U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan have been fraught with waste, and a new audit report provides the latest example.

Over the past five years, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko has detailed tens of billions of dollars of government waste. The examples are legion, including the $28 million the Pentagon wasted purchasing the wrong kind of camouflage uniforms for the Afghan National Army, the $34 million for a 64,000-square-foot military headquarters facility at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province that military commanders did not want and never used, the $772 million the Defense Department spent to purchase aircraft that the Afghan military cannot operate or maintain, and the $300 million for a power plant that the Afghan government does not have the expertise to run.

“We’ve built schools that have fallen down, clinics that there are no doctors for, we’ve built roads that are falling apart,” Sopko told AFP in 2014, noting that the amount of waste is “massive.”

To this checkered history we can now add the more than $160 million for a failed effort to implement an electronic payment system to collect and process customs duties. According to the SIGAR report released late last month, “The collection of customs duties on goods entering Afghanistan is one of the largest revenue sources for the Afghan government.” This is crucial for a country where 62 percent of the budget is subsidized by others, the U.S. government being the largest contributor.

But the customs system is racked with massive corruption. In 2014, for example, about half of the nation’s customs duties were believed to have been stolen.

To reduce corruption from cash-based transactions and help improve the Afghan government’s finances to make it more self-sustaining, the U.S. Agency for International Development awarded $83.8 million to contractor Chemonics to develop an e-payment system from 2009-2013. Implementation was slow, to say the least, but USAID doubled down and gave Chemonics another four-year contract, spanning from November 2013 to November 2017, and established a goal of processing 75 percent of all customs duties electronically by the end of the period.

“Nevertheless, as of December 2016, the … project’s e-payment system has only accounted for 0.59 percent of all Afghan custom duties collected, and there was little evidence to show that the project would come anywhere close to achieving the 75 percent target outlined in the contract and annual work plans,” the SIGAR report concluded. “However, USAID and Chemonics have not altered project targets to account for the reality of the situation, and instead continue to invest in an endeavor that appears to have no chance of achieving its intended outcome.”

But who cares? After all, it is someone else’s money, and government — or its contractors — seldom bear any consequences for extravagance or malfeasance. This is an attitude that has poisoned not only U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, but also activity in numerous other areas of government. It provides yet another reason to end our adventurism in Afghanistan — and to question whether giving massive sums of money and power to unaccountable government agencies is really the best way to solve all our problems.