The US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko, announced on Wednesday that his agency would investigate charges that former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani stole millions of dollars out of the country when he departed.
Ghani has stated that he fled Kabul to avoid bloodshed and that he did not take big sums of money with him. However, speculation has persisted, and Congress has requested Sopko’s staff to investigate.
“That has yet to be proven. That’s something we’re looking into. Actually, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee has asked us to look into that,” Sopko told a House of Representatives subcommittee.
Ghani has been roundly chastised for escaping as the Islamist Taliban advanced toward Kabul’s outskirts in August.
Sopko’s Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has long been probing fraud, waste, and abuse during America’s vast state-building endeavour, which ended in ignominy with the Taliban’s takeover after 20 years.
Sopko told a House Foreign Affairs Committee subcommittee overseeing development funding that the project’s failure shouldn’t have come as a surprise, considering the project’s extensive corruption and mismanagement.
“Corruption became so rampant that it posed a threat to Afghanistan’s security and reconstruction mission,” he told the House panel.
The hearing was the first in a series of congressional hearings on the tumultuous US withdrawal and the way forward. Representative Joaquin Castro, the Democratic chairman of the subcommittee, stated, “We can apply the lessons acquired in other crisis zones.”
Almost all help to Afghanistan has been cut off by the United States and other countries.
“These are challenging times for all of us who care about the future of the Afghan people, particularly the Afghans who have supported the United States and its allies over the last 20 years,” Sopko said.
SIGAR’s entire workforce, including locally employed Afghans, was safely evacuated from Kabul, he said.
(With inputs from NDTV)
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