Clinton to find out where the money is going in Afghanistan

The Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said Wednesday that the Obama Administration is trying to figure it out where the money being sent to Afghanistan is going and who all are accountable for this.

Speaking to the officials of the State Department Clinton said her team is “trying to figure out how much money and from what funding streams is going into Afghanistan.”

That’s one of the questions that were asked by Ambassador Holbrooke, the Special Representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan after doing a quick review, she said. According to Clinton, Holbrooke said, “There’s a lot of money going in, but where is it going and what are the accountability metrics?”

Clinton said: “So, we’re trying to get a handle on that.”

Clinton hoped that the Department of State under her will be much smarter and more accountable on how the money is used. “It’s especially important when there’s so much riding on how effective we are. So we’re trying to figure out what’s going in, where it’s going, what the positive results are,” she said.

“We’re going to contrast that with what NGOs have done, because a lot of NGOs have a commendable track record for being able to show results not everybody, but a lot of them do,” she said.

She is working on governance issues and anticorruption issues that are troublesome, not just in Afghanistan, but elsewhere as well, Clinton said.

The Secretary of State said her goal is not to spend money for the sake of spending it, but to do so in order to produce a tangible result that will benefit the people of Afghanistan.

“I’ve been there three times. I’ve had a number of meetings, both there and here, with representatives of all kinds of groups in the government, outside the government. And it is a really big, personal concern of mine that we do a better job,” she said.

Clinton said a day before she had a meeting with a number of Afghanistan experts, people who have lived and worked in Afghanistan over numbers of years. “They all raise exactly the same question. We have to get a handle on what we’re spending, how we’re spending it, and what we’re getting for it. And that’s our intention to do that,” she said.