http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/world/asia/to-american-watchdog-on-afghan-reconstruction-bluntness-is-a-weapon.html?pagewanted=all

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From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 9:45 AM
Subject: re: To American Watchdog on Afghan Reconstruction, Bluntness Is a Weapon
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    Our "government of the People, by the People and for the People" in Lincoln's phrase rests on checks and balances between the three branches of government. The cutting edge of that interaction is the Inspector General, whether it's a permanent post as for Glen Fine in our department of Justice or a special post as for John F. Sopko in Afghanistan's reconstruction.  Our Founding Fathers conceived that of the three, Congress was the branch closest to the People. The Inspector General thus is the People's representative, seeing that the People's moneys are well spent and the People's interest is well served. 

   Is John Sopko undiplomatic? Fine. He's not a diplomat. He's  my eyes on the scene.  All the various agencies involved have public relations efforts to tell me what they're doing well. I'm indebted to John Sopko (as to Glen Fine) for telling me what needs to be done better--or what shouldn't be done at all.

To American Watchdog on Afghan Reconstruction, Bluntness Is a Weapon

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

Published: August 8, 2013

Enlarge This ImageKABUL, Afghanistan — John F. Sopko is a 61-year-old former prosecutor who believes “embarrassing people works.”

Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, in his Arlington, Va., office.

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.