Audit: State Dept. fails to track billions of U.S. dollars in Afghan anti-drug efforts

Washington has spent more than $7.5 billion to battle the drug trade in Afghanistan over the past decade, but the State Department has failed to create a system for tracking whether the government’s efforts have had any impact, the department’s internal watchdog said Friday.

In addition, the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement has failed to work with Afghanistan’s fledgling government in developing a plan to pay for counternarcotics programs without U.S. funding, which is anticipated to dry up in the years ahead. The Bureau itself has contributed some $220 million in counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan since 2006.

The degree to which the Bureau — known by the acronym INL — has achieved any success in the war-torn nation is “unclear” because officials never “developed or implemented” what are known as “Performance Measurement Plans,” states a scathing audit circulated Friday by State Department’s Office of Inspector General.

“As a result, INL cannot determine whether its Afghan [counternarcotics] initiatives are successful or should be revised, reduced, or canceled,” the audit states. “Additionally, the long-term viability of the initiatives is unclear because INL had not worked with the [Afghan government] to develop required sustainment plans that detail how initiatives will continue without U.S. assistance.”

The audit comes just days after the United Nations declared that the cultivation of opium poppies — from which heroin is produced — has soared to record highs in Afghanistan over the past two years, casting doubt on the viability of Washington’s decade-long eradication efforts.

Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, which accounts for 90 percent of the world’s heroin supply, jumped by 7 percent between 2013 and 2014, according to a report published this week by the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime, which maintained the increased cultivation may have resulted in 7,050 more tons of opium on the world market today than a year earlier.

U.S. national security and intelligence officials have long said that the illegal heroin-opium trade helps finance the Afghan Taliban as well as global terrorists including al Qaeda — and that eradicating opium poppy cultivation is essential to any serious effort to combat such funding.

The U.N. report noted that the total value of Afghanistan’s poppy crop is estimated to be equivalent to roughly 4 percent of the nation’s $22 billion GDP.

The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) weighed in on the situation last month with a letter to the Obama administration warning that “the narcotics trade poisons the Afghan financial sector and undermines the Afghan state’s legitimacy by stoking corruption.”

In its Oct. 14 letter, SIGAR maintained that as of June, the U.S. government had spent roughly “$7.6 billion on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan,” with funding coming from the State Department, the Pentagon, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The letter noted that despite such spending, the U.N. reported that Afghan farmers grew an unprecedented 516,000 acres of poppies in 2013, surpassing the previous peak of 477,000 acres in 2007.

SIGAR also pointed out that “poppy-growing provinces that were once declared ‘poppy free’ have seen a resurgence in cultivation.”

The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement has not been the sole authority overseeing the billions spent on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan since U.S. forces invaded the nation following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the Bureau has long played a crucial organizational role in U.S. multi-agency counternarcotics initiatives overseas, particularly in efforts to coordinate with foreign governments on such initiatives.

The State Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit said total spending by INL in Afghanistan has been roughly $220 million since 2006, despite some $466 million authorized to the Bureau for such by Congress during that time.

While the Afghan government has “improved drug interdiction” over the course of the Bureau’s program there, without performance measurement plans in place, INL is “unable to report on whether the initiatives have made progress,” the audit said.

The Bureau had responded internally in recent months to an OIG recommendation that it create performance measurement plans, but that OIG has since determined that the recommendation was “unresolved.”

“This recommendation can be resolved when OIG receives and accepts a corrective action plan with target dates, where appropriate, that addresses the recommendation,” the audit said. “This recommendation can be closed when OIG receives and accepts evidence that INL has developed and implemented Performance Measurement Plans that measure and manage program performance and communicate program results for all of its initiatives in Afghanistan.”