Pentagon blows $43 million on invalid Afghan gas station, IG says

WASHINGTON — U.S. taxpayers footed a check for a $42 million natural-gas stuffing hire in Afghanistan, a boondoggle that should have cost $500,000 and has probably no value to normal Afghans, a supervision watchdog for reformation in Afghanistan announced Monday.

A Pentagon charge force awarded a $3 million agreement to build a hire in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, though finished adult spending $12 million in construction costs and $30 million in “overhead” between 2011 and 2014, a Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) found. Meanwhile, identical gas hire was built in adjacent Pakistan cost $500,000.

“It’s tough to suppose a some-more vast rubbish of income than building an choice fuel hire in a war-torn nation that costs 8,000% some-more than it should, and is too dangerous for a watchdog to determine either it is even operational,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., pronounced in a statement. “Perhaps equally vast however, is that a Pentagon has apparently shirked a shortcoming to entirely comment for a taxpayer income that’s been squandered — an unsuitable miss of clarity that I’ll be entirely investigating.”

The compressed-natural gas hire was designed to uncover a viability of drumming a country’s healthy gas reserves. But a examiner ubiquitous dynamic that Pentagon’s Task Force for Stability and Business Operations unsuccessful to control a feasibility investigate before rising a project.

If they had, a examiner ubiquitous remarkable in his report, a Pentagon would have found that it would have small value for many Afghans. The Pentagon’s possess executive settled that acclimatisation to dense healthy gas costs $700 per automobile in Afghanistan. The normal annual income there is $690.

In a minute to a examiner general, a Pentagon remarkable that it had shuttered a charge force progressing this year and would try to find officials to answer questions. The charge force had been given $800 million to assistance encourage private investment in Afghanistan.

“As recently as Oct 13, 2015, SIGAR contacted (the Department of Defense) to pronounce to these unnamed employees, though DoD again unsuccessful to brand anyone,” according to a examiner general’s report.

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