February 03, 2009	Tuesday	Safar 07, 1430

WASHINGTON, Feb 2: The United States has wasted billions of dollars in Iraq and is making the same mistakes in Afghanistan, warns a Congress-mandated report released on Monday.

The report by a Congress-auditor, known as Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, blames both fraud and lack of planning for the waste.

The report, titled “Hard Lessons”, points out that the US was “unprepared and ill-equipped to deal” with post-Saddam Iraq.

As Iraq slipped into the grip of a deadly insurgency during 2005 and 2006; US officials responded by moving large sums of money into security programmes. This “ultimately consumed over half of the $50 billion” meant for reconstruction.

By 2008, when the security situation improved enough to allow reconstruction, most of the $50 billion had already been spent.

Auditor Stuart W. Bowen Jr. spent five years probing misappropriations, frauds and corruption committed in the two countries.

He has submitted 250,000 pages of audits to Congress.

One glaring example he gives is that of a maximum security prison in Diyala province, which the Iraqis sarcastically call “the whale”.

The “skeletal, half-built” shell of a maximum-security prison in Khan Bani Saad “will probably never house an inmate” even though the United States spent $40 million on the now-halted $73 million project, the report notes.

In a separate interview to Washington Post, Mr Bowen said the largest single-country relief and reconstruction project in US history was full of wasted funds, fraud and a lack of accountability under an “ad hoc-racy” of lax or nonexistent government planning and supervision.

Most of the construction projects were done by private US contractors and cost US taxpayers $50 billion.

And despite the Iraq experience, the United States is making many of the same mistakes again in Afghanistan, he warns. US reconstruction expenditures in Afghanistan stand at more than $30 billion and counting.

“It’s too late to do the structural part and make it quickly applicable to Afghanistan,” Mr Bowen says.

None of the substantive changes in oversight, contracting and reconstruction planning or personnel assignments that Congress, auditors and outside experts proposed as the Iraq debacle unfolded has been implemented in Afghanistan, he adds.