Corruption continues to halt progress in Afghanistan, according to SIGAR report

With the international community's attention squarely fixed on the ongoing intra-Afghan peace talks in Doha, the plethora of challenges facing the fragile government are nowhere near resolution.

According to a report from the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), staggering amounts of resources have been lost to "corruption, abuse and waste" in the last two decades. Since the toppling of the Taliban regime in 2001, with the onset of the international War on Terror, the United States has appropriated nearly $134 billion on reconstruction efforts in the country.

According to SIGAR, the U.S. government's independent watchdog on Afghan reconstruction, in a forensic audit of $63 billion worth of development funds, approximately $19 billion (or 30% of the amount reviewed), was lost to financially wasteful and fraudulent activities.

As all stakeholders struggle to contain the outbreak of violence in the country, the peace negotiations remain on a knife-edge, forcing attention away from issues of endemic corruption, mismanagement and incompetence in the upper echelons of the country's loosely held democracy.