Afghanistan: What Went Wrong

"[The U.S. government was simply not equipped to undertake something this ambitious in such an uncompromising environment, no matter the budget."

"[Authorities] consistently underestimated the amount of time required to rebuild Afghanistan, created unrealistic timelines and expectations that prioritized spending quickly." 

"Prioritized their own political preferences for what they wanted reconstruction to look like, rather than what they could realistically achieve."

"Billions of reconstruction dollars were wasted as projects went unused or fell into disrepair."

"Police advisors watched American TV shows to learn about policing, civil affairs teams were mass-produced via PowerPoint presentations and every agency experienced annual lobotomies as staff constantly rotated out, leaving successors to start from scratch and make similar mistakes all over again."

"[The result] could be described as twenty one-year reconstruction efforts, rather than one twenty-year effort."

Lessons Learned, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report 

Murals are seen along the walls at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. | Paula Bronstein /Getty Images

 

In 2008 the U.S. created the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Its purpose was to ensure that officials in Washington were kept informed and up-to-date on the progress of the U.S. administration's intention at rebuilding the country that had been invaded seven years earlier by a U.S./NATO-led group of Western allies whose original purpose was to capture the leader of the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, whom the ruling Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) refused to hand over to the U.S. 

Identified as the man responsible for planning and helping to carry out the audaciously threatening and ultimately violently destructive attack on the New York World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and an aborted attack on the U.S.Capitol, Osama bin Laden was an honoured guest of the Taliban and of the Pakistan Interagency Intelligence Service aligned with the Taliban. The invading forces quickly dispersed both al Qaeda and the governing Taliban to the mountains bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And the international alliance of foreign troops spent the next twenty years attempting to quell the ever-recurring guerrilla raids by the Taliban intent on returning to power, while the U.S. focused for the first ten years on capturing Islamist terrorists and confining them to a special prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. While foreign diplomats and troops found themselves in Afghanistan a second purpose was worked out, to take the country from its theocratic primitive state into modernity, including gender equality and separation of church and state.

Building schools and medical clinics, educating Afghans on best governance practises, sending civil instructors in police action, prison practise, well digging, modernizing medical practices to permit women to be treated in once-men-only medical treatment centres, encouraging a free press, educating women to take their place in the workforce, persuading farmers to grow cash crops other than poppies, and instructing the Afghan military in modern warfare techniques and counter-measures to terrorism.

A Taliban fighter holds a machine gun in front of the main gate leading to the Afghan presidential palace on Monday in Kabul. The U.S. struggled to manage a chaotic evacuation after the Taliban rolled into the Afghan capital. Rahmat Gul/AP

These props were onerous to maintain while fighting an ongoing ferociously barbarian insurgency that just would not stop, that tested the efficacy of wildcat guerrilla techniques against the cumbersome weight of a traditional military apparatus. All the while the Taliban struck with suicide bombers, threatened farmers to grow poppies for the opium market, the proceeds going to fund the Taliban as they destroyed schools and health clinics and attacked foreign diplomatic missions and set IEDs to blow up foreign troops.

How efficient and effective were the Western powers in countering the Taliban, that the U.S. alone spent a whopping trillion of their treasury and lost well over two thousand American military personnel, other nations losing proportionately fewer military personnel, every one a rebuke to the West that it felt it would be capable of taming a primitive tribal compulsion to kill and terrorize to fulfill their intransigent view of force, guile and conquest. Rome's armoured phalanxes of seasoned legionnaires and siege machines in the end, failed against the savage hordes of uncivilized barbarians; an empire destroyed by its own ambition.

Taliban fighters patrol in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

SIGAR has been diligently over the years churning out reports in great detail on the outcome of spending hundreds of billions in Afghanistan -- to determine whether effort and the effect was succeeding in taming the unruly culture that historically relied on warlords to respect each others' territory, and corruption was endemic, common to each and every fraction of societal culture. The agency seemed well aware right off that the huge mission was awry, reflecting quarterly report conclusions.

The agency scrutinized public statements and dispatches from people in  Afghanistan that appeared to be ignored by the Washington administrative elite. The SIGAR output in annual updates emphasized that the great creaking machinery at work by the West in Afghanistan was failing to achieve any of its grand state-re-making drives to turn Afghanistan in an eastern version of a western democracy. In 2015 the $83 billion spent on turning the Afghan National Security Forces into a professional fighting force concluded with no data on training, recruitment or equipment.

Strangely, the report discovered $135 million to have vanished though its purpose was for rebuilding projects that had also suddenly vanished. The final report, "Lessons Learned" was released the very day that the Taliban entered Kabul and the government fell as its prime minister fled the country. The report outlined that those projcts that did see completion failed to be of use and quickly fell into disrepair. Afghans appeared not to have been consulted or included on projects they knew nothing of where the success of a project was weighed by whether its budget was fully spent.

 

Neither the State Department nor the Department of Defence was fully engaged in oversight, and neither had the resources and expertise for large-scale reconstruction missions with significant economic and governance components. "The U.S. government -- clumsily forced western technocratic models onto Afghan economic institutions; trained security forces in advanced weapon systems they could not understand, much less maintain; imposed formal rule of law on a country that addressed 80 to 90 percent of its disputes through informal meas and often struggled to understand or mitigate the cultural and social barriers to supporting women and girls."