and an early military exit to massive, ill-conceived and expensive building projects under the Coalition Provisional Authority of 2003 and 2004.
Many of those projects were abandoned as security worsened.
Overall, SIGIR and other law-enforcement agencies have obtained 35 convictions, including two major bribery schemes involving $14 million solicited by U.S. military officers who ran Kuwait-based units contracting for the billions of dollars in supplies sent to Iraq.
Also
American kidnapped: Gunmen kidnapped John Solecki, an American U.N. official, and killed his driver in southwest Pakistan today as they were heading to Solecki's job as the head of the U.N. refugee office in Quetta, senior police official Khalid Masood said.
Afghanistan bombing: A suicide bomber detonated his explosives inside a police training center in Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan, today, killing 19 officers and wounding at least 20, a police chief said.
Stuart Bowen wishes he could say the $50 billion cost of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was money accounted for and well spent.
"But that's just not happened," Bowen said.
Instead, the largest single-country relief and reconstruction project in U.S. history — most done by private U.S. contractors — was full of wasted funds, fraud and a lack of accountability under what Bowen, the congressionally mandated special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, calls an "ad hoc-racy" of lax or nonexistent government planning and supervision.
Despite the Iraq experience, he said, the United States is making many of the same mistakes again in Afghanistan, where U.S. reconstruction expenditures stand at more than $30 billion.
"It's too late to do the structural part and make it quickly applicable to Afghanistan," Bowen said. President Obama could take several steps to mitigate future damage, Bowen said. Instead of the "multiple versions" of the federal acquisition regulations (FAR) adopted and amended by "multiple agencies" operating in Iraq, Obama "could just issue a FAR regulation applicable to Afghanistan that everyone will follow" in issuing and supervising contracts, he said.
Bowen's office, SIGIR, is releasing a book today that recounts the Iraq experience and suggests how to avoid future mistakes. "Hard Lessons" is being published as the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting holds its first public hearing.
The commission will examine expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan and propose solutions.
"Hard Lessons," a draft of which was leaked in December, concludes the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was a failure, largely because there was no overall strategy behind it. Goals shifted from "liberation" and an early military exit to massive, ill-conceived and expensive building projects under the Coalition Provisional Authority of 2003 and 2004.
Many of those projects were abandoned as security worsened.
Overall, SIGIR and other law-enforcement agencies have obtained 35 convictions, including two major bribery schemes involving $14 million solicited by U.S. military officers who ran Kuwait-based units contracting for the billions of dollars in supplies sent to Iraq.
Also
American kidnapped: Gunmen kidnapped John Solecki, an American U.N. official, and killed his driver in southwest Pakistan today as they were heading to Solecki's job as the head of the U.N. refugee office in Quetta, senior police official Khalid Masood said.
Afghanistan bombing: A suicide bomber detonated his explosives inside a police training center in Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan, today, killing 19 officers and wounding at least 20, a police chief said.
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