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Sputnik, 30 March 2016

An Afghan policeman keeps watch as people walk on a street in Kabul, ahead of the Kabul Conference July 19, 2010. Afghanistan will ask at the major international conference on Tuesday for more control of billions of dollars pledged to reconstruct the war-torn country. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani   An Afghan policeman keeps watch as people walk on a street in Kabul, ahead of the Kabul Conference July 19, 2010. Afghanistan will ask at the major international conference on Tuesday for more control of billions of dollars pledged to reconstruct the war-torn country. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani ∧

It is not the resurgence of the Taliban, al-Qaeda or Islamic State elements popping up that are hampering U.S. efforts to rebuild Afghanistan, it is corruption, said Special Investigator for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) Wednesday.

John Sopko serves as the head of SIGAR, and has arguably one of the hardest jobs in the country: rooting out corruption in the reconstruction effort of a country that essentially runs on dishonesty. For Sopko, corruption, mostly in the form of bribery of Afghan officials, is a massive threat.

“I would submit to you that nothing is a greater threat to the United States’ efforts to rebuild Afghanistan and other countries like it,” said Sopko in a speech to graduate students at University of the Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

He claimed that “vast sums of money injected into the Afghan economy” have gone missing and have failed to be accounted for by the U.S. To make matters worse, bribery of Afghan officials has become more than commonplace. Sopko noted that the U.S. was very late to the game when confronting the issue.