Pak schemes using US funds in disarray
Subodh Varma for The Times of India
Last year, a team of top US auditors flew over to Pakistan to check out on how aid to their close ally is being used. What they found was a picture of disarray. Here is one glaring example: of the 140 laptops that were sent to Peshawar for smooth functioning of government staff, 72 laptops valued at $101,000 were missing. Enquiries showed that employees had taken them home.
The audit team from the Office of Inspectors General gave this terse order, USAID-Pakistan take immediate steps to confirm the existence of 72 laptop computers. If the laptop computers cannot be produced, the mission should issue a bill of collection to the contractor for $1,400 for each missing laptop.
In October 2009, US Congress passed the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act, which authorizes up to $1.5 billion a year for development, economic, and democratic assistance to Pakistan for fiscal years 2010 through 2014. This is civilian assistance as opposed to the huge military assistance that Pakistan gets for fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
According to the latest quarterly report on the civilian assistance program prepared jointly by the departments of state and defense, and USAID, the US embassy in Islamabad had received $3.931 billion for the program. But oversight officials from these powerful arms of the US government were aghast at what they found in Pakistan.
One year after the launch of the civilian assistance strategy in Pakistan, USAID has not been able to demonstrate measurable progress, the reports says.
Two audits done during the last quarter of 2010 found programs had made little progress in achieving the goals because of hostile environment, lack of baseline data and lack of oversight. As an example the auditors said that $767,841 worth of expenditure in upper FATA was questionable because of inappropriate accounting.
After President Obama took over, the US shifted its assistance strategy by trying to give funds to Pakistani NGOs rather than US contractors. Over $269 million has been given to local NGOs according to the report. However, this strategy too has run into trouble with several NGOs being accused of embezzlement of funds.
In a spectacular example of this, USAID/Pakistan terminated its agreement with the Academy for Educational Development (AED), after an investigation revealed fraud stemming from false statements and claims, and other violations. AED had 65 contracts from USAID, reportedly worth $640 million at the time.
In a programme aimed at delivering livelihood developing activities in upper FATA, the report found that it had carried out only 53% of planned activities, and program outcomes were weak because of security problems and allegations of wrongdoing.
Even equipment provided under the military assistance program, worth over $18 billion since 2006, has been found to be not fully accounted for. The GAO watchdogs tracked equipment from an US facility at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, through Tampa, Florida and finally to a DOD-leased warehouse in Islamabad between June 2009 and February 2011.
They found that basic data about military equipment like name, serial number, quantity and location was not written down and neither were there periodic checks to see whether the pieces were physically present or not. The defense department had assured in 2008, after severe discrepancies were found in inventories, that a proper procedure called Golden Sentry program would be put in place. But the current GAO report complains that many of the crucial checking systems are yet not in place.
So, while violence escalates in Afghanistan and civilian resentment at US presence mounts in Pakistan, fuelled by drone strikes on civilians and cases like the release of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, many are questioning the continued flow of funds into a losing cause in Pakistan.
