Foreign Policy - The United States Has Outspent the Marshall Plan to Rebuild Afghanistan --- In June of 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall delivered a wholly unexpected commencement speech to the newly minted graduates of Harvard University. The United States, Marshall announced, would launch a massive reconstruction effort to rebuild Europe in the devastating aftermath of World War II. The subsequent effort, the Marshall Plan, put Europe back on the path to prosperity and has been hailed as a monumental, if wildly expensive, achievement of U.S. foreign policy. All told, the United States funneled an inflation-adjusted $103.4 billion to the plan's recipients over the course of four years. -- But the Marshall Plan has now been knocked off its pedestal as America's most expensive nation-building project. Afghanistan now reigns supreme, having gobbled up $104 billion in American aid. And, unlike in Europe, that money hasn't bought the kind of world-class infrastructure that became the cornerstones of numerous flourishing economies. Instead, the funds have mainly bought empty buildings, malfunctioning power plants, and a corrupt government that will be wholly dependent on Western -- read: American -- aid well into the future. --- On Wednesday, John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, released his quarterly report to Congress. The document reads like an early epitaph for the American nation-building effort in Afghanistan. With $104 billion already spent, another $5.8 billion has been requested for 2015. Of the money appropriated, $15.95 billion remains to be spent. --- A significant portion of that money has been directed toward projects that are comically ill conceived or badly carried out. The United States has spent $7.6 billion on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, but opium cultivation there -- a key Taliban funding source -- has risen for the past three years, and helped push global quantities of the crop to a record level. The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $34.4 million toward a soybean project in the face of scientific evidence indicating that the crop was "inappropriate for conditions and farming practices in northern Afghanistan, where the program was implemented." The United States Agency for International Development has pledged $75 million toward the ill-fated Kajaki Dam project, but the inspector general questions whether that project is at all economically viable. The United States has spent $626 million to provide weapons and equipment to Afghan forces. That aid includes 465,000 small arms, but, according to the IG, for 43 percent of those arms information was missing in a database used to track their receipt in Afghanistan. - More, http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/07/30/the_united_states_has_outspent_the_marshall_plan_to_rebuild_afghanistan