The office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a government watchdog agency, revealed in a report published Tuesday that American taxpayers lost about $19 billion to “waste, fraud, and abuse” in Afghanistan in the past decade. John Sopko, who holds the SIGAR title, said in the report that his office had documented several outrageous instances of misspent American money in the period covering May 2009 to December 2019, including the construction of a soccer stadium not built to regulation — rendering it useless — later improperly used as a military training site and the construction of staircases to nowhere in single-floor developments. A significant percentage of the waste identified — $12 billion — went to “counter-narcotics” programs in the country that Sopko deemed wasteful because “the programs did not achieve their intended purpose.” The Taliban jihadist group — which ran the country prior to the American invasion in the aftermath of … [Read more...] about Afghanistan Report: U.S. Paid Billions for Staircases to the Ceiling, Unusable Soccer Stadium