What the US Didn’t Learn in Afghanistan, According to the Government’s Own Inspector General

by Megan Rose | ProPublica

John Sopko, the special inspector general since 2012, has long chronicled the government’s miscalculations. In his latest lacerating assessment, he concluded that “the U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve.” The U.S. effort was clumsy and ignorant, the report says, calling out the hubris of a superpower thinking it could reshape a country it didn’t understand by tossing gobs of money around.

ProPublica also examined some of the same issues along the way in a series called “GI Dough.” In 2015, we decided to add up the waste and did an extensive analysis of the causes behind it. Our reporting found at least $17 billion in likely wasted taxpayer dollars at the time. (And that was just out of the small percentage of total spending SIGAR had scrutinized at that point.) To help put those squandered funds into context, we created a game readers could play to see what the money could have bought at home.

The SIGAR reports form a penetrating body of real-time analysis that reveals little appetite to change course and whose warnings seem to have gone unheeded. Adequately answering the questions SIGAR raised in each report would have forced a wholesale reexamination of the U.S. presence in the country. That never happened.

Then there were the military generals and other top officials described in The Washington Post’s revelatory “Afghanistan Papers” in 2019, who were far more interested in spinning a tale of near victory to the public. In addition to assurances that the insurgency was on its heels, officials often trotted out statistics about lower infant mortality rates, increased life expectancy and vastly improved educational opportunities for girls. SIGAR acknowledged such “bright spots” in this week’s report, but concluded that those achievements were not worth the sizable investment and, more important, aren’t sustainable without a continued U.S. presence. In other words: It was all temporary.

SIGAR found that there was a persistent, troubling disconnect between what U.S. officials wanted to be true and what was actually happening. “By spending money faster than it could be accounted for, the U.S. government ultimately achieved the opposite of what it intended: it fueled corruption, delegitimized the Afghan government, and increased insecurity,” the report says. But officials pressed on with “reckless compromises,” including unrealistic timelines for progress, and “simply found new ways to ignore conditions on the ground.”

Diplomatic agencies more suited to the task of nation building were muscled aside by the Pentagon, which was better resourced but lacked the requisite expertise. The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, SIGAR reported, didn’t have enough staff to “meaningfully perform that role.”

“If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that can sustain itself and pose little threat to U.S. national security interests,” the report says, “the overall picture is bleak.”

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