$571 B
The total cost to the
United States of the
war in Afghanistan
“It was a tsunami of money,” writes
Chandrasekaran, who followed the
funds as they were dispersed in Helmand. One day in the fall of 2010,
he discovered, teachers in Nawa had
stopped showing up at schools across
the district. At $5 a day, it turned out,
digging ditches for the agriculture project was far more lucrative.
Earlier this year, SIGAR, the internal
auditor, took a closer look at some of the
apparent success stories of development,
including a 2011 road construction project between the towns of Lashkar Gah
and Nawa. The road should have made
everybody happy, by helping farmers in
Nawa reach the markets of Lashkar Gah.
(“Roads pave the way to stability,” USAID
de