President Barack Obama's experts on Afghanistan do not know how much the U.S. spends on the war each year.
The experts did not even know how many Americans lives were lost on the battlefield.
According to the Washington Times, this embarrassing lack of basic knowledge from State Department and Pentagon experts on Afghanistan was known at a House hearing.
The revelation was made at the House Foreign Affairs Committee on hearing about 'The Issue: Afghanistan and the transition to fewer U.S. troops post-2014'.
James F. Dobbins, State's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan; Donald Sampler, assistant to the administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides civilian foreign aid; and Michael Dumont, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia were few of the prominent members who attended the hearing.
Republican Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, quizzed the witnesses about 'How much the US was spending annually in Afghanistan? How much is the cost to the American taxpayer?
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He was met with stone silence from the witness panel. Dobbins gestured to the other witnesses for the answer. They, too, came up empty.
"Anybody know?" Rohrabacker asked, adding: "Nobody knows the total budget, what the US was spending in Afghanistan. It's a hearing on Afghanistan.
Dobbins said he was sorry that he had no answer about that.
Rohrabacker called the lack of an answer "disheartening."
When he askedthe witnesses about how many killed and wounded have we suffered in the last 12 months. Again, none of the three had an answer.
According to the Pentagon's fiscal 2013 budget, it is spending about 88 billion dollars this year to wage the war in Afghanistan. The State Department budget allocates 4.6 billion dollars in aide and operations.
The U.S. has lost the lives of 118 service members this year, according to the website icasualties.org, the report added.