(Image Source: CNN )

BY YUTAKA HAYASHI

ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY

You're watching multisource US video news analysis from Newsy. 

A bipartisan Congressional commission revealed somewhere between 30 to 60 billion dollars are being wasted on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Or look at it like this. $30 billion is the annual budget of the National Institute of Health. At 60 billion, would pay for universal preschool for every three and four year old kid in America.” (CNN)

Deutsche Welle lists some examples of wasted funds --

“In Iraq, $40 million was invested in a prison that nobody wanted and whose construction was never completed. In Afghanistan, $300 million was spent on a power plant in Kabul, despite the fact that the Karzai government lacks both the money and expertise to keep the plant running.”

Think that’s bad?  IndiaVision says it gets worse -- reporting, we might even be funding our enemies.

“US contracts were the Taliban's biggest source of funds, while a separate investigation estimated that 360 million dollars have ended up in the hands of the Taliban.”

So, how could this happen?  A commentator on RT says the huge scope of these military operations requires us to rely on private contractors -- he says, that’s a problem in itself...

“It’s a security threat.  It puts us further into debt.  It makes a larger distance between who we can look to to go to accountability when something wrong happens in these war zones.  you know, who do we go to?  Some private contractor?  These are a very dangerous set of circumstances?"

A commentator on Fox Business says local social practices contributed to the expenses.

“...when we went into Iraq and Afghanistan we needed local hires: people who would help us with security, but again, that’s a part of the world where they take their little baksheesh, they take their little percentage, which for us is corruption, waste, fraud and abuse; for them it’s standard operating procedure.”

And CBS reports, wasteful practices will continue if something isn’t done.

Reporter: “The commission also warned of massive new waste. For instance, there is a planned $82 million Afghan defense university that the government of Afghanistan cannot afford to keep up.”
Dov Zakheim (Commission Member): "What is the point of spending hundreds of millions on projects that will then fall into disuse?"
Reporter: “The commission warned that, without a major overhaul of wartime contracting, we can expect more of the same.”

Transcript by Newsy.