[The Afghanistan special inspector general’s office was no different before the arrival of Mr. Sopko. Created by Congress in 2008 and modeled after a similar program in Iraq, the office produced a single audit in its first year. It soon improved, but not enough for Congress, which in 2011 forced out the first special inspector general, Arnold Fields.]
By Matthew Rosenberg
KABUL,
Afghanistan — John F. Sopko is a 61-year-old former prosecutor who believes
“embarrassing people works.”
As the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction,
he has made a full-time job of doing just that. He and his team spend their
days cataloging the waste, mismanagement and fraud that have plagued American
reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.
Then they go
out and publicize what they have found — aggressively. If they upset the
generals and diplomats running the war, so much the better. Most officials
“would love to have it all triple-wrapped in paper, classified and slipped
under a door so it goes away — then they don’t have to do anything,” he said
during a recent interview.
He added,
“I’m into accountability.”
Mr. Sopko
may lack the name recognition of those who have shaped the war in the American
imagination: Osama bin Laden, President Hamid Karzai, generals like Stanley A.
McChrystal and David H. Petraeus. But Mr. Sopko has been as instrumental as
anyone in shaping the now-prevalent view among Americans that the war in
Afghanistan has become an expensive boondoggle no longer worth fighting.
After a few
minutes with Mr. Sopko, it is easy to see why. He is blunt in a way that is
rare for American officials, and his directness often hits just the right notes
when he makes his case to Congress, journalists or others who help shape public
opinion.
His success
in effecting change is harder to measure, though. Mr. Sopko’s take-no-prisoners
approach has alienated many officials whose work he scrutinizes. Many seethe at
what they characterize as his grandstanding and bullying. Some throw out the
occasional expletive to make their point.
His work,
they say, lacks depth and nuance and too often emphasizes problems instead of
solutions. A number of officials said they had begun to tune him out, though at
the same time they said they did not want to attract Mr. Sopko’s attention.
The nicest
thing many officials will say about Mr. Sopko is that he is not always wrong.
Mr. Sopko
“does tell everyone, ‘U.S.A.I.D. can’t manage its programs because they can’t
get off the embassy compound,’ ” Larry Sampler, a senior official at the
United States Agency for International Development, told reporters at a
briefing in Kabul last month. “I can’t say that’s not true.”
“But it’s
not universally true,” Mr. Sampler added. As an example, he cited the fact that
American officials based in Herat, in western Afghanistan, were allowed to
drive their own vehicles because the area had become relatively tranquil.
Mr. Sopko
has “created a perception that we’re just pushing money out the door and not
paying any attention,” Mr. Sampler said, “and that couldn’t be further from the
truth.”
Mr. Sopko,
who works from an office tower a few blocks from the Pentagon and makes
occasional trips to Afghanistan, bristles at suggestions that he mainly seeks
the limelight. He insisted that his goal was to help salvage the war effort by
highlighting the need to stop spending money when its impact could not be
gauged, or it was simply being stolen.
His critics
should “spend less time complaining” about negative news media coverage, he
said, “and fix it.”
He was more
amused by a State Department effort to have a public affairs official sit in on
interviews conducted at the American Embassy in Kabul. The embassy said it was
standard procedure at missions around the world for any government employees
speaking with the press.
Mr. Sopko,
unsurprisingly, had a different take: “The last time I dealt with minders was
in the Soviet Union,” he said, chuckling. No State Department officials were
present during the interview.
Inspectors
general, the government’s internal watchdogs, are usually reserved, issuing
reports that tend to be dense and rather dry. Their public statements are often
few and far between.
The
Afghanistan special inspector general’s office was no different before the
arrival of Mr. Sopko. Created by Congress in 2008 and modeled after a similar
program in Iraq, the office produced a single audit in its first year. It soon
improved, but not enough for Congress, which in 2011 forced out the first
special inspector general, Arnold Fields.
Mr. Sopko
took over a year ago and immediately stepped up the agency’s metabolism. In his
first year, his office has issued more reports, alerts, audits and other items
than were put out in the agency’s first four years of existence.
But the
work, in Mr. Sopko’s estimation, is pointless unless someone is reading it. “I
don’t put out reports just to kill a bunch of trees,” he said. “If you want to
make a change, you need to get to the American people.”
That
philosophy is evident in the steady stream of reports produced by his office.
They are made for easy consumption with executive summaries and clearly stated
conclusions, and Mr. Sopko’s public affairs staff aggressively flags them to
reporters. The New York Times has cited the work of the special inspector
general in multiple stories.
Sometimes,
though, the power of embarrassment goes only so far. But “putting people in
jail also works — it gets their attention,” Mr. Sopko said. Since he took the
job, investigations by his office have resulted in nine people being jailed.
A sampling
of his team’s findings in the past month offers a guide to the kind of work it
is doing. There was what is known as an “alert letter” warning of
“serious deficiencies” in a $47 million State Department program to develop
Afghanistan’s justice system; an audit found that $47
million spent to help
stabilize contested areas in Afghanistan had yielded little stabilization; another alert letter highlighted the $34 million spent to
build a state-of-the-art headquarters for the Marines in southern Afghanistan
that is never going to be used.
The reports
do garner attention. The Marine headquarters, for instance, has quickly become
another data point for skeptics of the Afghan war.
Raised in
Cleveland, Mr. Sopko described his parents as New Deal Democrats who imbued him
with the belief that the government could do good. His father was a
meteorologist for the National Weather Service; his mother was a homemaker.
He became a
lawyer, and started out prosecuting mobsters in Ohio. Then, in 1982, he decided
to work as a Congressional staff member in Washington. There, he discovered he
“loved doing the work that changed policy.”
Three
decades later, Mr. Sopko is still in Washington, and still looking to shape
policy. “I wish to goodness I had this opportunity four years ago,” he said.
“That said, it still has to be done, and now more than ever.”
The troop
drawdown may be well under way, but the United States is still committed to
spending billions of dollars in Afghanistan in the coming years. Without “lots
of troops protecting our people,” Mr. Sopko said, they “won’t have that ability
to get out into the country.”
“We could
just pump money out the door if we don’t keep at this,” he said.
