The recently coordinated Southwest Asia Joint Planning Group, comprised of several Inspectors General and a representative of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), came before a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing last week to testify on the oversight of U.S. resources in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To the chagrin of the subcommittee, though, the assembly of government overseers provided no overarching strategy to combat waste, fraud, and abuse, and little in the way of proactive solutions to help prevent the future squandering of U.S. resources. It is debatable, of course, whether it was fair for the subcommittee to expect as much.

With the expected request for more troops in Afghanistan along with pending legislation to triple U.S. aid to Pakistan, the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs was interested to hear how the panel intended to battle the fraud likely to accompany the anticipated influx of funds into the region. The opening statements of the Inspectors General – representing the State and Defense Departments, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) – and the GAO representative missed the mark for the subcommittee.

As Rep. John Tierney (D-MA), chair of the subcommittee, pointed out in his opening round of questioning, the panel provided no investigative strategy in light of the new commitments of “troops and treasure” to the region. Instead, members of the panel spoke of their respective office’s investigative status, highlighted recent accomplishments, and talked of current efforts to coordinate audits and investigations with the other panel members’ departments. Of course, those were all reasonable testimonies, as coordination of inspection work in the Af-Pak Theater was the stated goal of the planning group, and for subcommittee members to expect more was unrealistic for a couple reasons.

While one could argue that the joint planning group’s recent comprehensive oversight plan is too static – State Department acting Inspector General Harold Geisel’s testimony highlighted future plans to check up on the guard forces at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, a boat State already missed – Inspectors General are subsequent in nature; they follow the money. In the simplest sense, it requires the spending of money for an Inspector General to act. Educational outreach to government contract officers, an initiative highlighted by Defense Department Inspector General Gordon Heddell, and a preplanned, rotating review of contingency operations, which is the core of the group's comprehensive oversight plan, are about as proactive as Inspectors General offices get.

Moreover, a significant lack of manpower inhibits these offices from adequately overseeing the current level of U.S. contingency operations, let alone expanding their purviews into more proactive areas. Congress, in fact, carries a great deal of the blame for this lack of resources. The United States has been fighting in Afghanistan for close to eight years and many of these investigative offices have just recently been able to expand their personnel numbers into the double digits with the help of increased funding. This increase in oversight funding is due largely to the contracting horror stories that came out of Iraq and the anticipated surge of forces in Afghanistan, but it has come very late.

After two hours of listening to testimony and asking questions, Rep. Tierney and Ranking Member Jeff Flake (R-AZ) seemed to come to the realization that a strategy beyond the coordination of investigative efforts was beyond the panel members' capabilities. Towards the close of the hearing, Rep. Tierney rhetorically asked the panel whether Congress should legislate that the government not disperse future funds to southwest Asia until independent analysis confirms that effective spending controls are in place. Unfortunately, with an imminent ramp up of resources into the Af-Pak Theater, it will be difficult for Congress to ensure that worthy objective is met.

Image by Flickr user Army.mil used under a Creative Commons license.