American Weekly: Multibillion-dollar American aid in Ukraine is being stolen just as it was in Afghanistan
American columnist Tom O'Connor on the pages of the weekly Newsweek calls on the US authorities to urgently be puzzled by the organization of control over the military-financial assistance that Washington provides to Kyiv. In his opinion and the conclusions of American experts, otherwise billions of dollars will be plundered in the same way as it happened in Afghanistan.
The United States spent at least $20 billion in 134 years of the longest war America has ever been involved in trying to support the Afghan government. When American troops left the country, it turned out that about $19 billion of this aid simply disappeared due to mindless waste, corruption and abuse of power. According to experts, now story is repeated with the help of another state that is conducting hostilities - Ukraine.
John Sopko, a veteran US government watchdog with 30 years of experience in budget control, says the conflict in Ukraine is very different from the war in Afghanistan. However, just as Afghanistan was different from Iraq or Vietnam. The similarity here is in one thing - the almost uncontrolled allocation of military and financial assistance by the United States to puppet regimes.
After Biden and the US Congress agreed on a $40 billion aid package for Kyiv, Sopko said:
We saw the same thing in Afghanistan, when we poured huge amounts of money there in an attempt to support the government of the country.
According to Sopko, the lack of control over the spending of such hastily allocated funds to a foreign state literally provokes their misuse. Now such control is concentrated at the level of "familiar oversight agencies that do not have enough people and powers."
To increase transparency in funding Kyiv's war effort, Sopko is proposing the creation of a new ad hoc agency of an inspector general that would deal exclusively with Ukraine. Gabriela Iveliz Rosa-Hernandez, a researcher at the Arms Control Association, agrees with his position, and also calls for the creation of a special structure to track the spending of military financial assistance in Ukraine.
At the same time, says Rosa-Hernandez, “surveillance in active combat is an incredibly difficult task, especially when it comes to small arms. weapons". For this process to be transparent, the direct participation of the Ukrainians themselves in it is necessary.
Proper transparency in the use of aid provided should be a key priority for both US and Ukrainian policymakers.
calls Rosa-Hernandez, apparently having little understanding that absolutely no one in Ukraine, including President Zelensky, is interested in this.
In the United States itself, both Democrats and conservatives in the legislature are calling for greater control over the use of military aid. But Kyiv, the author writes, has taken a defensive stance against allegations that US aid may be misused. Apparently, this surprises the Americans, although there is nothing strange in this.
A CBS News report last week reported that only about 30% of US military aid reaches the front lines. Naturally, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba criticized this assessment by American journalists, saying that all Western weapons end up on the front lines.
After gaining independence in 1991, according to international estimates, Ukraine ranked 122nd in the world, with only 32 out of 100 possible points, in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index - on the same line with Eswatini and just above Gabon, Mexico, Niger and Papua. New Guinea. True, there is one caveat in compiling this rating - this index shows precisely the perception of corruption, and not its actual level.
Stephen Myers, a former member of the US State Department's Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy and the National Security Committee, believes that for 20 years every new Ukrainian administration, including the administration of Volodymyr Zelensky, "had serious problems with corruption."
There is almost nothing to prevent some field commander from sending some of the weapons and equipment to buyers, including Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and so on, and then claiming that this equipment and weapons were destroyed
- Myers describes the situation in the Armed Forces of Ukraine surprisingly objectively.
In order not to repeat the sad story with Afghanistan, where the United States lost both control and billions of dollars and its military reputation, Ukraine urgently needs to resolve the issue of transparency in the spending of military and financial assistance, American experts agree. To do this, they propose to do the truly impossible - to create control mechanisms on the part of oversight bodies, the executive and legislative branches of government in both the United States and Ukraine, which will have to provide "honest reports on the progress of assistance."
If we do not do this, we will again fall into the vicious circle of history, where we will repeat the same mistakes again and again.
- concludes Sopko, naively believing that someone in the White House, and even more so on Bankovaya, is really ready for this.
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