Have billions of aid dollars helped Afghanistan?

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It has been three years since Canadians troops lowered the Canadian flag for the last time in Afghanistan, marking the end of 12 years of military involvement.

But Canada still remains tied to Afghanistan through aid and funding development programs.  And despite billions of dollars of aid from Canada and other allied nations pouring into Afghanistan, it has been a bumpy road to prosperity for the country.

Afghans have seen little improvement in their standard of living, and the country has a burgeoning drug trade and high levels of insecurity and corruption. And troops are not just fighting the Taliban.

"Unfortunately for Afghanistan, you have ISIS there. You have almost every major terrorist group," John Sopko tells The Current's guest host Piya Chattopadhyay.

Sopko is the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. He and his 200 staff investigate the effectiveness of the $117-billion the U.S. has invested in the country since 2008.  He is currently in Ottawa to meet with Global Affairs and the RCMP.

Sopko says the security situation in Afghanistan is definitely worsening, so much so that it's hard for him to even travel throughout the country.

"The Afghan government itself is having problems getting around to large parts of their country. They only really control about 57 per cent of their country right now," he says. The rest is controlled by the Taliban and jihadi groups.

The main beneficiary of the unrest has been the drug trade. Sopko says it's booming in Afghanistan.  

"That's actually the one growth industry in Afghanistan — the narcotics trade," he says.

"They are producing more hectares under cultivation of poppy. They are producing more opium than ever before. They are exporting more, and they have more drug addicts themselves." He added that 80 to 90 per cent of the opium sold in Canada originates in Afghanistan.

Sopko points to two reasons for Afghanistan's struggles. The first is the end to Western military missions in the country. It put the security burden solely onto Afghan troops, and they're struggling with that responsibility.

The other hurdle is corruption, Sopko tells Chattopadhyay.

"Corruption, incompetence and nepotism in the government —  and particularly in the armed forces and police — have led to poor decisions, poor actions and the lack of support by a lot of the troops and a lot of people on the ground."

Corruption can take many forms: officials or soldiers stealing fuel and food — or skimming salaries, Sopko says.

"Our biggest concern — and we've raised this for almost as long as I've been there for five years — was about ghosts, and I don't mean spirits. I mean troops and police who are on the books as being alive and fighting or doing their work. But it turns out that they don't exist. Corrupt officials would take their salaries."

Sopko says similar "ghost" employees show up among teacher and police forces in Afghanistan. Even students. He pointed to a recent press report stating that while the former government of President Hamid Karzai received education funding for 11 million students, the current government says there were only six million students.

"We have to make certain the World Bank is doing its job in overseeing the money," Sopko says.

"Likewise, we have to see the UN is doing its job in overseeing the money we, our countries, give to them. And up until now we have not had a warm fuzzy feeling about that."

Listen to the full conversation at the top of this web post.

This segment was produced by The Current's Sujata Berry.