Obama administration wasted $450m on Afghan spy program

The Pentagon wasted almost half a billion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money on contractors tasked with training an Afghan spy program, according to the assessment of a new Congressional report, Newsweek reports.

The report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), published at the end of July, reviewed the results of $457.7 million spent on two Department of Defense contracts between 2010 and 2013: one run by Legacy Afghanistan R&D, and the other by Afghanistan Source Operations Management (ASOM).

The program trained only a few dozen Afghan members of the security forces and achieved minimal results, the report said.

“Because of a lack of performance metrics…and a reliance on contractor-provided data for the ASOM program, it is almost impossible to gauge the government’s return on investment for the $457.7 million spent,” the report stated.