An incoherent strategy doomed the 20-year US mission in Afghanistan, watchdog says as US withdraws

By Oren Liebermann and Ellie Kaufman, CNN

An incoherent strategy to rebuild Afghanistan, flush with resources but lacking cohesive leadership and a well-defined mission, doomed the 20-year US reconstruction effort that saw American taxpayers pour $145 billion into projects that were often unsustainable, corrupt, and forced through on unrealistic timelines.

The conclusions from the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction offer a scathing criticism of the US mission in Afghanistan just as the Biden administration is struggling to evacuate Americans and Afghans from the Kabul airport in a chaotic rush to the exits.

The report, titled “What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction,” points to how much work remains. “After 13 years of oversight, the cumulative list of systemic challenges SIGAR and other oversight bodies have identified is staggering,” it said.

The report, the 11th issued by SIGAR on lessons learned, outlines how the US poured resources and lives into an impossible and ill-defined mission. While it notes bright spots, including lower child mortality rates, increases in per capita GDP, and increased literacy rates, the report is a litany of incompetence, graft, obfuscation and wishful thinking.

It points to the role US officials played in misunderstanding and sometimes obscuring conditions on the ground, ignoring them when they did not fit a narrative of progress.

“As security deteriorated and demands on donors increased, so did pressure to demonstrate progress,” SIGAR said. “U.S. officials created explicit timelines in the mistaken belief that a decision in Washington could transform the calculus of complex Afghan institutions, powerbrokers, and communities contested by the Taliban.”

“Rather than reform and improve, Afghan institutions and powerbrokers found ways to co-opt the funds for their own purposes, which only worsened the problems these programs were meant to address,” SIGAR said. “When U.S. officials eventually recognized this dynamic, they simply found new ways to ignore conditions on the ground.”

Conditions worsening for years

Even as life expectancy jumped by 10 years to 65 years of age, the child mortality rate plummeted by more than 50%, and the Afghan GDP nearly doubled, other trends steadily moved in the wrong direction, including the country’s security.

The Taliban controlled more territory than at any point in the last 20 years, was at its strongest in two decades, and was carrying out an ongoing campaign against Afghan security forces. Over the last year, the Afghan military came under an average of 80 to 120 attacks per day, even as the Taliban refrained from targeting US forces.

As a result, fear for personal safety “has never been higher.”

At the same time, the cultivation of poppy used to make the drugs whose sale partially funds the Taliban has steadily increased, even as the US spent billions to reverse it.

“Unsurprisingly, Afghanistan continues to be ranked among the most corrupt countries in the world,” SIGAR wrote.

US officials in charge of the reconstruction effort often didn’t understand Afghanistan and empowered the wrong people, driving corruption, the report found.

US officials “often empowered powerbrokers who preyed on the population or diverted US assistance away from its intended recipients to enrich and empower themselves and their allies,” SIGAR said. “Lack of knowledge at the local level meant projects intended to mitigate conflict often exacerbated it, and even inadvertently funded insurgents.”

Because of pervasive institutional corruption, the US circumvented government channels in providing assistance, but the approach left Afghan officials without the experience they needed to oversee their own programs. Even when programs achieved short-term success, the lack of competent oversight meant the programs could not last because the Afghans in charge were “poorly equipped, trained, or motivated.”

And the US and its allies on the ground never made the country secure enough to truly enable its reconstruction efforts.

“The absence of violence was a critical precondition for everything U.S. officials tried to do in Afghanistan — yet the U.S. effort to rebuild the country took place while it was being torn apart,” SIGAR said.

The creation of a capable and well-equipped Afghan military and police force was central to the success of the US mission, and it was a key component of an Afghan government capable of sustaining itself and running the country.

But the US was never able to establish such a cohesive force, despite spending $83 billion to train and equip the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces over 20 years.

The Afghan military was replacing a quarter of its force annually, SIGAR wrote, while forces received insufficient training. Instead of contributing to the country’s security, these poorly trained forces “actually contribute to insecurity.”

The government itself, created through the elections with the assistance of the US, never found the legitimacy it needed to garner the support of the population.

“Poor security has critically undermined the electoral process and the legitimacy of its elected officials,” the report said.

US efforts often counterproductive

The US often found itself taking counterproductive actions in pursuit of “impractical or conceptually incoherent goals,” SIGAR wrote

Even as it tried to root out corruption, the US poured billions of dollars into the country to try to jumpstart the economy, fueling the very graft it sought to eliminate. It tried to empower the Afghan military, but only with weapons and equipment it felt that the Afghans could sustain, some of which has now fallen into Taliban hands. The US also attempted to build a lasting electoral process and democratic tradition from scratch, while at the same time trying to respect Afghan sovereignty.

If there was a middle ground on these spectrums, “US officials were seldom able to find it.”

And yet the report offers a warning that US politicians and officials are unlikely to draw the necessary lessons from Afghanistan.

Despite “widespread recognition” that reconstruction missions in warzones “usually go poorly,” the report warns that large reconstruction efforts start small, and the US could “slip down this slope again somewhere else and for the outcome to be similar to that of Afghanistan.”

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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