A sizeable amount of US money went into IEA’s pockets: John Sopko

John Sopko, former US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said on Wednesday that a sizeable amount of US taxpayers’ money went into the pockets of the Islamic Emirate.

“We know it is going to continue because unfortunately we have nobody on the ground and the money is going through the UN, world food organization (WFP) and other international organizations, and we don’t really have good oversight,” Sopko told Fox Business.

He said that he was not sure if the US foreign aid pause by the Trump administration includes money going directly to the UN and other international organizations.

Sopko said that the US international aid agency (USAID) continues to be a “broken agency.”

He said USAID workers in Afghanistan told SIGAR: “You can’t believe what we are doing. And we use that for a lot of our reports. But none of that got up to Washington. That is why you heard all the happy talk – we are winning the war, we are helping the kids, we are building schools, we are doing all this – and it turned out they built schools but they never looked if there were any teachers. They built hospitals but they never looked if there was any water or drugs or even patients.”

Sopko said that the whole objective was to spend the money, and it wasn’t just for USAID, but the US Department of Defense and the Department of State.

“The test was: did you spend your appropriated funds, and if you didn’t, you lost money, if you didn’t, you weren’t promoted. And that is the whole delusion we had between the reality on the ground and what the American people were being told by the aid administrators, the ambassadors, the generals and everybody for the last 20 years,” he said.

Earlier, John Sopko claimed that the Islamic Emirate is diverting or otherwise benefitting from a considerable amount of U.S. assistance.

IEA, however, has rejected the claim.