Saint Paul tries to be "all things to all, to save at least some," he writes in this Sunday's reading from the 1st Letter to the Corinthians. But after seven years of trying all sorts of programs to help the people of Afghanistan, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs continue to be plagued by mismanagement, undocumented results, wasteful overhead, and profit skimming by U.S. contractors, according to reports and audits.

Of six different audits conducted in the past year by the agency's inspector general, only one found a program working largely as it was supposed to. For example: A $219 million contract for technical and management advice to government ministries and other institutions produced "a lack of evidence" of results after the agency and the contractor "spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to define the program's activities and priorities."

The success of a $37 million contract to help small businesses could not be measured because "the contractor's performance data . . . were not reliable." A $102 million contract to promote agriculture led to defective buildings, the spraying of pesticides without studying their impact, and the failure to implement a major farm program in time for last summer's planting season.

"As a result, the mission may not be able to provide planned jobs to local Afghans, and sales from crop harvests may not materialize," the August 2008 audit said.

Michael Yates, USAID's Afghanistan mission director, defended his agency's work, saying it had produced "remarkably powerful impacts" in health, education, agriculture, and more. "The audits have identified areas of weakness, but we then take concrete steps to address those areas," he said.

Yet critics such as Ann Jones, who wrote a 2006 book about her four years as an aid worker in Afghanistan, said the effort has been bedeviled by waste and mismanagement. More than half of the assistance money goes to overhead and profits for private U.S. contractors who hire Afghans to perform the work, Jones says. "It's hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure of American reconstruction in Afghanistan," she said.

Source: An article by Ken Delanian for USA TODAY