I want to thank you gentlemen for being here and your service to our country, and the meeting is called to order. I apologize for bag few minutes late. Forget we changed the time until 9 45 until 10 00 so ben could go to a meeting at 10 30. Can you for accommodating both meetings. Obviously afghanistan continues to be something that is important to our u. S. National interests. We brokered a government, if you will, the United States did in 2014, that create both a president and ceo office that has not been confirmed, if you will, through and continued on. We had concerns about that process taking place, and you wonder about the support that government has realtive to not being confirmed in the way that it normally would. I have a tremendous respect for president began ghann and a warm relationship with abdullah. Theyre have muddled through it together as one might expect with the type of arrangements that have been, quote, create from the outside. I was glad to see president obama com
Had their first president ial eselection the institutions being build in afghanistan are institutions even now nice santa institutions now. I talk about the state of play in the United States when our nation was 14 years old. We had not dreamed of giving women the right to vote and we have Serious Problems with collecting revenue and dealing with debt. Im very close if the work of the mec. Five ministries signed up in an agreement with Evaluation Committee they will examine their own ministries and publicly air what is found in in those examinations examinations publicly address what anied to do. The when we are were working with the hope to help them provide resources to develop the electric grids we identified 56 very specific victories to corruption in utills structure. Now, again, each utility was created in 2009 basically from scratch. The first 0 years required significant federal subsidies from the government of afghan. Its now in the black. They defense all 56 or whatever the s