U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

WASHINGTON : 

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office

Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800

Fax: (202) 512–2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402–0001

74–637PDF 2012

INVESTIGATING WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE IN

AFGHANISTAN

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND 

INVESTIGATIONS

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

JUNE 6, 2012

Serial No. 112–162

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/ or

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/

(II)

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida, Chairman 

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey 

DAN BURTON, Indiana 

ELTON GALLEGLY, California 

DANA ROHRABACHER, California 

DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois 

EDWARD R. ROYCE, California 

STEVE CHABOT, Ohio 

RON PAUL, Texas 

MIKE PENCE, Indiana 

JOE WILSON, South Carolina 

CONNIE MACK, Florida 

JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska 

MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas 

TED POE, Texas 

GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida 

JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio 

BILL JOHNSON, Ohio 

DAVID RIVERA, Florida 

MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania 

TIM GRIFFIN, Arkansas 

TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania 

JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina 

ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York 

RENEE ELLMERS, North Carolina 

ROBERT TURNER, New York 

HOWARD L. BERMAN, California 

GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York 

ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American 

Samoa 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York 

GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York 

RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri 

ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey 

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia 

THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida 

DENNIS CARDOZA, California 

BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky 

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York 

ALLYSON SCHWARTZ, Pennsylvania 

CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut 

FREDERICA WILSON, Florida 

KAREN BASS, California 

WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts 

DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island 

YLEEM D.S. POBLETE, Staff Director 

RICHARD J. KESSLER, Democratic Staff Director 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS

DANA ROHRABACHER, California, Chairman 

MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania 

RON PAUL, Texas 

TED POE, Texas 

DAVID RIVERA, Florida 

RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri 

DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island 

KAREN BASS, California 

(III)

C O N T E N T S 

Page

WITNESSES 

Mr. John Hutton, Director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management, U.S. Government Accountability Office ............................................................................. 15

Mr. Charles Johnson, Jr., Director, International Affairs and Trade, U.S. 

Government Accountability Office ...................................................................... 17

Mr. Larry Sampler, Jr., Senior Deputy Assistant to the Administrator, Office 

of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs, U.S. Agency for International Development ...................................................................................................................... 48

LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING 

The Honorable Dana Rohrabacher, a Representative in Congress from the 

State of California, and chairman, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations: 

New York Times article, ‘‘Intrigue in Karzai Family as an Afghan Era 

Closes,’’ dated June 3, 2012 ............................................................................. 2

Prepared statement .............................................................................................. 11

London Daily Telegraph article, ‘‘Captured Taliban Bombers Freed After 

Paying Bribes, Say Americans,’’ dated June 5, 2012 ..................................... 38

Mr. John Hutton and Mr. Charles Johnson, Jr.: Prepared statement ................ 18

Mr. Larry Sampler, Jr.: Prepared statement ........................................................ 51

APPENDIX 

Hearing notice .......................................................................................................... 70

Hearing minutes ...................................................................................................... 71

(1)

INVESTIGATING WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE 

IN AFGHANISTAN 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6, 2012

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS, 

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS, 

Washington, DC. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:31 p.m., in room 

2200, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Dana Rohrabacher 

(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I call to order this hearing of the Oversight 

and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs 

Committee, and I was just about to ask for unanimous consent to 

move ahead. 

All right. So what we will be doing is we both have some opening 

statements, and then we will proceed with the witnesses, and hopefully we can be done here—votes will start around 4:30. So our goal 

is to be totally out of here and done with the hearing by 4:30. Let’s 

see if we can do that. 

So I will begin, with your permission, begin with an opening 

statement. 

James Risen has had a story in the New York Times, in fact it 

was this last Sunday, which focused on the family of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. 

[The article referred to follows:]

2


74637c-1.eps
3


74637c-2.eps
4


74637c-3.eps
5


74637c-4.eps
6


74637c-5.eps
7

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Risen reported and I quote:

‘‘Members of his family are trying to protect their status, 

weighing how to hold onto power while secretly fighting among 

themselves for the control of the fortune they have amassed in 

the last decade. One brother, Qayum Karzai, is mulling a run 

for the Presidency when his brother steps down in 2014.’’

There have been previous reports that Hamid himself might try 

to change or circumvent the constitution to serve a prohibited third 

5-year term. Risen quotes a business partner of the Karzai family 

as saying, and I quote:

‘‘We have an illegitimate and irresponsible government because 

of Karzai and his family.’’

I have long been concerned about this problem, because the U.S. 

has unwisely bet everything on Hamid Karzai, giving him unprecedented power, in an overly centralized government that contradicts 

Afghan history and culture with its over-centralization. Ten years 

of his rule has left the country teetering on the brink of collapse, 

even with the backing of half a trillion American dollars, and a 

vast and NATO Army at his disposal, from which some 2,000 

Americans have been killed, and thousands more have been grievously wounded. And we are now on the hook for perhaps another 

decade of blood and treasure after 2014 to maintain an inherently 

flawed strategy. 

I wanted the GAO to look specifically into business deals involving Hamid Karzai and his family and their inner circle that have 

used U.S. funds. I was told that the GAO could not provide answers because, and I quote:

‘‘The lack of complete data on U.S. contracts with performance 

in Afghanistan, the difficulty in obtaining publicly releasable 

information on Afghan firms, and the improbability that ownership interest in firms could be identified. Additionally, the 

database does not provide information on subcontract awards.’’

USAID is one of those agencies that is not keeping adequate 

records on who is benefiting from American aid, and I want to 

know why. I want to know exactly why that is the situation, or 

that can be disputed. If a reporter for the New York Times can find 

out about Karzai’s family, why can’t USAID? I approached the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and was told 

that they couldn’t do it because they only have 120 people working 

for them, working there, it said. 

Well, as has been widely reported, President Karzai denied me 

entry into Afghanistan as part of a congressional delegation in 

April. I have serious concerns about the strategy we have been pursuing in Afghanistan, but what has made the debate personal for 

Karzai, is this investigation into the corruption of his administration and what I may call a decentralization strategy that I support, 

and perhaps that is making him upset as well, because what reforms I am calling for could mean a great deal to the family fortune, so to speak. 

Many people in Washington as well as in Kabul do not want me 

or anyone else to look into the basket to see if all the eggs are still 

there. That includes the State Department, which has gone all in 

8

for Karzai, but it also includes Congress, where my request to hold 

hearings, conduct investigations, and explore alternative strategies 

for Afghanistan have been denied time and again. Indeed, I wonder 

if someone will cut off the broadcast of this session before it concludes, which is what happened last time I held such a hearing. 

Too many careers have been tied to Karzai; so many that the 

campaign is now out to save him. Instead, we are ending up trying 

to save him rather than save Afghanistan. Indeed, I was told not 

to mention Karzai in the title of this hearing. SIGAR has reported 

Afghanistan is plagued by corruption and is tied for third as the 

most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency 

International’s Annual Corruption Perception Index. Corruption 

threatens the U.S. military and reconstruction missions as well as 

the Afghan Government’s legitimacy among its own people. 

Unfortunately, the records being kept by the United States Government agencies and departments, including USAID, and the lack 

of access to the Afghan Government’s records, has made it virtually 

impossible for the GAO to do its job or to help this Oversight and 

Investigations Subcommittee do its job to safeguard the interests of 

the United States and the American taxpayer. 

There has, however, been a scandal so big that it could not be 

hidden by the bureaucracy. That was the Kabul Bank case. The 

Kabul Bank was the largest commercial bank in Afghanistan and 

held one-third of the entire banking system’s assets. It was looted 

through a series of insider loans that were never meant to be paid 

back. The bank collapsed and was bailed out to the tune of $825 

million according to the IMF. One of the central figures in that 

bank scandal was Hamid Karzai’s brother, Mahmoud Karzai, who 

was given interest-free loans which he then used in part to buy a 

stake in the bank itself. 

It has been reported that much of the money loaned out by the 

bank was used to speculate on real estate in Dubai. So there was 

not even a pretext that the capital was being used to provide development for the Afghan economy. Which brings us to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which will be represented here 

today on our second panel. 

USAID and its contractors were involved in advising the Afghan 

Central Bank on regulations and supervising the operation of the 

banking system at the time the Kabul Bank scandal was taking 

place. USAID has claimed it could not have prevented such fraud, 

and I am hoping its witnesses today, or witness today, can elaborate on why it could not do so. The U.S. used the the Bank of 

Kabul for many, many transactions, so we had leverage and we 

had a great deal relationship with the people running the bank. 

For Fiscal Year 2013, the USAID request for Afghanistan is $5.2 

billion. Since 2002, USAID has awarded $15.2 billion in Afghanistan reconstruction projects. However, a majority staff report from 

the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 8th of 2011, 

found that, and I quote.

‘‘Roughly 80 percent of USAID’s resources are being spent in 

Afghanistan’s restive south and east. Only 20 percent is going 

to the rest of the country.’’

9

Would it not be better as a long-term strategy in a civil war-type 

situation to build up the capabilities and areas that were loyal, or 

more loyal to you and to our country—for example, the northern—

the areas where the Northern Alliance is more dominant? There is 

an old adage that goes: ‘‘I don’t need to pay my enemies to hate 

me because they will do it for free.’’ It is our friends we want to 

reward. 

So there should be a distribution of aid—and there should have 

been all along—that is much fairer and more balanced than simply 

this southern-tier push to focus aid that we have seen, that we now 

know about in Afghanistan. The GAO reports have raised questions about how well USAID has protected American taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan, and I was shocked to learn from one report 

that it was only in January 2011 that USAID created a process to 

vet non-U.S. contractors regarding whether they were a terrorist or 

organized-crime funding risk. 

How many years of counterterrorist campaign does it take to 

start to worry about whether American funds are going into the 

pockets of terrorists? Part of the problem is that so many contracts 

get passed down through multilayers of subcontractors, so somebody gets the money. Then there comes the subcontractor, and who 

the heck knows who the subcontractor’s subcontractor is. At each 

step the money is taken out of the stream, but the work then is 

passed on to someone else. It is less a process of construction than 

a systematic process of looting conducted by a labyrinth of shady 

connections that no one seems to be able to keep track of, and that 

everyone knows about the ties that it has—or whoever they are 

dealing with have to the government. So Afghani leaders can get rich through a $300 million power 

plant in Kabul that is too expensive to run, or a power plant in 

Kandahar that has no electric grid to which it can be connected, 

or a Helmand River dam whose generator is rusted as the project 

has stalled. 

We have in Ghazni Province, $4 million went to an Afghan firm 

whose owners fled to the Netherlands with the money after paving 

less than a mile of a 17-mile road project. I am hoping that both 

the GAO and the USAID can suggest a better way to control American money going forward through 2014 and beyond. 

I hope we can find an alternate strategy in Afghanistan, but 

whatever we decide to do, we need to make sure the money we 

spend actually goes to support our objectives, especially doesn’t go 

to support people who hate the goals that we have laid down and 

our people are giving their lives for as we speak. But that hasn’t 

been done so far. 

In 2010, I was briefed on a new software system that can be 

seamlessly inserted into all of the American taxpayer expenditures 

of aid funds for Afghanistan or any other recipient. If we insist that 

our aid be spent from a separate account and paid by a check, then 

this software will track every transaction as our money moves 

through the local economy, including the initial transaction involving our money that is made to a recipient outside of Afghanistan. 

So I think the technology exists that we can get the job done if 

the will exists to try to get control of this situation. Corruption 

must be stamped out. It would be ironic, as well as tragic, if one 

10

of the results of American development assistance was to provide 

the Afghan oligarchy in which the U.S. has invested so much, the 

means to implement personal exit strategies if things get rough. 

Most of the Karzai family and its cronies did flee the country the 

last time the Taliban invaded, and only came back to Afghanistan 

when they were protected by United States troops. In contrast, the 

Northern Alliance fought the Taliban every step of the way, never 

quit, and were on the vanguard when we fought to drive the 

Taliban out of Afghanistan in 9/11. 

We do not want cowardly allies who will take their ill-gotten 

gains and cut and run, rather than stand and defend their country. 

We need allies who are rooted in the country, not sitting on huge 

foreign bank accounts and willing to take off once the going gets 

rough. 

With that said, I will now yield for an opening statement of any 

length that you would like to Mr. Carnahan, our ranking member. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Rohrabacher follows:]

11


74637d-1.eps
12


74637d-2.eps
13


74637d-3.eps
14

Mr. CARNAHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and to our witnesses 

for being with us today. This is an important hearing, and is an 

important part of continuing the bipartisan tradition of this subcommittee conducting rigorous oversight of U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. 

Two years ago, as I chaired the committee, we conducted a set 

of hearings, again bipartisan, on our reconstruction efforts in Iraq 

and Afghanistan and looked at what lessons the administration 

should learn in order to reduce the rampant waste, fraud, corruption, and abuse of U.S. taxpayer dollars. We heard from Stuart 

Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. He 

described an adhocracy with blurred chains of command between 

DoD, State, and USAID. He emphasized the lack of institutional 

structure and human resources to effectively perform stabilization 

and reconstruction operations. 

For the past several years I have been working on developing 

legislation to increase accountability, efficiency, and transparency 

in our overseas contingency operations. And I am sure we will hear 

from our witnesses today reforms have been implemented and improvements have been made on some fronts, but continuing to 

make real immeasurable progress in these areas is absolutely essential, especially as our troop levels decrease and Congress is 

tightening budgets across the government. 

No doubt the environment in which USAID, State, and our international partners operate is difficult and complex. But the work 

they do is critically important to the U.S., is vital to our national 

security interest, and reflects the moral values of who we are as 

a country. That is why regular and detailed oversight is required. 

Our development programs help build local capacity to invest in 

the programs that increase the political participation of women, 

help build the democratic institutions, expand health programs for 

women and children, and help transition the Afghan economy away 

from an overreliance on its scarce natural resources. 

I would like to commend the work of our diplomats who are 

working under complicated and sometimes dangerous circumstances. As it is our job to ensure strict accounting of all U.S. 

taxpayer funds, I commend the chairman, again, for calling this 

hearing and I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much. 

Our first panel will be the Government Accountability Office, the 

GAO. John Hutton, who will be testifying as a director at the U.S. 

Government Accountability Office working for the Acquisition and 

Sources Management Team; in this capacity he provides direct support to congressional committees, and Members on a range of acquisition and sourcing issues. Throughout his 34-year career at the 

GAO, I remember that you had a full head of hair and it was totally dark hair when you first started there. 

Mr. HUTTON. Yes, sir—and mustache. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. But throughout that long 34-year career at 

the GAO he has worked on a wide range of issues. Prior to his appointment to the Senior Executive Service he lead the GAO’s reviews related to such diverse issues as Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction, U.S. Mexico border infrastructure, U.S. and international 

efforts to combat AIDS and the promotion of U.S. exports. So you 

15

had all of the easy jobs that were given to you over the years. He 

holds two master’s degrees; one in public administration, Syracuse, 

Maxwell School; and in one national security strategy from the National War College. 

He will be presenting the GAO testimony, but with him to help 

answer questions, is Charles Michael Johnson Jr., a senior executive with the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Mr. Johnson, 

is the director responsible for the GAO’s portfolio addressing U.S. 

international counterterrorism and security-related issues. Prior to 

joining the GAO’s international affairs and trade team, Mr. Johnson was assistant director in the GAO’s Homeland Security and 

Justice team. He spent a year detailed to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, between 2005 and 2006, 

where he worked on border security and immigration issues. Mr. 

Johnson graduated summa cum laude from the University of Maryland with a degree in business administration. 

So Mr. Hutton, you may proceed and then we will go on to a second panel in which Larry Sampler, Senior Deputy Assistant to the 

Administrator of the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs at 

the U.S. Agency for International Development will be testifying. 

And you may proceed with what time you may choose to consume, 

hopefully around 5 to 10 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF MR. JOHN HUTTON, DIRECTOR, ACQUISITION 

AND SOURCING MANAGEMENT, U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 

Mr. HUTTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Rohrabacher, 

Ranking Member Carnahan, and members of the subcommittee. 

Thank you for inviting Mr. Johnson and I to discuss the accountability and oversight of U.S. funds to assist Afghanistan. GAO has 

issued over 100 reports and testimonies on U.S. efforts, including 

those managed by USAID, DoD, and State in support of congressional oversight of the nearly $90 billion appropriated since 2002, 

to help secure, stabilize, and rebuild Afghanistan. Our work complements that of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and the Inspector Generals from DoD, USAID, and 

State. 

Now, drawing on past GAO work, our statement focuses on 

USAID and our findings in three key areas. 

First, our reports have shown that USAID faces systemic challenges that have hindered its management and oversight of contracts and assistance instruments, such as grants, used to carry 

out development programs and support USAID’s mission in Afghanistan. These challenges include gaps in planning for the use 

of contractors and assistant recipients, and having visibility into 

their numbers. 

Now, while reliable data on contractors and grant recipients are 

a starting point for ensuring proper management and oversight, we 

have reported for the last 4 years on USAID’s limited visibility into 

its Afghanistan contracts and grants as well as the personnel working under them. 

While USAID, along with State and DoD, agreed in 2008 to use 

a common database to track statutorily required information on 

16

contracts and associated personnel, we found in September 2011, 

that the database still does not reliably track such information. 

Further, other sources of such information used by USAID have 

their own limitations. USAID has taken some actions to mitigate 

risks associated with contracting in Afghanistan. Under its Accountable Assistance for Afghanistan Initiative, USAID began vetting prospective non-U.S. contractors and grant recipients in 2011. 

Vendor vetting is intended to counter the risk of U.S. funds being 

diverted to support criminal or insurgent activity. 

At the time of our June 2011 report, we recognized that USAID’s 

vetting process was in its early stages and recommended that 

USAID formalize a risk-based approach to identify and vet the 

highest-risk vendors. We also made a recommendation to promote 

interagency collaboration with DoD and State to better ensure that 

non-U.S. vendors potentially posing a risk are vetted, all of which 

USAID agreed to do. 

Second, we have identified weaknesses in USAID’s oversight of 

program performance. We appreciate that the USAID mission in 

Afghanistan is overseeing programs in a high-risk security environment and has experienced high staff turnover, both of which hinder 

oversight. However, USAID has not consistently followed its own 

performance management and evaluation procedures in Afghanistan, which makes its programs more vulnerable to corruption, 

waste, fraud, and abuse. While we found in 2010 that implementing partners routinely reported on program’s progress, USAID 

did not always approve the performance indicators being used and 

did not ensure that targets were established as required. USAID 

concurred with our recommendations to ensure that programs have 

such performance indicators and targets and to consistently assess 

and use program data and evaluations to shape the current and 

the future programs. 

I will now turn to our third key area and that is the accountability for direct assistance. That is funding that is provided either 

bilaterally to individual Afghan Ministries, or multilaterally to 

trust funds administered by the World Bank and the U.N. In 2011, 

we found that USAID did not complete pre-award risk assessments 

such as determining the awardee’s capability to independently 

manage and account for funds for bilateral direct assistance 

awards. Similarly, USAID had not consistently complied with its 

multilateral risk assessment practices. For example, USAID did 

not conduct a risk assessment before awarding an additional $1.3 

billion to the World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust 

Fund. Such assessments and other internal controls are key to providing reasonable assurances that agency assets are safeguarded 

against fraud and mismanagement. 

Based on our recommendations, USAID updated its policies to require pre-award risk assessments for all bilateral direct assistance 

awards, and also revised the guidance on pre-award risk assessments for the World Bank and other public international organizations. 

In closing, we have made numerous recommendations aimed at 

improving USAID’s management, accountability, and oversight of 

assistance funds in Afghanistan. USAID has generally agreed and 

has taken steps to address them. Mr. Chairman, robust manageVerDate 0ct 09 2002 10:11 Aug 30, 2012 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 Y:\WORK\112TH\TEXT\74637 HFA PsN: SHIRL
17

ment and oversight of taxpayer’s funds is paramount, particularly 

in challenging environments like Afghanistan where institutional 

capacity is weak. 

We would be happy to respond to any questions you may have. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. And Mr. Johnson, you are just here to jump 

in. Did you have something that you would like to just add—or add 

to that? 

STATEMENT OF MR. CHARLES JOHNSON, JR., DIRECTOR, 

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS AND TRADE, U.S. GOVERNMENT 

ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 

Mr. JOHNSON. Basically, what I would like to highlight a little 

bit more is that the USAID Administrator in 2010 committed to 

this Congress that it would not award any additional bilateral direct assistance to the Afghan Ministries until pre-award risk assessments were done. We did find some cases, as John pointed out, 

where after that commitment was made in 2010 that there were 

additional awards done without that being required. 

Recently, we have discovered that there is a new policy put in 

place to help ensure that that doesn’t take place in the future. And 

just to further elaborate on the World Bank, or the public international organizations issues where the U.S. is relying on these institutions for safeguards and controls, I would have to note that the 

U.S. has been working with the World Bank in particular to try to 

enhance U.S. access to certain information. That is a process for 

which they have ongoing negotiations with the World Bank. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Hutton and Mr. Johnson follows:]

18


74637a-1.eps
19


74637a-2.eps
20


74637a-3.eps
21


74637a-4.eps
22


74637a-5.eps
23


74637a-6.eps
24


74637a-7.eps
25


74637a-8.eps
26


74637a-9.eps
27


74637a-10.eps
28


74637a-11.eps
29


74637a-12.eps
30


74637a-13.eps
31


74637a-14.eps
32


74637a-15.eps
33


74637a-16.eps
34

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. Let me, it is very frustrating to think 

that we are, you know, talking about people, we are saying we 

made these commitments back in 2010, but 2010 was years after 

we had been involved in Afghanistan. How much aid has the 

United States given Afghanistan since the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban? 

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, I guess I will take that question. I think our estimate is that it is close to $90 billion, and that does not include 

the cost of the U.S. troops, which is an enormous cost on top of 

that. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. So $90 billion in actual foreign aid, or 

American aid, not American military aid, but sort of, we are talking about, you know, economic. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, that aid would focus on security, government 

and development-related projects. So it would be a significant 

amount that is actually paying for the Afghan security forces, the 

Afghan Army and police, a significant amount. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. How much did we give them that is 

nonmilitary oriented? I mean, it is one thing to understand that we 

had to give so much and so many AK–47s that we had to buy from 

somebody and give it to some military units there, but what—how 

much have we given the development assistance, and what we 

would consider to be humanitarian, and civilian aid? 

Mr. JOHNSON. Okay, the best estimate I can come up with, given 

work we have done that has looked at the Afghan security forces 

funds has been about $43 billion, roughly, recently. So I would estimate roughly close to $46 billion or $47 billion in terms of aid that 

has gone there. But we have reported—we did a report looking at 

the Afghan Government reliance on donors for money, which as we 

know, the Afghan Government cannot afford to sustain itself in 

some of the projects that we are putting in place to which the U.S. 

has been the largest contributor. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. I am looking for a figure. How much 

in civilian aid have we given Afghanistan since the liberation from 

the Taliban? 

Mr. JOHNSON. My estimate for—would be——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Nonmilitary aid. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Nonmilitary, nonsecurity assistance in terms of 

expenditure numbers, that is the best number I have, would be 

roughly somewhere in the ballpark of $12–15 billion. Expenditures 

is what I am saying, where money has actually been disbursed and 

hit the ground. There is money in the pipeline, obviously, but in 

terms of disbursements——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. So you are saying that we have actually—and that is over this last 10-year period, basically. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, my numbers go from 2006 to 2010, but basically, that is where the surge has taken place. In the earlier years 

the numbers were much smaller. So my range would be somewhere 

in the range of $12–15 billion, is the range I can give you. We can 

go back and give you the number going back to 2002, but since 

2006 up through 2010, the expenditure numbers show roughly 

about $12 billion. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Since 2006. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Right. 

35

Mr. ROHRABACHER. But how many years have we been in Afghanistan before 2006? 

Mr. JOHNSON. We have been there since 2002. A lot of the money 

early on was security-related money. The data in the reports that 

we recently noted, the U.S. has paid for 90 percent of the security. 

We probably pay roughly about 36 or 37 percent of the nonsecurity. 

So the donor international community actually has contributed 

more in terms of expenditure in the nonsecurity area than the U.S. 

There has been a shift in that area. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay, I am going to go—am I off base by saying that when we take a look at what we have spent in the civilian 

sector in terms of not, you know, not arming people, not the security, but the civilian sector aid since the Taliban was kicked out of 

the country—and that is long before 2006—would I say, would $20 

billion be sort of in the right range? 

Mr. JOHNSON. It depends on if you are talking funds allocated 

versus obligated or disbursed. They are different numbers there. 

What I gave you was disbursement numbers, meaning funds that 

have hit the ground. The number would go up closer to $45 billion 

if you are talking about money that has been either awarded or allotted toward nonsecurity related stuff in Afghanistan. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. $45 billion? All right. Your staff just gave you 

a little help there. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Staff just gave me a new number. Thank you. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. What is the figure we are looking at now? 

Mr. JOHNSON. This is allocation of funds for reconstruction from 

2002 to 2010, and basically the numbers are roughly about $22 billion in non-DoD funds. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. Okay. 

Mr. JOHNSON. But that is allotments, with money that is in the 

pipeline yet to be disbursed. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I am getting a lot of figures here, and——

Mr. JOHNSON. Yeah, well, we will actually go back and give you 

precise figures. Again, this is 2002 to 2010. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I would just like to know the number between when the Taliban were driven out and now, and how much 

we pumped into the nonmilitary effort in Afghanistan. When I ask 

about the GAO to give me any data that they had on how much 

of those billions of dollars that we spent ended up in the pockets 

of the Karzai family, we were told that is impossible to do. It is 

impossible to know how much the Karzai family profited from 

those tens of billions of dollars that we have spent there to help 

build up their economy and the well-being of their people. 

How basically—I mean, we don’t know where the money has 

gone then? 

Mr. HUTTON. Mr. Chairman, you outlined some of the challenges 

that we saw and there is additional challenges in terms of how you 

determine how much money went where. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Uh-huh. 

Mr. HUTTON. You hit some of the key ones about the difficulties 

and just knowing, once you make an award to a prime, then how 

the money flows down, and it could be several tiers and things like 

that. One of the bigger challenges, though, is just trying to identify 

who is the firm’s owner, or who is benefiting from a firm’s award. 

36

And that is difficult because, first of all, even in the United States, 

it is very difficult to be able to determine who is actually benefiting 

from an award. Not all companies have their information public. 

But in the Afghan context, it is important to note that SIGAR had 

done some work that showed that all firms that are operating in 

Afghanistan have to be licensed by the Afghan Government. Now, 

while there is data on the Afghan Government side, SIGAR had 

tried to do some work, and they saw challenges in even determining whether that data are reliable. They also identified issues 

that once an award was made, ownerships may change over time, 

and being able to consistently track that over time is very challenging. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. In a younger life, you know, when I was—I 

was probably—I was a totally different person when I was 19; but 

when I was 19, I found myself in the central highlands of Vietnam, 

and I was not in the military, but we were doing some special 

projects there. 

And then I was supposed to go down to a town on the coast and 

meet up with some doctors to tell me about corruption. And I will 

never forget that, because the doctors at the end of this—I am 19 

years old, and he has got these doctors who are crying, I mean literally, men who are crying that we are going to lose this war because of the corruption level in Vietnam. And they took me out to 

show me the hospitals that had been set up to win the hearts and 

minds of the Afghan—of the Vietnamese people, and they had been 

looted, and they had been looted by our Vietnamese allies and perhaps even some American people who were there supposedly to 

help. 

I will never forget that because at the same time these guys—

there was a lot of people who were—these guys were aiding and 

treating the men who were coming right out of the combat zone, 

and here they were, understanding that all of this blood, and this 

horrible price that was being paid by Americans, but yet we have 

so much corruption, they did not see how the Vietnamese people 

could respect us. Because if they could see it, the Vietnamese people could see it, and why couldn’t our Government see it? 

And you know what? I don’t think we ever did crack down on 

that. And I think that was one of the factors that put us in a situation that when we left, we left in disgrace in Vietnam. I would hope 

that that is not what we do in Afghanistan, but it appears that we 

have had this same type of attitude. 

And, you know what I am hearing right now is that we really 

haven’t had an accounting system to make sure that what we are 

putting into this country to help improve the lives of the people, 

whether or not that money has been looted to a great degree or not. 

Am I mistaken here from what I am hearing from you? I mean, it 

sounds like there hasn’t been a real attempt at serious accounting 

at this. 

Mr. HUTTON. Mr. Chairman, it is interesting that when you 

think about what normally is expected to be put in place, first of 

all, you have things like the Federal Acquisition Regulations. That 

is a pretty sound framework. It has a lot of different things in 

there that contracting officers can use to protect the taxpayer’s interest when they are awarding a contract, for example. But what 

37

our work has shown over time is that, whether you are talking 

about in that environment DoD’s contracting, State, or USAID, 

they all face similar challenges. And the challenges really center on 

three pieces: The need for clearly defined requirements of what you 

are trying to accomplish. If you can’t clearly define those requirements, you are starting off on a very bad foot. 

Second, you have to have the sound business arrangements that 

is going to increase, you know; that if you have sound business arrangements you are going to help, again, better protect the taxpayer. What that means is using the right contracting vehicles; 

writing them in such a way with the certain clauses that are already in the Federal Acquisition Regs. They are going to help protect the taxpayer’s interests. But most importantly, sir, is the lack 

of trained personnel in both numbers and experience to oversee 

and monitor the performance. That is key. 

So when you think about it from the start, there is already processes that allow you to set the footing correctly. But our work has 

shown, whether again, we are talking about any of the main agencies in those environments, a lot of these problems we are seeing 

are emblematic across all of their——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, let me give you an example. It was reported in the London Telegraph yesterday, that the Taliban insurgents who were responsible for IED attacks that killed several 

American paratroopers, that these Taliban insurgents were actually released from jail by officials in the—is it Konzi Province—and 

that they would release these Taliban after bribes were paid to 

these provincial officials. When that happens, okay, let’s say we 

have that happening. Do we cut off aid to those people? Do those 

people still receive aid who have then—who have released people 

who have been murdering our troops? 

[The article referred to follows:]

38


74637e.eps
39

Mr. HUTTON. Sir, that is a very difficult question for me to respond to. That is really policy. What we try to focus on are the institutions, the agencies that are spending hard-earned taxpayer 

funds, whether it is in environments we are talking about, here 

that they are best equipped to understand what they are trying to 

accomplish, understand the risks involved, ensuring they have a 

proper framework in place, and then executing. Execution is often 

the issue. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yeah. 

Mr. HUTTON. We are not executing these contracts and grants as 

well as we could. And that presents the risks overall. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, there is a lot of—so are you telling us 

that you are satisfied that the money that we are providing in aid 

to uplift the Afghan people, that it is actually getting down to 

them, and not being pilfered away? 

Mr. HUTTON. Sir, what I am saying is that when you look at the 

whole body of work, I mentioned at the outset we have done over 

100 reports and testimonies across, again, the main three agencies. 

But what you see in many cases are similar problems where we are 

executing these awards and we don’t know if we are getting the 

good outcomes that we set out to do, because we don’t have the 

good monitoring and oversight. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, the answer is yes. You are not certain 

then. You don’t feel confident that the money is coming down to it. 

And let me just suggest, the American people are war-weary. They 

are war-weary of Afghanistan. We ended up spending all of these 

years in Iraq, and now we have a government in Iraq that seems 

to be anti-American, and more pro-Mullah than pro-American, and 

certainly they are ungrateful for all of the blood and treasure, trillion dollars that we spent in Iraq. 

I happen to know the Afghan people, and I know that there is 

among a large segment of Afghan people, a great deal of not only 

respect, but a gratitude and a love in their hearts for the American 

people. I have been there with them. I have been in their villages 

and fought with them. And what we have here is not shame on the 

Afghan people. I think—I feel, I personally resent that the Iraqi 

people do not—are not grateful to us for relieving them of the oppression of Saddam Hussein. But I don’t think that—I am not disappointed in the Afghan people at all. I think that basically if we 

have a system that still functions and permits people such leeway 

as we have just been mentioning, shame on us, not shame on them. 

And Mr. Carnahan, you may proceed. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to start with 

a question about the agricultural development teams that have 

been deployed across Afghanistan. Our Missouri National Guard 

have been one of those entities that have been deployed. They have 

been in the Nangarhar Province, and we have heard some good 

success stories about what they have been able to do on the 

ground. And I wanted to ask specifically about how we can sustain 

and build upon the success of stories that we have heard about 

those agricultural development teams and your assessment of their 

work. 

Mr. JOHNSON. We did some work recently, the last 2 years, on 

the agricultural sector in Afghanistan as part of our counterVerDate 0ct 09 2002 10:11 Aug 30, 2012 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00043 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 Y:\WORK\112TH\TEXT\74637 HFA PsN: SHIRL
40

narcotics focus. And I would concur with your point that there has 

been a renewed focus on the ag sector in particular. Former SRAP 

Holbrooke placed that emphasis on more building up the agricultural sector in Afghanistan. And as part of that it was to elevate 

the civilian presence, the expertise of USDA and others as a part 

of the PRT teams that were going out. Prior to that we didn’t have 

the right type of resources or that whole confidence of approach to 

deal with the ag sector. 

And so I would say that report in July 2010 does talk about that 

and notes the fact that the U.S. has made some progress in the alternative development sector of building the ag and the water irrigation sector as well. And more recently, some work we did this 

February 2012, we looked at the civilian surge, the civilian presence in Afghanistan. And a part of those findings also talked about 

how the civilian part will be parallel to the military leadership to 

make certain that things like agriculture were going to be a priority and that you have the experts there on the ground in the different districts and provinces carrying out those functions. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. Thank you. The other area that I wanted to get 

into was Afghan National Police training. There is certainly wide 

agreement and recognition that the fundamental element of the future stability of Afghanistan, your report certainly addresses the 

critical nature of that. We have had increased funding toward 

those efforts, yet the Department of Defense has not assessed the 

effectiveness of civil policing activities, and State has yet to conduct 

an evaluation of its program in Iraq. 

Can you talk about that lack of evaluation and even being able 

to measure how effective that is, and to get beyond just the quantity of the police that we are training to the quality of that training? 

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, one of the issues I can tackle in an open setting is the Iraq piece on evaluation. That is part of our censored 

but unclassified product. But on the civilian police issue in Afghanistan, in particular we do note, you know, DoD has done those assessments. They have contracted out in that area. In terms of doing 

more in terms of civil order policing, they have committed in their 

recent reports to the Congress that they would focus more attention on civil-order policing as opposed to sort of the paramilitarytype police training and the capability of these police to take on 

paramilitary type things. I think DoD is shifting some of that focus 

toward more civil-order policing in terms of assessments in that 

area. 

So you are correct that there were some deficiencies in that area, 

but DoD has noted those deficiencies and has agreed to take steps 

to correct them. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. And was that entirely being done by contractors? 

Mr. JOHNSON. It is a combination of using contractors such as 

DynCorp, and the U.S. military, along with our international partners, and doing those sort of things. Right now it is a concerted effort involving the contractors and folks who may be embedded with 

the police in the communities. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. So what is your assessment of—has there been 

adequate assessment now or is that yet to be done? 

41

Mr. JOHNSON. We are hoping that is going to be forthcoming in 

the next Department of Defense report that is required to be provided to the Congress. There is an annual report that they do. I 

think it is called a Section 1230 report that they are required to 

provide to the Congress, and we are anticipating that the forthcoming report should include that information. That was basically 

their response back to the issue that we raised in our recently 

issued Global Foreign Police Training Report. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. And what is the date of that report? 

Mr. JOHNSON. The Global Foreign Police Training Report was 

issued about a month ago, I believe. I think it was, if I am not mistaken, sometime in March. And we can make sure you get a copy. 

We will send a copy up. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. And the next report you referenced is due when? 

Mr. JOHNSON. The next report for DoD should be sometime in—

I think they just issued one in June. Should be the end of the year, 

December, around the December time frame; December, January. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. And do we expect them to just do it the way we 

wanted it done in the first place, or are they changing the metrics 

and the way they are doing it? 

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, I think given the plans that the U.S., and 

DoD in particular, has to draw down combat troops, they have over 

the past year recognized the need to pay more attention to ensuring that the Afghan National Police focus on civil order, rule-of-law 

type issues, and I think there is some recognition, given some criticism from some past work that the IGs have noted, as well as the 

Congress itself, that more attention needs to be done in that area. 

And I think now that it is more a NATO-led training mission; that 

that has begun to be the case, that they all want to focus on civilorder police because of the planned withdrawal of the combat 

troops by the international community. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. Also related to the police ensuring that there is 

an adequate number of female members in the Afghan National 

Police, can you talk about that? My understanding is there is about 

9 percent within the police, with the goal of 5,000 by 2014. How 

are we doing on achieving that goal, and what are we doing to 

achieve that goal? 

Mr. JOHNSON. Unfortunately, Congressman, we don’t have any 

updated information or statistics on female police in the Afghan security force. We would be happy to undertake that work, though, 

or to get back to you on those numbers. We can check with some 

of the information we can get from the State Department and the 

Department of Defense and get back to you on that. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. Thank you. I would like to see that. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Okay. 

[The information referred to follows:]

42


74637f-1.eps
43


74637f-2.eps
44

Mr. CARNAHAN. And then finally, we have worked with Stuart 

Bowen and others in developing legislation that would look at consolidating civilian stabilization management functions into a U.S. 

Office for Contingency Operations, and, not surprisingly, we have 

not had a lot of great feedback from the State Department or Defense Department. But I would like to see if you would comment 

on that concept of having joint contingency operations like that, or 

other recommended changes in how we can do this better and get 

beyond some of the traditional tension between DoD and State and 

USAID, and be more effective, in particular, in terms of accountability measures. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, there are two parts to that. One is the whole 

contingency operation. With regard to that function itself we have 

seen some of the earlier draft proposed language. We raised some 

caution or concern in showing that some of the functions that are 

being considered to be rolled in, that they are brought into the contingency operations. 

For example, INL functions are broader than just contingency operations. They are doing counternarcotics work and law enforcement training across the globe. Some of that will have to be taken 

into consideration. That was one of the issues I think we may have 

provided some feedback on. 

In addition, when you talk about oversight and accountability, I 

guess our position there is that obviously the GAO, as part of your 

investigative arm, stands ready to meet any of your needs in the 

contingency operation environment, whether that is Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and we have been doing significant work in 

all of those areas and stand ready to continue to do that work for 

the Congress. 

Mr. CARNAHAN. Thank you very much. I yield back, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much. We will have a second 

round at this point, and I would like to ask a little bit, some details 

here about, for example, the bank scandal. Okay, there is your specific. Apparently this bank, the Kabul Bank went broke, or bankrupt, and $825 million were lost in this bank. Now, at the same 

time, we have this—and I know you pronounce it Deloitte, is that 

it, DeLoitte, the accounting firm, this major accounting firm that 

we have got was actually there, American accounting firm, was involved in that operation to try to keep—try to keep it so it wouldn’t 

go broke. 

And I understand that also the United States Government used 

this bank to deposit many of its accounts, and they used it as a 

vehicle for aid, et cetera. How is it that when we have such a prestigious accounting firm on the premises, and we have American 

Government officials directly involved with running accounts 

through the bank, that the bank can just go belly-up like this and 

there is $825 million evaporated? 

Mr. HUTTON. Mr. Chairman, we have not looked at that, but I 

do know that USAID within the last year or so, did some work 

looking at the contractors that were supporting technical advisors 

for that particular bank. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, we did have technical advisors. We 

must have had technical advisors in that bank. 

45

Mr. HUTTON. Yes, contractors were performing as advisors, I believe 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So how is it that that bank, we have American technical advisors on the scene, how can we just blink our 

eyes and all of a sudden there is $825 million evaporated? 

Mr. HUTTON. Well, we have not looked at that specifically, but 

I could take that back to just the internal controls again, sir, and 

having the institutions and the oversight framework for being able 

to assure that procedures are followed, whether it be the banking 

sector or any other sector. 

Mr. JOHNSON. And Mr. Chairman, if I can sort of chime in on 

what John just was alluding to, part of the issue is that the U.S. 

and the international community made a commitment to move 

more toward direct assistance, provide more money on budget. At 

the same time, we were trying to build the Afghan Government’s 

institutional capacity, whether it is the banking institutions, financial institutions, whether it is the Ministry of Interior, Defense——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right, sure. 

Mr. JOHNSON. All of those things. So these things were happening at the same time, which in an environment where we have 

noted security is a challenge, corruption is a challenge in this country, as we know, and as well as, more importantly, the lack of institutional capacity did not exist, so the U.S. and the rest of the community have been trying to build that while we are also trying to 

pump billions of dollars into the governments directly. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Has there been an investigation into this 

bank, and so we know where that money went? There are reports, 

of course, that President Karzai’s brother, who was heavily involved in this bank, has been able to purchase property in Dubai, 

for example. Has anyone looked into that charge? 

Mr. JOHNSON. As John noted, we have not looked specifically at 

the——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Who would look into it? If it was going to be 

looked into, who would look into it? 

Mr. HUTTON. Sir, I think typically, for GAO, if we are doing any 

job and we see some things that look like it might be potentially 

fraud, waste—or fraud in particular. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. 

Mr. HUTTON. We would then turn that over to the IG that is responsible for that program to take the next look because that is 

more their core specialty. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Has it been turned over to them? 

Mr. HUTTON. Sir, I have not looked at it, I cannot tell you, but 

I don’t know whether any of the other witnesses from the executive 

branch might be able to give you some more insights into that, but 

I don’t have information on that, sir. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Do you have any information on that as to 

whether or not——

Mr. JOHNSON. No, sir. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So the IG is supposed to investigate? 

Mr. HUTTON. Typically that is the process that we use. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay, typically, and in Afghanistan, that is 

what we are doing. If something comes up like this, we ask the IG 

to investigate, but we have an $825 million loss, but you are unVerDate 0ct 09 2002 10:11 Aug 30, 2012 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00049 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 Y:\WORK\112TH\TEXT\74637 HFA PsN: SHIRL
46

aware of whether or not there has been a request for an investigation? 

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, I would note this was an issue that came up 

probably 11⁄2 years, 2 years ago, and there was a hearing before the 

Approps Committee, and this was mentioned during that hearing 

with the IG present as well as SIGAR present, and my understanding is that there were some investigations that were going to 

be undertaken but not by the GAO. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. 

Mr. HUTTON. The only other thing I would add, sir, is investigations may not only involve that one particular inspector general 

that I mentioned, there may be other tools such as Federal Government investigators and other support, but I don’t know anything in 

terms of the specific details about the case you raise. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Let me ask you this: Do you have a blacklist 

of Afghan officials and presidential family members who you will 

not do business with because there is evidence that they have been 

involved with high level corruption? 

Mr. HUTTON. No, sir. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. There is no blacklist, there is no list of——

Mr. JOHNSON. No list that the GAO has. 

Mr. HUTTON. Right. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Hmmm. And so, for all we know, a large 

number of people who you are dealing with are people who have 

engaged in blatant corruption? 

Mr. HUTTON. Well, one thing, sir, when you talk about lists, we 

mentioned in our formal statement as well as in our past work, we 

identified that there are vetting processes that the DoD and 

USAID in particular have used. To the extent to which they are 

vetting contractors or grantees before they make the award and 

they find that they have some issue, regardless of what the issue 

is, that is information that they would have in their own organization. One of the issues we came up with in our report was making 

sure that the interagency shares information so that all that information can be leveraged if that particular contractor or grantee 

wants to participate in another Federal agency’s programs. 

Mr. JOHNSON. If I can add on, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes, go right ahead. 

Mr. JOHNSON. With respect, again, getting back to the direct assistance issue and the decision made to move more toward direct 

assistance by the international community and our own Government to provide more than 50 percent there, there was a push and 

has been a push to, you know, provide funding directly to the Afghan or the Pakistani Governments or their firms, local firms for 

that matter. And as a part of that, as we noted and as John noted 

in his statement, the key to that being successful is to make sure 

we do pre-award risk assessments to determine where the 

vulnerabilities, the weaknesses are. And there are situations from 

that standpoint——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. That means you would have to have a list, 

and you apparently don’t have a list. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Even if they have a list and the list tells you that 

this organization or institution is corrupt, and we have some situations where in Pakistan, the institution may have been corrupt, 

47

they would still decide to go the direct assistance route, but they 

would take mitigating things to put in place, such as embedding 

someone in there to ensure that there is no mismanagement of 

funds or to require certain additional controls. Those are things 

that can be done to help safeguard and prevent waste, fraud, and 

abuse of some of the U.S. funds. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Tell me, have you studied the reconstruction 

that was done in Japan after World War II? You haven’t? 

Mr. JOHNSON. No, sir. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. What countries have you studied reconstruction programs on that were successful? 

Mr. HUTTON. That were successful? In my professional work at 

GAO, I focused on Iraq and Afghanistan. That is my——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So you have never focused on a successful 

program of restoration. I doubt whether the Americans after World 

War II permitted Japanese companies who were involved in corruption to continue to get contracts with the economy-building measures that we were taking then. I doubt that. I don’t know for sure. 

But let me just say that I can understand why the American people would be horrified if they found out how loose we have been 

with their money, and the fact is that this corruption in Afghanistan, if the United States isn’t willing to take it so seriously that 

we blacklist anybody who has been engaged in it, much less put 

them in jail, if we don’t do that, no wonder they don’t take it seriously, because we are not taking it seriously then. And I think 

that, after all of these years, it is disheartening to hear this late 

in the game how loose this whole situation is. 

I want to thank you, and I am not—I am not blaming you guys. 

This whole thing—anyway, it looks, after all of these years to hear 

this, I am very disappointed, but thank you very much. We will 

have the next panel, please. 

Mr. HUTTON. Thank you. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. All right, thank you very much, and we will 

now proceed with our second panel, which is composed of Larry 

Sampler, Jr., a senior deputy assistant to the administrator, Office 

of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs of the United States Agency 

for International Development. Now that was a mouthful. 

He also served as a deputy coordinator for reconstruction stabilization with a joint appointment at both the State Department 

and USAID. He was a research staff member for the Institute of 

Defense Analysis with a focus on West Bank and Gaza, which is 

another garden spot that you were involved in. During 2002 and 

2005, he served as chief of staff for the United Nations Assistance 

Missions in Afghanistan. 

Prior to that assignment, he was a consultant to the Afghan Government in support of the Afghan constitutional Loya Jirga, after 

which he was awarded a constitutional medal by President Karzai. 

Mr. Sampler did his undergraduate work in physics and electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, has a master’s degree in diplomacy from Norwich University, and is an Army veteran who served 

with the Special Forces. 

You are on the hot seat now, but we appreciate you being here, 

and we appreciate a very serious and frank dialogue with you 

48

today, but you may proceed with your opening statement, and then 

we will go from there. 

STATEMENT OF MR. LARRY SAMPLER, JR., SENIOR DEPUTY 

ASSISTANT TO THE ADMINISTRATOR, OFFICE OF AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN AFFAIRS, U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT 

Mr. SAMPLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I will be brief and leave as much time as possible for questions. 

I thank you for the opportunity to testify. I do represent the Office 

of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs at USAID. 

And I would like to begin the way I always do, which is by 

thanking the veterans, be they military, State Department, USAID 

or even contractors, who have served in the past decade in Afghanistan. 

As you rightly noted, since the time you were there and the time 

I was there, there has been a tremendous amount of sacrifice, and 

I would like to recognize that both on the part of the international 

community but also the Afghans, from Abdul Haq and Ahmad 

Shah Masood, to the thousands of Afghans now who put their lives 

at risk every day working to make Afghanistan a better place. 

So while it is my responsibility, and I take it quite seriously, to 

address as many of the concerns as have been raised as possible, 

I also hope that in my remarks, I can give a few opportunities for 

people to take pride in what has been accomplished and have some 

sense of optimism about the way ahead and things to come. 

As you noted, I have worked in Afghanistan since 2002, off and 

on, much of that time physically in Afghanistan, and so I know 

firsthand a lot of the challenges that implementers face, and I am 

happy to share during the question and answers as that is appropriate. 

Before I talk directly and specifically about oversight, I would 

like to address a few of the successes that the Afghans have 

achieved with the support of the U.S. taxpayers, USAID, the interagency and the international community. And I have to note, one 

of the best unintended consequences of my travel to the region is 

that I get out of the constant news cycles of Washington, and I get 

to see firsthand when things are working and when there are successes and how much progress there has been since 2002. 

For example, under the Taliban there were less than 900,000 

people in school. Very few of them, if any, were girls. Currently 

more than 8 million children are enrolled in school, more than a 

third of those are girls, and now after a decade of improving 

schools and improving access to education, we are finding a generation of young men and women graduating from these schools who 

have much better critical thinking skills. This will make them better citizens, and it will make them much more resilient in their opposition to thoughtless or malicious doctrines. 

In 2002, only 9 percent of Afghans had access to basic health 

care. Today that access is over 60 percent of the population, and 

by basic health care, we mean medical assistance within an hour’s 

walk of where they are. Life expectancy at birth now is 20 years 

higher than it was in 2002, and maternal and infant mortality 

49

rates have dropped significantly, drawing international attention to 

what the Afghans have done right in that regard. 

Our work in the energy sector has tripled the number of Afghans 

with access to reliable electricity, not just supporting but actually 

enabling economic growth in the country. With USAID’s support, 

Afghanistan’s national power company has increased their revenue 

collection by 50 percent every year since 2009. This has reduced 

the need for a subsidy for this state-owned enterprise from $170 

million a year to around $30 million a year last year. 

And as a segue, USAID is focusing our efforts on areas with the 

greatest potential for increasing domestic revenue and sustainable 

growth and away from areas that require foreign assistance. These 

are areas such as agriculture, extractive industries, energy, trade, 

and generic capacity building for their government. We are, in fact, 

reducing new infrastructure projects to focus instead on building 

the Afghan capacity to maintain the infrastructure that they have. 

We are cementing gains that we have made by women, gains 

made in the areas of health and education, and we are increasingly 

focusing on how to involve the private sector both in Afghanistan, 

among the Afghan diaspora, and among the international business 

community in our programs. We are focusing, in other words, on 

sustainable development. 

The successes that I have talked about have been achieved by 

constantly improving how we do business in Afghanistan. Protecting taxpayer resources is a key concern of USAID. Over the 

past 2 years, we have taken several measures to better track our 

funding, to enhance accountability, and to ensure our programs do 

have the desired impact in the communities we seek to impact. 

We have developed the Accountable Assistance for Afghanistan 

initiative that the GAO colleagues referred to. It is actually an 

extra layer of oversight, recognizing that Afghanistan is a high-risk 

environment in a war zone. It involves better award mechanisms 

that are more carefully crafted to keep our partners more carefully 

constrained. It involves intensive partner vetting for all non-U.S. 

partners. It involves stronger financial controls, how we actually 

parse out the resources and the money. And it involves a closer, 

more professional oversight of the projects in the field. 

Ultimately, our goal is that Afghanistan can monitor and manage programs themselves. To that end, we are engaging in financial 

management training with our Afghan partners at all levels, both 

inside and outside of government. We are also supporting efforts to 

promote a professional Afghan civil service, and in the long term, 

this will improve accountability and reduce the opportunities for 

corruption. 

So, as part of our goal of Afghan management of their own development, we are working to concentrate more assistance directly to 

the Afghan Government while at the same time tailoring oversight 

to make sure that we have a high degree of accountability. 

We do not work with the Government of Afghanistan as a whole. 

Instead, we work with specific Ministries, and we only engage after 

careful assessments have determined that the Ministry has the 

technical, financial, and administrative systems necessary to responsibly manage our resources. Our primary method in these 

cases is a disbursement of funds on a reimbursable basis for costs 

50

incurred. In other words, the Ministry does the work; we validate 

that the work has been done; and then we provide the funds. 

Finally, as you know, there are multiple independent oversight 

bodies that review our work, including the GAO, but also SIGAR 

and the USAID inspector general. These organizations have done 

about 70 audits of our work since October 2010, and some of these 

audits I would note were initiated at our request; USAID asked for 

them. In fact, the A3, or the Accountable Assistance for Afghanistan initiative, was specifically in response to an audit that we had 

requested. We really welcome their oversight, we have a good 

working relationship with all of the oversight bodies, and we do 

welcome their insight. 

Finally, in conclusion, we recognize the sacrifices in blood and 

treasure made by Americans and Afghans alike. We are under no 

illusions about the challenges we face, but we think these challenges call for exercising more care and diligence in how we operate rather than walking away from the vital national security interests that this work supports. Our mission of defeating al Qaeda 

and denying it a safe haven or a place to rebuild is still critical, 

and USAID programs are an important contribution toward that 

goal because we are helping to build a stable, sustainable, and secure Afghanistan that will not require huge amounts of foreign assistance. 

Mr. Chairman, I am happy to take your questions or to address 

some of the issues raised by GAO at your convenience. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Sampler follows:]

51


74637b-1.eps
52


74637b-2.eps
53


74637b-3.eps
54


74637b-4.eps
55


74637b-5.eps
56

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much. 

And I won’t say that that was a contradictory set of images being 

presented, but it was not necessarily totally consistent, either, between the first and the second panel, but not necessarily contradictory. 

Let me just get into some details with you here. I appreciate how 

difficult your job is, and let me just note that, and I am very 

pleased that someone of your caliber has taken on such a heavy responsibility and such a difficult task. 

Mr. SAMPLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. And I understand that. So could we take a 

look at, first of all, how much money—let me ask you the question, 

2002 to the present, 10 years, how much money have we spent in 

American aid to Afghanistan, not military aid? 

Mr. SAMPLER. I had the advantage of having my staff look this 

up after you asked the GAO. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I was hoping you were going to do that. 

Mr. SAMPLER. $15.7 billion is what USAID has had appropriated 

for our use in Afghanistan since 2002. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Say that again now. 

Mr. SAMPLER. $15.7 billion. For clarity, that does not represent 

all civilian assistance. I am not cognizant on what USAID or other 

agencies may have had, but it would not approach anything like 

the amount that USAID has been given. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. And when you have money that is 

coming in, you are saying that you actually have tried to give this 

directly to people within the Afghan Government who you have determined have specific responsibilities for trying to achieve these 

specific goals. Has the money been, has our then tax dollars or the 

Treasury money that is coming into this, would that have gone 

through the Kabul Bank? 

Mr. SAMPLER. No, Mr. Chairman. With respect to the Kabul 

Bank concerns, no U.S. dollars were associated with Kabul Bank 

at all. We didn’t even use the electronic fund transfer mechanism 

of that particular bank. It was not a policy decision, per se. There 

are other banks, and we just had not been doing business with 

Kabul Bank. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. But we did have one of our great firms 

there to make sure that their books were being, supposedly being 

kept right, but they were being paid by whom? 

Mr. SAMPLER. I believe you are referring to Deloitte. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes. 

Mr. SAMPLER. Who bought out BearingPoint. BearingPoint had a 

contract as a part of the Economic Growth and Governance Initiative. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Where did that contract come from? 

Mr. SAMPLER. That was a USAID program. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. A U.S. What program? 

Mr. SAMPLER. I am sorry? 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. U.S. Aid program? 

Mr. SAMPLER. USAID program. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. 

Mr. SAMPLER. It was about a $95 million program over several 

years. This piece of it was about 8 percent of that, so $7 million 

57

roughly that Deloitte was using not at Kabul Bank but at the Afghan Central Bank. The Afghan Central Bank is the institution 

that is charged with preventing things like Kabul Bank from happening. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. 

Mr. SAMPLER. One of the issues, in my opinion, is the institutions 

in Afghanistan are not yet mature enough to have prevented or to 

prevent adequately the kinds of Afghan-on-Afghan crime that 

Kabul Bank represents. The Deloitte program, the Economic 

Growth and Governance Initiative, was supposed to help build the 

central bank’s ability to supervise subordinate banks or to supervise outlying private banks. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. So you didn’t have anything directly 

involved with the Kabul Bank, but you did provide a grant to 

Deloitte to do its job, which was partially to oversee banks in Afghanistan, and Kabul Bank happened to be the biggest one? 

Mr. SAMPLER. Not precisely, and I am sorry; I don’t mean to 

quibble. It was not a grant, it was a contract, and Deloitte was not 

responsible for doing any oversight themselves. They were trainers. 

They would not have been able to do oversight because they 

wouldn’t have the language skills, for example, to review Dari and 

Pashto and Balochi documents. Their job was to serve as mentors 

to the central bank examiners working for the Government of Afghanistan, and these central bank examiners would have been the 

ones who would go out and do the bank investigations and the 

bank inquiries at the private banks. So it was not Deloitte’s responsibility. And in fairness to our own inspector general, USAID asked 

for an investigation after the Kabul Bank fiasco, and our inspector 

general disagreed with us. We said that Deloitte’s responsibilities 

would not have given them any particular insight into this Afghanon-Afghan crime, and our inspector general thought differently, 

and they said in their report, we believe that if Deloitte were doing 

what you told them to do, they would have seen precursors to or 

indications of fraud, and they should have reported that to the U.S. 

Government. 

We took that on board, and we actually terminated that program 

because despite the fact that they weren’t directly responsible for 

this, the program lost tremendous credibility because of the press 

associated with it, but we have now issued——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I would suggest that it was more the $825 

million that evaporated rather than just the press from——

Mr. SAMPLER. No, the bank fiasco, there is no question. Deloitte 

was caught up in the press associated with that. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Is Deloitte then serving as an NGO, would 

that be what you would say or just a contractor? 

Mr. SAMPLER. They were a contractor. In this case, they were a 

contractor, and to the best of my knowledge, I don’t think they 

work as an NGO. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. All right. So it was a profit-making contract? 

Mr. SAMPLER. They were and are, and this was, yes. But we have 

since then, based on the IG report, issued guidance to all of our 

contractors that if they detect any indication of fraud, waste or 

abuse, they have a responsibility to report it, and that is across the 

board in our contracts now. 

58

Mr. ROHRABACHER. In your testimony, you were talking about 

with pride of how you have tried to go directly through the Afghan 

Government when possible to achieve the social goals and the development goals that you have set out for yourself. Now, in the Afghan Government, there are people who have committed crimes; 

they have been shown to have been involved, you know, there is 

the fellows who just let go all of these Taliban prisoners, et cetera, 

et cetera. Do you have a list, a blacklist of people that you will not 

give our money to? 

Mr. SAMPLER. We do, Congressman. With respect to direct assistance, we don’t give money to individuals. We work with Ministries, 

and we don’t even work with the Ministries until we have positive—we have done this initial assessment. If there are shortcomings, we have provided technical assistance to compensate for 

those shortcomings. So there is no check written to an individual 

in the Bank of Afghanistan. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Sure, of course. 

Mr. SAMPLER. But we do have, and there is——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. But if the guy at the Ministry who takes in 

the checks and writes the checks for the Ministry happens to be 

the same guy who was, you know, fingered for stealing money from 

some other organization——

Mr. SAMPLER. There are a couple of interagency task forces and 

some that are international among all the donors, one being Task 

Force Shafafiyat, which looks specifically at issues of Afghan corruption, and we certainly share information among the interagency. To take your example, though, of a Ministry that we have 

done the pre-award assessment, we would have identified through 

this task force or through the interagency collaboration most likely 

that this individual was of questionable repute, and there would 

have been some mitigation taken to make sure that he did not 

have access to these funds. 

I don’t—to the best of my knowledge there is no situation where 

one individual in any Ministry we work with has signatory authority for funds. It doesn’t work that way. They do the work. They say 

they have done the work and certify it. USAID direct hire staff or 

our third-party contractor validate that the work is done, and then 

we reimburse the receipts for that work. These are lessons we have 

learned the hard way, not just in Afghanistan but in other places 

that USAID works. This is not the first corrupt place that we have 

had to work. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes. Yes, I understand that. I want to ask 

you a little bit about NGOs and then back to the point you were 

just making. 

So there was a senior auditor for SIGAR, James Peterson, wrote 

a column for Politico yesterday suggesting that NGOs were taking 

far too much money off the top of various programs that have been 

given money to do this or that, but they end up having enormous 

overhead costs. And he suggested in this article, that USAID has 

struggled to keep NGO overhead costs below 70 percent. So is that 

right? I mean, we are actually just looking at the NGOs going in, 

and they are only providing the money that is given to them, only 

30 percent is ending up trying to achieve the goal? 

59

Mr. SAMPLER. Well, I can reassure Mr. Peterson, we are successful at keeping overhead below 70 percent. I don’t know where he 

got that number. I can’t speak for all NGOs, I know the NGO that 

I worked for and I know the ones that I have worked with in my 

10 years, none of them have overhead that approaches even 30 percent, to be honest, but certainly not 70 percent. I did see Mr. Peterson’s article back I think when it came back out in January or February and found it to be not particularly credible, to be honest. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. So the—that is okay. So you would 

suggest that using NGOs is an alternative or one of the alternatives that would be a very viable alternative for USAID to look 

at and to continue down that road in terms of your development 

strategies, is that correct, in Afghanistan? 

Mr. SAMPLER. Yes, NGOs, we have direct assistance, we have 

contracts with for-profit companies for the most part, and we have 

cooperative agreements and grants. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Do you want to give me a little assessment 

on whether the NGO approach or giving direct money to specific 

government agencies in meeting the Afghan Government’s agencies, which is the most effective in building the new clinics and 

schools that you talked about? 

Mr. SAMPLER. Certainly. This is part of I think what makes my 

job so interesting, to be honest, Congressman, is there are things 

that NGOs are better able to do, and they are valuable partners 

all over the world, and they have both international NGOs and domestic Afghan NGOs, but I constantly remind myself and our staff 

that our job is to work the international community out of a job, 

out of business. 

Using international NGOs is somewhat effective at that, but it 

is more effective if we can find Afghan partners in whom we can 

build that capacity from the ground up. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. And you have used these Afghan partners 

and been satisfied at the level of competency and also the level of 

corruption or lack of corruption that you have found? 

Mr. SAMPLER. If we are not satisfied, we don’t use them, Congressman. Competency we can train; corruption we can’t tolerate. 

So if we meet with an organization that needs capacity to be able 

to do whatever we have asked them to do—the Ministry of Public 

Health is a great example. The Ministry itself needed some work. 

We created a technical assistance mechanism to help the Ministry 

do this, and then the Ministry went themselves to NGOs, and the 

Ministry and USAID helped build the NGO capacity to execute the 

programs. We could have done it with an international NGO, but 

that would not have had the same capacity building value of doing 

it through the Afghans. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I would just note that my personal observation over the years has been that when NGOs come in, a lot of 

them have to have drivers. They have to have very secure locations, and sometimes luxurious for the country they are in, a luxurious location to nest, and it seems to me that there is a lot of—

NGOs going out and roughing it has not necessarily been what I 

witnessed. Although I am sure there are many NGOs that do that, 

there is a lot of NGOs that aren’t. 

60

Mr. SAMPLER. Thank you, Congressman. NGOs range everything 

from small faith-based NGOs that are supported by one congregation in north Georgia all the way up to some very large multinational NGOs. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. Do you believe that Karzai’s brother 

profited from the bank failure from the Kabul Bank scandal? 

Mr. SAMPLER. Congressman, all I know about Karzai’s brother 

and the bank is what I have read in the press. The most recent 

story I read was that he had reached an accommodation with the 

prosecutor where he would not face jail time as long as he made 

restitution, and that is what the press is reporting. Other than 

that, I don’t know. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. Have you heard stories about any 

other member of the Karzai family that seemed credible to you that 

they might have been involved in drugs in some way? 

Mr. SAMPLER. You have to stop at the credible to me part. Congressman, I know you know from your own time in country that 

it is a country that has an oral tradition as opposed to a written 

tradition, and there are stories about everything and everyone in 

Afghanistan, so certainly those stories were rampant. 

To be clear, though, at no time during my DoD experience there, 

with ISAF, with the State Department or with USAID have I ever 

seen a credible story that is documented that we could take action 

on, and I am confident knowing that people that I worked with——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. That little caveat ‘‘that we could take action 

on’’ leaves a big door open. Let me ask you this: Do you know of 

the Karzai family owning property in Dubai? 

Mr. SAMPLER. I do not. And I wouldn’t know. I go through Dubai 

on the way, but that is all. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. But you are at the same time providing 

grants, are you not, to the various government officials and agencies in the Afghan Government that would be responsible for trying 

to ferret out that type of corruption? 

Mr. SAMPLER. The most relevant organization that I can think of 

that we support is the Office of High Oversight, which is their 

equivalent perhaps of an inspector general at the national level. So, 

yes, we do support the Government of Afghanistan’s attempt to police its own. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. And you haven’t heard of anything 

coming from—about the Karzai family being on their blacklist? 

Mr. SAMPLER. No. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Or is it just something everybody knows, or 

is it just something that perhaps is probably not true? 

Mr. SAMPLER. I don’t know exactly how to answer that, Congressman. 

USAID’s business is with the Government of Afghanistan. I am 

very comfortable discussing corruption and allegations about the 

Government of Afghanistan and about specific Ministries. With respect to particular families, be it Karzai’s or Habib Yaqubi’s, I 

could go back, if you wish, and find out what we have on our books, 

but I don’t know those answers off the top of my head. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, he did give you a medal and everything. 

Mr. SAMPLER. He did, and I am quite proud of it. 

61

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I would be proud of a medal from Afghanistan, and he was representing Afghanistan at the time. I think you 

can be very proud of that medal. 

Mr. SAMPLER. He was. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. And we are very grateful for the service that 

you are providing. 

Mr. SAMPLER. Thank you, Congressman. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Part of that service is having to come up and 

be cross-examined by Members of Congress, which makes it even 

a little bit more of a drudgery or a tough job. 

Let me ask about this new agreement that we have signed with 

the Afghan Government. It is my understanding—well, first of all, 

it has tied us into a relationship with an Afghan Government that 

I personally would question whether we should be tied into or not, 

but does this agreement, from your understanding, tie us into a relationship with the Afghan Government where 50 percent of our, 

of all of our assistance will have to go through the Afghan Government in what you were saying rather than being given to contractors and NGOs? 

Mr. SAMPLER. The agreement does call for a 50 percent on-budget contribution. We will not do that until we can assure ourselves 

that that contribution will be properly managed. So that is what—

it is set for us as a goal, just as we have set goals for the Government of Afghanistan. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So we have agreed to try to achieve that 

goal? 

Mr. SAMPLER. That is correct, Congressman. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. But we haven’t agreed to do it, we 

have just agreed we are going to try to do it? 

Mr. SAMPLER. Absolutely. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. That is a very interesting interpretation of the agreement. I will take a look and make sure the wording is sort of that way. I will have to suggest that we have been 

in Afghanistan now for close to 10 years, and you are right when 

you talked about Commander Masood and Abdul Haq and some of 

the great leaders that they had. This is—they have lost 1 million 

people in the last 20 years, many of them who would be providing 

the leadership, the honest and committed leadership that Afghanistan or any society needs. Unfortunately, they are gone, and we 

have got to do our best without them. 

Let me ask a little bit, I have one or two more questions about 

aid, and you do not have a specific list of people who work for the 

government who you are not now—who are on your blacklist, who 

you are not going to deal with? 

Mr. SAMPLER. USAID, other than our suspension and debarment 

list, which is a corporate list, does not have a blacklist of individuals, but before we work with a particular Ministry, part of the 

preventive maintenance or the preventive assessment that we 

would do, the preparatory assessment would involve who will be 

working with this money and who will be the signatory for this. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. How much of the aid—I have received 

information that suggests that a large portion of the aid that we 

have spent in Afghanistan in these 10 years has gone to the southern tier of Afghanistan, which is basically the Pashtun territories. 

62

Is that true? And if it is true, why are we putting a lion’s share 

of our aid there rather than working with those people who actually helped us defeat the Taliban, who come from more of the 

northern tier of the country? 

Mr. SAMPLER. Congressman, that is not an uncommon question. 

The demographic distribution of the funds is somewhat skewed by 

the fact that Kabul is itself in the east of Afghanistan, so in the 

regions, the east and the south have Kabul and Kandahar. The 

south and even the southwest, the Helmand River valley area, 

have been identified as particular recipients of assistance, primarily in support of the military or the comprehensive approach to 

countering the insurgency there. 

In meetings with the governor of Bamiyan, which you may know 

is a beautiful part of Afghanistan and has not seen much of the 

war lately, they lamented the fact that they are peaceful. They are 

law abiding. They have a woman governor, they have a minister, 

an admirable administration, but they don’t get the level of resources that they think they should get. 

We are working—I mean, we constantly realign our portfolio. We 

did a portfolio review just in the past 6 months, and part of that 

realignment is focusing on where do the resources need to go. We 

avoid political distributions. These are not—the resources are determined primarily by the needs of the U.S. Government and then 

by the priorities of the Government of Afghanistan. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. Your list of things for which we can be 

proud of, and let me just suggest that shortly after the liberation—

of course, I went in and out of Afghanistan before the liberation 

and back during all the way to the Russian times, but I remember 

right after the liberation, I went in, and I drove between Kabul and 

Mazar-i-Sharif, and halfway through, there was a school, a tent 

that was set up. And I will have to admit to you one of the most 

inspiring sights that I have ever seen were those kids in that 

school and where you had little girls and little boys both, and here 

they had just come from a society where educating a girl would 

have meant they would cut the head off the teacher. And these people were committed to teaching their children, all of their children, 

the basics that would permit them to live a decent life. And that 

was very inspiring, and helping schools and health care can’t go 

wrong in that regard, unless somebody is pilfering all the money, 

like I suggested when I was in Vietnam, I noticed then that money 

had been pilfered. 

Mr. SAMPLER. Congressman, you lamented the loss of Abdul Haq 

and Commander Masood, and I think a lot of people do. But I am 

inspired when I go back by the young people who look up to those 

men and their peers and who aspire to fill their shoes. One of the 

things that excites me about the education programs in particular, 

and it was my words, I wrote the part of my presentation talking 

specifically about critical thinking skills. Young Afghan men and 

young Afghan women are not going to be led blindly into bad ideas, 

be they governance ideas or be they some other maligned doctrine, 

and these schools I think are the hope and the future, not just for 

Afghanistan but for the region. They will be better citizens, they 

will be better business people. 

63

Mr. ROHRABACHER. And the schools, are they in the southern 

part of the country as well, is this something that you are focusing 

on, and how does that—I mean, as we know, the southern part of 

the country where the Pashtuns are the dominant force, much of 

the Taliban’s antifemale aspects of them comes from or actually the 

Pashtuns agree with some of that, a lot of that. Is there a resistance in these Pashtun areas to that type of education? 

Mr. SAMPLER. It varies community by community. As you probably recall, they have a very tribal and clan-structured society, especially in the south, and if the leadership of that community have 

had exposure, if one of their nieces or daughters or a woman in 

their family has been educated and they have seen that this contributes to the well-being of the family, then those patriarchs are 

able to help push that message out. 

But the other thing that makes this irreversible, I think, is the 

number of young women who have been educated and who will not 

be put back into the dark ages, and the radio programs, there are 

some 15,000 independent radio stations now across the country 

that are quietly but slowly spreading a message that education of 

women is a good thing. So, yes, there is resistance. In some cases, 

it has been brutal resistance, but I think that that is on the wane 

in general. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. You mentioned Kandahar, and that of course 

has been a priority area, but it has also been a priority area that 

has been dominated by the Karzai family, and what has been your 

experience with the Karzai family in Kandahar? 

Mr. SAMPLER. I have no personal experience with the Karzai 

family in Kandahar. When I was the chief of staff of the U.N. mission, I spent a fair amount of time there, and I would be able to 

say that the Karzais’ tribe was a prominent tribe but not the only 

dominant tribe in that part of the country, and during my time 

there, that would have been 2004 to 2006, their clan or their tribe 

was competing with others for resources and for dominance, but I 

was not in Kandahar at a time when anything like the Karzai family ran the city. I didn’t experience that. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. And what else is prevalent in Kandahar, is 

there something that grows out in the countryside? 

Mr. SAMPLER. You are probably speaking about opium, and 

Helmand is actually quite a bit more——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes, I understand, but Kandahar is in that 

part of the, that whole swath of the country where opium is——

Mr. SAMPLER. Across the south, if there are not strong institutions and if there are not, alternatively, livelihoods and value 

chains and access to market, opium will certainly be grown. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. And I know that you have got a list, 

and I hope you will provide for me a list, and I know you have got 

it because—and it is good—of enterprises that we are trying to use 

as alternatives to the opium trade, and I won’t ask you to detail 

that for us now, but I am sure that is part of what you are trying 

to do? 

Mr. SAMPLER. It is. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. If you could send that to me in writing, that 

would be deeply appreciated. 

Mr. SAMPLER. We will be happy to do that, Congressman. 

64

[The information referred to follows:]


74637g-1.eps
65

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Do you have anything you would like to add? 

Mr. SAMPLER. Just one thing I would like to address, with respect to the GAO, and I don’t know if they stayed, I speak sincerely 

when I say we appreciate the oversight they provide. I don’t take 

great umbrage when the GAO finds mistakes. I take and pay particular attention to open recommendations that we have not closed. 

So the GAO finding a problem is not great news for us, but it is 

not a failure on our part. Not addressing their recommendation and 

not closing the recommendation is. And that is where I think we 

have such a good relationship, not just with GAO but also with 


74637g-2.eps
66

SIGAR and in particular with the USAID IGs. We will argue with 

them vociferously about points of art and about the state of how 

we do this, but at the end of the day, their job is to point out weaknesses, and our job is to address the weaknesses. So I think hearings like this are very useful, and I certainly think that the GAO 

and the two IGs provide a valuable resource. We had—I asked my 

staff, we have had over 248 recommendations from our IG over the 

course of the 10 years that we have been in Afghanistan, and of 

those, all but about 49 of them have been closed, and I know some 

of the 49 because they cross my desk regularly. The IG said that 

we needed to do X, but for reasons why we can’t do that yet. So 

that would be the only point I would make is that I view this as 

not antagonistic and certainly not adversarial but as parts of a 

whole and making sure that we are good stewards with taxpayer 

resources. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. So you have been in and out of Afghanistan now for quite a few years, and you know about our 

struggle to develop that country. Is the government structure that 

we helped put in place, that we actually pressured people to adopt, 

is that so centralized that, number one, it encourages corruption? 

I mean, we have now a presidential system in which the President 

of the central government appoints all of the provincial governors, 

and then the governors then appoint the other officials down under 

them, so basically we have set up a system that if it was in the 

United States, the President of the United States would be controlling all the governments all the way down to the local city hall. Do 

you think that system lends itself to corruption? 

Mr. SAMPLER. I am smiling, Congressman, that is a great question, and it is one that actually I think during the emergency Loya 

Jirga and the constitutional Jirga, we in the international community debated almost constantly, but what we fell back on to in the 

end was that it was not our decision to make, we did have and 

there is no question that the international community influenced 

the Afghans in the shape and the form of their government. 

Answering from a developmental academic perspective, I don’t 

think that a centralized government fosters corruption more than, 

say, a decentralized government would. What prevents corruption 

is robust institutions, and if the Afghans had the capacity in the 

provinces and the districts for robust institutions, there would be 

more room for decentralization. It is my experience, my personal 

experience, not the Agency’s, that in Afghanistan, that capacity is 

not there universally yet. It is growing. And, again, the schools are 

growing it fast. As these provincial centers are able to absorb capacity and to absorb resources, they should. 

If you are asking me whether or not having, whether the Afghan 

Constitution having the President appoint and the governors appoint is the best system, the only comparison that I can make is 

it took us 12 years to go from the Articles of Confederation to a 

Constitution that was the best I think in the world, and even then 

our Constitution took 114 years as of yesterday to give women the 

right to vote. I think it is important that we hold the Afghans accountable to a high standard, but it has to be an achievable standard, and you know better than I perhaps because you roamed that 

country with less security details and less constraints, their culture 

67

is incredibly entrenched. And it is not going to be something that 

we can change in a decade, which is one of the reasons I have been 

so encouraged to hear discussion about a longer-term investment, 

certainly at diminished levels, but the United States is going to 

stay the course in Afghanistan so that we don’t make mistakes that 

we made after the last time we were working in that part of the 

world. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. The opposition to the current government 

from the northern sector of the country is suggesting that they 

have—by the way, people have claimed that I believe in some sort 

of segmentation of the country and dividing the country, which I 

do not, just for the record. And where they get that is that I believe 

that we have to have a system that does in some way address their 

basic culture, which is decision making needs to be made at the 

tribal and village level as much as possible, but in terms of the—

so Mr. Karzai has covered himself by suggesting that means I believe in cutting the whole country apart. Also I happen to believe 

in—that in Afghanistan, it might be better—or whatever I believe 

is irrelevant, but the people may want this, and they should be 

given the choice of deciding. A lot of people in the northern part 

of the country would rather have a parliamentary system in order 

to make sure that you just don’t have all the power in one man and 

if you do have a President or Prime Minister of the country, that 

at least that person has to rely on a coalition instead of everything 

from the top down, and—any thoughts on that? 

Mr. SAMPLER. Congressman, I think your recognition of local decision making is just as relevant today as it was when you were 

there. One of the lessons that we have learned in our 10 years 

there was focusing, for example, on rule of law issues. Rule of law, 

to us, means judges, it means prosecutors, defense attorneys; it 

means courtrooms. Rule of law to Afghans mean local shuras, and 

it means sitting down with the elders of the two villages that are 

in dispute and coming to a sensible conclusion, and then everyone 

agreeing to it and walking away. That is a lot less expensive than 

courts. In Afghanistan, it is a lot more effective. It is sensitive and 

recognizes the leadership that they have in their own communities. 

Just an anecdote about illustrating the differences in how we see 

the world and how they see the world, after the emergency Loya 

Jirga, I sat with elders and was beginning to presage that there 

were these elections coming, and one of the gray beards from one 

of the communities said, Mr. Larry, I fought with the Muj, I am 

the water master in my village, I have been on the Hajj, I have 

done all these things. This young man is my grandson, why should 

his vote count the same as mine? And I was a recent graduate from 

an excellent university in the United States, and I didn’t have an 

answer to that. What I have come to realize is that Afghan systems 

aren’t worse than ours in some cases; they are just different. We 

need to identify their strengths and their weaknesses, and we need 

to make sure that we protect our equities, be it taxpayer dollars 

or people, and then we need to let the Afghans get on with doing 

business in ways that are transparent and accountable. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Let’s just note that the only time period that 

I have been able to discern from their history where they had decades long of relative stability happened under the leadership of 

68

Zahir Shah, who is one of the beloved figures of Afghan history, 

and the reason why he was beloved and able to be the leader of 

the country is he left people to govern themselves at the local level 

and let the village and the tribal leaders have their meetings and 

make their decisions. He did not try to govern the country by having a centralized army forcing everybody to do what his appointee 

in that area was insisting. That is how he succeeded and in Afghanistan had decades of relative stability, and after the Communist efforts to unseat him and he was in exile in Rome, I believe 

the greatest mistake we ever made was not bringing him back and 

pressuring him to bring Karzai into a position of being able to be 

in power, and so, right now, my analysis of what this structure 

looks like is I find it difficult to tell the difference between the 

structure that we have set up, a centralized structure where one 

person is making the appointments and they are trying to build a 

strong army in the center and having foreign troops there to give 

added strength to the central government, I don’t see where we are 

any different than what the Soviets were in when I first went to 

Afghanistan 25 years ago. And the Soviets did not succeed, and we 

won’t succeed if that is what it is all about. 

So I respect the fact that you and others are doing your best to 

try to help our country succeed, and you are doing your very best, 

and I know our military people are doing their very best. I don’t 

think that we have given, laid down the ground rules in a way that 

will permit them to succeed, and the American people can’t go on 

like this. We may have signed a contract to be with them for another 10 years. American people don’t want to be in Afghanistan 

another 10 years. We don’t want to be providing foreign military 

advisers there. We don’t want to be providing foreign aid there. We 

want to let those people govern themselves, work through the systems that work with their culture, not try to superimpose things, 

and leave with a smile and say, we are your friends, but we are 

not your keepers. 

So, thank you, again, for what you are doing, and I agree, I am 

very happy that you started your comments thanking the men of 

the American military who sacrifice so much and people like yourself have sacrificed for that, too. 

With that said, I am going to give you the last word, 30 seconds. 

Mr. SAMPLER. No, thank you very much. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. With that said, I want to appreciate, Larry, 

I appreciate you being here. 

I appreciate the first witnesses, and I think we have had a really 

honest dialogue and discussion today. 

I think if we dig through all of this, we are going to find some 

gems, and with that said, I hold this hearing adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 4:22 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

(69)

A P P E N D I X 

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING RECORD

70

f


74637n.eps
71

Æ


74637m.eps