The U.S. financial commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan is behemoth — more than what was spent post World War II on rebuilding Europe. Unfortunately, huge amounts have been wasted, spent on dubious projects with little accountability, as Reason reports. One such project is a compressed natural gas station. Price tag: $43 million.

According to a 2015 SIGAR study, the U.S.-funded Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO) “spent nearly $43 million to construct a compressed natural gas (CNG) automobile filling station in the city of Sheberghan, Afghanistan.” A similar station in Pakistan “costs no more than $500,000 to construct,” making the Afghan counterpart some 86 times as expensive. Yet the Department of Defense (DOD) was “unable to provide an explanation for the high cost of the project or to answer any other questions concerning its planning, implementation, or outcome.”

Those who decided to spend those millions didn’t seem to realize that “Afghanistan lacks the natural gas transmission and local distribution infrastructure necessary to support a viable market for CNG vehicles” or that “the cost of converting a gasoline-powered car to run on CNG may be prohibitive for the average Afghan.”

In summation, the SIGAR study concludes, “it is not clear why TFBSO believed the CNG filling station project should be undertaken.…In fact, an economic impact assessment performed at the request of TFBSO found that the CNG filling station project produced no discernable macroeconomic gains and a discounted net loss of $31 million.”

Where is the accountability for this?