Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog
,
BuzzFeed News obtained internal Ministry of Education data
for 2011 that has never before been made public. For Afghanistan
overall, the data showed 1,174 schools — almost 1 in every 12 — was
a ghost school, an educational facility that the Afghan government
publicly claimed was open but that was, in fact, not operating. In
the provinces that are the most dangerous to monitor — and into
which the U.S. poured the most aid money — that proportion soared.
In Kandahar province, where DeNenno served, a full third of the 423
schools the Ministry of Education publicly reported as open in 2011
were not functioning, and in Helmand, it was more than
half.
But teacher salaries continued to go to these ghost schools —
and still do, according to numerous Afghan and U.S. sources. While
the Afghan government puts in some of its own money to pay
teachers, more than two-thirds of teacher salaries are provided
through a World Bank fund, to which the United States is the
biggest donor. The World Bank fund did not respond to requests for
comment, but USAID said that World Bank financial controls guard
against salaries going to ghost teachers.
And just as with ghost students, the U.S. government has known
about ghost teachers for years. Back in 2005 and 2006, an internal
education ministry task force calculated that at least $12 million
in salaries were going to so-called ghost teachers annually,
according to several former employees of the USAID contractors
embedded in the ministry. A scathing, confidential
2013 USAID audit of the Afghan education
ministry obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals that the United States
had been injecting hundreds of millions of dollars for more than a
decade into a ministry marred by an “inadequate payroll system” and
lacking even the most basic auditing practices.
In some areas, the belief that ghost schools have enriched
fat cats at the expense of Afghan children has stoked such
widespread ire that American education aid is actually doing the
opposite of what the U.S. intended: It’s turning locals against the
government.
– From the Buzzfeed article:
Ghost Students, Ghost Teachers, Ghost
Schools
In the wake of so many wasteful, inhumane and disastrous
foreign policy failures, the U.S. government has been desperate to
highlight some significant successes in order to justify all of
these tragic foreign imperial blunders.
One such supposed success relates to education in Afghanistan,
an area into which some $1 billion in taxpayer money has been spent
to build schools and pay teachers according to Buzzfeed. U.S.
Government officials have consistently trumpeted all of the good
work that has been done in this regard, but there’s one slight
problem.
Not only are most of the statistics complete bogus, but in
many cases, a lot of this U.S. wealth that was meant to be targeted
for education, has gone straight to the coffers of some of the
most ruthless warlords in the county. How could this
happen you ask? Here’s how.
From
Buzzfeed
:
Nearly four years later, water seeps through the leaky roof and
drips onto students in this more than $250,000 construction. Doors
are cut in half; some are missing altogether.
There is no running water for the approximately 200 boys —
and zero girls — who attend. But the school did enrich a notorious
local warlord.In exchange for donating the land on which
the school sits, he extracted a contract from the U.S. military
worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Over and over, the United States has touted education — for
which it has spent more than $1 billion— as one of its
premier successes in Afghanistan, a signature achievement that
helped win over ordinary Afghans and dissuade a future generation
of Taliban recruits. As the American mission faltered, U.S.
officials repeatedly trumpeted impressive statistics — the number
of schools built, girls enrolled, textbooks distributed, teachers
trained, and dollars spent — to help justify the 13 years and more
than 2,000 Americans killed since the United States invaded.
But a BuzzFeed News investigation — the first comprehensive
journalistic reckoning, based on visits to schools across the
country, internal U.S. and Afghan databases and documents, and more
than 150 interviews —
has found those claims to be massively exaggerated, riddled
with ghost schools, teachers, and students that exist only on
paper.The American effort to educate Afghanistan’s
children was hollowed out by corruption and by short-term political
and military goals that, time and again, took precedence over
building a viable school system.
And the U.S. government has known for years that it has
been peddling hype.
BuzzFeed News exclusively acquired the GPS coordinates and
contractor information for every school that the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) claims to have refurbished or
built since 2002, as well as Department of Defense records of
school constructions funded by the U.S. military.
At least a tenth of the schools BuzzFeed News visited no
longer exist, are not operating, or were never built in the first
place.“While regrettable,” USAID said in response, “it is
hardly surprising to find the occasional shuttered schools in war
zones.”
USAID program reports obtained by BuzzFeed News indicate the
agency knew as far back as 2006 that enrollment figures were
inflated, but American officials continued to cite them to Congress
and the American public.
All they do is lie. Constantly, and about pretty much
everything.
As for the schools America truly did build, U.S. officials
repeatedly emphasized to Congress that they were constructed to
high-quality standards. But in 2010, USAID’s inspector general
published
a review based on site visits to 30
schools.
More than three-quarters suffered from physical problems,
poor hardware, or other deficiencies that might expose students to
“unhealthy and even dangerous conditions.”Also, the review
found that “the International Building Code was not adhered to” in
USAID’s school-building program.
This year, BuzzFeed News found that the overwhelming
majority of the more than 50 U.S.-funded schools it visited
resemble abandoned buildings — marred by collapsing roofs,
shattered glass, boarded-up windows, protruding electrical wires,
decaying doors, or other structural defects. At least a quarter of
the schools BuzzFeed News visited do not have running
water.
By obtaining internal records from the Afghan Ministry of
Education, never before made public, BuzzFeed News also learned
that more than 1,100 schools that the ministry
publicly reported as active in 2011 were
in fact not operating at all.
Provincial documents show that teacher salaries — largely
paid for with U.S. funds — continued to pour into ghost
schools.
Some local officials even allege that those salaries
sometimes end up in the hands of the Taliban.Certainly,
U.S.-funded school projects have often lined the pockets of brutal
warlords and reviled strongmen, which sometimes soured the local
population on the U.S. and the Afghan government.
One place where it’s a lot less than it’s cracked up to be is
the province where America poured more aid money than almost any
other: Kandahar, home to Zhari district, where DeNenno’s school
sits.
Habibullah Jan had fled the country, but when the Americans
overthrew the Taliban in 2001, he returned and reimposed his
checkpoints. With more than 2,000 men under his command and, soon,
a seat in parliament, he became the most powerful man in Zhari.
When his old foe the Taliban began to surge in 2005, the Americans
turned to him for help.
To put it plainly: The U.S. allied itself with a warlord so
oppressive and kleptocratic that he helped create the Taliban in
the first place.
You really can’t make this stuff up.
Few American soldiers knew that Haji Lala and Habibullah Jan
were brothers, let alone of Habibullah Jan’s role in fomenting the
Taliban. “I liked Haji Lala,” a soldier in DeNenno’s unit said.
“I’m pretty sure he did some bad stuff, but for us he was helpful.”
He added,
“I knew he was a warlord, but he was our
warlord.”
America: Apple pie, democracy and Afghan warlords.
One of the most common payments the military made was
compensation. If U.S. soldiers killed an innocent bystander, or
blew up a civilian’s house, or killed someone’s sheep, commanders
would pay compensation. The amounts were often modest — from less
than $100 to more than $25,000 — but in total they added up
to
more than $2.5 million, from which strongmen
could take a cut.
DeNenno said that Haji Lala would sometimes tell the
Taliban, “Go blow up this area because we wanna get the Americans
to pay for it.”
The American taxpayer, the biggest patsy on earth, as
usual.
But the goal was never just to educate children. Education
was also a means to advance America’s short-term military and
political objectives.In 2003, a National Security
Council–led “Accelerating Success” program demanded that USAID
hasten its work and complete 314 schools by June 2004. The reason:
The U.S. wanted achievements — statistics — to extol ahead of the
Afghan presidential election.
As a result of the NSC directive, USAID Director Patrick Fine
wrote in an October 2004
internal memo, first obtained by
the Washington Post,
“awards were made without having design specifications,
without agreed sites selected or surveyed or a process to do this,
and without adequate consultation with either the [Ministry of
Education or Ministry of Health] or the beneficiary
communities.”The target numbers, he continued, “had gained
a life of their own and were driving USAID to continue to rush the
process.”
Profiteers exploited that rush. A full reckoning of the waste
and outright fraud has never happened, in part because cases of
corruption have often been hidden for years.
When an accountant went to federal investigators in 2006 with
evidence that one of USAID’s largest contractors, Louis Berger
Group, had been
defrauding the agency of millions for
years, the investigation was kept under federal seal
until late 2010. Only then did the Justice
Department reveal that two executives had pleaded guilty to fraud
and announce the deal it had reached behind closed doors:
The company as a whole would avoid criminal charges and be
allowed to continue winning government contracts in exchange for
implementing new financial controls and paying
nearly $70 million in fines.Since the
whistleblower came forward, USAID has awarded the company contracts
worth more than 10 times what it was fined.
Looks like Louis Berger was handed out some banker justice.
Must be nice.
From 2008 to at least August 2013, USAID claimed it had built
or refurbished more than 680 schools in the country since the U.S.
invaded — a figure the agency sometimes used to counter bad press
and that it repeated
on Twitter and in
blog posts,
press releases, and a
report from USAID’s Office of the
Inspector General, not to mention in Secretary Clinton’s submission
to Congress.
But over the last two years, USAID has quietly whittled
away at that number without explaining what happened to the more
than 115 schools it no longer says it built or
refurbished.After BuzzFeed News pressed for an answer,
Larry Sampler, the head of USAID’s Office of Afghanistan and
Pakistan Affairs, said the agency had “revised its operational
definition of school construction” to a “stricter definition.”
Less than 20 miles southeast of DeNenno’s school, Deh-e-Bagh
Primary School was recorded in U.S. military records as completed
in 2012, at cost and up to standard. The nine-room building, along
with latrines and a security wall, would allow children to go to
school regularly and provide a “tangible source of community pride
and legitimacy” for local elders and the Afghan government, the
records say.
But Deh-e-Bagh Primary School has never seen a single
student.Only partially completed in 2012, its doors have
never opened. There are no latrines, no running water. Without a
security wall surrounding it, the building has deteriorated.
Windows are smashed. Rooms are littered with construction
materials.
That same year, 2012, a military unit distributed supplies to
the Sher Mohammad Hotak Primary School, located just a few miles
down Highway 1 from DeNenno’s base. Fifty girls attended the
school, according to the unit’s records. In
photos the unit posted to Facebook, both
girls and boys are seen smiling and collecting new backpacks.
Together, USAID and the Pentagon have pumped more than $200,000
into the school.
But in an unannounced visit to the school this March, not a
single girl was in attendance. Instead, the seven tents that made
up the school were filled with boys, some of whom had no chairs or
desks. They sat on rocky ground, fading backpacks emblazoned with
the Afghan flag next to them.
It was that way across Afghanistan, with school after school
visited by BuzzFeed News showing fewer students than were on the
books. In 2011 and 2012, USAID sent monitors to many of the schools
it had funded to check the number of students and other key
information. Since then it has
relied almost exclusively on data provided
by the Afghan Ministry of Education to determine how many students
and teachers are in schools. But no matter who came up with the
official count, it often exaggerated the reality on the
ground.
At the USAID-funded Mujahed Sameullah Middle School in Kunar
province, for example, there were fewer than 50 boys, sometimes
sitting two per classroom. That’s only about a fifth of the 274
boys USAID’s quality assurance monitors recorded in 2011 or the 264
the Afghan government told BuzzFeed News are currently enrolled.
Overall, in the schools BuzzFeed News visited for which
comparison data was available, official figures overcounted
students by an average of nearly a fifth — and girls by about
two-fifths.
In response to questions, USAID said that it takes seriously
any allegations of falsified data and “will continue to work with
the ministry to improve reliability.” It also said that beginning
in 2012, the agency and other donors recommended that the ministry
tighten that standard from three years to one. To date, the
ministry has not done so. Still, USAID told BuzzFeed News that
while it could not “be absolutely sure of all attendance numbers in
all Afghan schools at all times,” in general it “is confident in
overall attendance numbers provided by the MoE.”
But Elizabeth Royall, a U.S. liaison to the ministry in 2011
and 2012, said, “There was a lack of scrutiny. I would just report
MOE numbers, and that’s what we went with.”
The U.S. just went with the ministry’s numbers for teachers,
too. And those numbers were used to pay salaries — even when the
teachers weren’t teaching.
BuzzFeed News obtained internal Ministry of Education data
for 2011 that has never before been made public. For Afghanistan
overall, the data showed 1,174 schools — almost 1 in every 12 — was
a ghost school, an educational facility that the Afghan government
publicly claimed was open but that was, in fact, not operating. In
the provinces that are the most dangerous to monitor — and into
which the U.S. poured the most aid money — that proportion
soared.In Kandahar province, where DeNenno served, a full
third of the 423 schools the Ministry of Education publicly
reported as open in 2011 were not functioning, and in Helmand, it
was more than half.
But teacher salaries continued to go to these ghost schools —
and still do, according to numerous Afghan and U.S. sources.
While the Afghan government puts in some of its own money to
pay teachers, more than two-thirds of teacher salaries are provided
through a World Bank fund, to which the United States is the
biggest donor. The World Bank fund did not respond to requests for
comment, but USAID said that World Bank financial controls guard
against salaries going to ghost teachers.
And just as with ghost students, the U.S. government has known
about ghost teachers for years. Back in 2005 and 2006, an internal
education ministry task force calculated that at least $12 million
in salaries were going to so-called ghost teachers annually,
according to several former employees of the USAID contractors
embedded in the ministry.
A scathing, confidential
2013 USAID audit of the Afghan education
ministry obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals that the United States
had been injecting hundreds of millions of dollars for more than a
decade into a ministry marred by an “inadequate payroll system” and
lacking even the most basic auditing practices.
In some areas, the belief that ghost schools have enriched
fat cats at the expense of Afghan children has stoked such
widespread ire that American education aid is actually doing the
opposite of what the U.S. intended: It’s turning locals against the
government.
At one point, the provincial police chief shouts out who he
thinks are commandeering the payments: “Everyone knows the salaries
of teachers come to the province, and then they go to the
Taliban.”
Military spending under the CERP program required very little
paperwork for most projects. The point was to help win a war. But
that flexibility means, quite literally, that the military does not
know what it spent on education in Afghanistan, or what it got for
its money. The military conceded that many CERP projects were not
entered into “procurement database systems” but said it “does
maintain extensive project records.” Last year, however, the
Defense Department told the special inspector general for
Afghanistan Reconstruction just how little it knew:
For more than 40% of CERP projects, the Pentagon could not
say who ultimately received its money.
Pressed by BuzzFeed News, the Pentagon said it could not
provide an exact number of schools it actually built.It
also could not say how the more than $250 million in CERP funding
earmarked for education was actually spent. To try to drill down on
those figures, BuzzFeed News filed a Freedom of Information request
and obtained CERP funding records — but found that entire projects
were missing, including Joe DeNenno’s permanent school.
“The CERP database was an absolute mess, literally a disaster,”
one government official familiar with the records said. “Saying
disaster doesn’t even do it justice.”
Since 2002, the United States has invested more than $1 billion
to provide education to Afghan children. But the American
government does not know how many schools it has built, how many
Afghan students are actually attending school, or how many teachers
are actually teaching. What’s certain is the numbers for all of
those are far less than what it has been peddling.
While it’s bad enough U.S. taxpayer’s were sent a bill for $1
billion to fund education in Afghanistan when we have so many
enormous domestic problems of our own, it’s downright criminal that
so much of this money was irresponsibly wasted in political
schemes, not to mention some of it going to directly to
murderous warlords. Then again, none of this should surprise you.
We are all familiar with the seemingly endless
list of humanitarian disasters created by inept U.S. foreign policy
since 9/11, such as:
“Stop Thanking Me for My Service” – Former U.S.
Army Ranger Blasts American Foreign Policy and The Corporate
State
More Foreign Policy Incompetence – U.S.
Humanitarian Aid is Going Directly to ISIS
Afghan President Hamid Karzai Slams U.S. Foreign
Policy in Farewell Speech
America’s Disastrous Foreign Policy – My Thoughts
on Iraq
The Forgotten War – Understanding the Incredible
Debacle Left Behind by NATO in Libya
