Is it true that rare Italian goats were airlifted to Afghanistan?
Did Defense Department employees go to carpet tradeshows in Europe? How about on jewelry-related trips to India?

These might seem like unusual questions for the Pentagon, but lawmakers at a hearing Wednesday were trying to figure out how, exactly, a task force spent about $638 million on economic development in Afghanistan.
And more importantly, as Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., put it: “Was it worth it?”
The readiness subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee didn’t get many answers.
“That’s the big question, and it’s the right one,” was all Brian McKeon, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, could offer.
During two hours of questioning, he provided few specifics, allowing, “It’s a little early to say” whether the now-defunct Task Force for Business and Stability Operations had been successful.
The task force — a “very unusual animal” McKeon called it — was led by civilian business experts and aimed to develop the Afghan economy by jumpstarting the private sector.
The committee called the hearing after the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, published several damning reports about wasteful spending by the task force. It operated mostly outside the traditional bounds of government bureaucracy — and, SIGAR said, without much oversight.
John Sopko, the inspector general, testified that, so far, his agency has found that the Pentagon’s task force had a “scattershot approach to economic development” and there was no “credible evidence showing” that its efforts worked.
The task force was initially launched in Iraq before moving to Afghanistan in 2010. But even in Iraq, it was beset with problems, Sopko told the subcommittee. These issues were detailed in at least three official reports. The Pentagon and task force members should have learned from their experience in Iraq, he said, but they repeated the same mistakes.
His conclusions echo a yearlong ProPublica investigation into Afghanistan reconstruction that found a widespread failure to apply lessons from Iraq was in part to blame for upwards of $17 billion in waste.
McKeon put up little defense of the task force beyond disputing SIGAR’s estimated $43 million cost of a controversial natural gas station and claims that his office had been uncooperative.
He said he was “skeptical that the Department of Defense is the natural home” for economic development efforts.
Lawmakers agreed. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., the ranking minority member on the subcommittee, said it was a job better suited for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
McKeon said his office was struggling to come up with answers about the task force’s activities, because it shut down in March and most of its employees left the Defense Department — an argument the lawmakers found unpersuasive.
McKeon was unable to answer even the most basic questions about how all the money was spent.
The Pentagon, for the most part, had records for how money was spent by industry sector, but not necessarily for how support costs broke down for all the individual projects, he said. (Although, those goats? The task force spent $6 million bringing in nine blond ones from Italy and building a farm in an attempt to launch a thriving cashmere industry, according to SIGAR. This project hasn’t been evaluated yet for effectiveness.)
Questioning at the hearing didn’t get any easier from there, and, McKeon had, at times, an almost painful lack of information. Clearly uncomfortable and stuck with a limited script, he reiterated several times that he hadn’t been in charge of the task force, since he only took over the job in 2014.
Ayotte, who chairs the subcommittee, asked if there were metrics to judge the projects.
“I haven’t seen metrics,” McKeon said.
Then Ayotte asked why the task force eschewed living on a military base and opted instead for private villas and security that cost $150 million — a decision that ate up nearly 24