John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), may have taken Uncle Sam and shaken him by the lapels this week, but the media missed it. Americans, however, need to hear how Sopko, in an address at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., laid out why Afghanistan remains “relevant” – and a cause for outrage – for every U.S. taxpayer and policymaker.

In short, Afghanistan is on life support, and Joe Citizen is its permanent IV. From your pockets, Uncle Sam has taken $103 billion to build Afghanistan – so far. By the way, that figure doesn’t include the costs of war-making. To put it in context, as Sopko says in the text of his speech, “that is more money than we have spent on reconstruction for any one country in the history of the United States.” That goes for the countries in Europe that American money rebuilt during the Marshall Plan after World War II.

“We are spending more money this year on reconstruction in Afghanistan than we do for the next three countries combined,” Sopko continues, referring to Israel, Egypt and Pakistan. Eighteen billion dollars are currently in the pipeline, he says, and between $6 and $10 billion is “promised annually for years to come.”

Why? Don’t ask. Your U.S. representative probably hasn’t.

The grotesque scale of all of this “aid” becomes even more striking on realizing that Afghans, per capita, earn $687 per year. Mammoth U.S. reconstruction programs thus place “a financial and operational burden on the Afghan economy that it simply cannot manage by itself,” as Sopko puts it. Consider that Afghanistan’s GDP in 2012 was approximately $20 billion. “That same year,” Sopko says, “U.S. reconstruction funding amounted to $15 billion – 75 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP.” Again, these massive sums don’t include war costs.

“Sustaining this assistance,” Sopko adds, “will overwhelm the Afghan government’s budget.”

For example, the projected costs of supporting Afghan security forces come to $5 to $6 billion per year, Sopko says. “At these levels,” he explains, “if the Afghan government were to dedicate all of its domestic revenue toward sustaining the Afghan army and police, it still could only pay for about a third of the cost.”

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