Michael Hughes: Revelations that the U.S. Defense Department wasted more than $457 million on a failed intelligence program in Afghanistan surfaced at the wrong time for war hawks that want to boost troop levels by another 4,000, especially considering the sitting U.S. president promised voters that he would reduce the costs of overseas commitments in order to do more state-building at home.

On July 31, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) in a press release said that a DOD program that cost taxpayers almost half a billion dollars failed to achieve its stated objectives. The DOD-funded Legacy Afghanistan R&D program and the Afghanistan Source Operations Management (ASOM) training and mentoring program, the release added, were designed to develop the “intelligence capacity” of the Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). Click here to read more.