Watchdog reveals how the US war in Afghanistan became a failure

U.S. failure in Afghanistan was driven by a system that rewarded generals, diplomats, contractors, and policymakers who reported successes on the ground rather than the grim reality of a bloody insurgency, according to the watchdog who spent 12 years observing the war unravel. The result, said one U.S. military adviser, was that the system ‘became a self-licking ice cream cone’ as more money was committed to justify the billions already spent.

John Sopko, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, will deliver his final report later this year. It will reveal that experts and government officials now believe that decisions made as far back as 2002 meant the war was doomed to fail. And it will highlight how American ignorance of Afghan culture, the impact of local corruption, plus weak cooperation between U.S. agencies all contributed to a war effort that left the country back in Taliban hands at a cost of more than 2,400 American lives and $2 trillion.

Yet, writes Sopko in a New York Times opinion piece published Thursday, you wouldn’t know it from the optimistic reports coming from the officers and officials in charge at the time. ‘But a perverse incentive drove our system,’ he writes. ‘To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not.

‘Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.’ The U.S. war in Afghanistan ended with humiliation in August 2021. Taliban fighters had made rapid advances ever since President Joe Biden announced he was bringing home American troops in April of that year, and they quickly swept into the capital Kabul dashing Washington’s hopes that the Afghan government could survive without foreign forces.

Thousands of Afghans and foreign civilians flocked to the capital’s airport seeking safe passage as U.S. diplomats hurriedly abandoned their embassy. Tragedy struck when a [kamikaze] bomber killed 13 American personnel amid the chaos at the airport.

The confused exit cast a black cloud over Biden’s first year in office, undermining his reputation as a foreign policy expert and a safe pair of hands after Donald Trump’s first term. Those final weeks showed the futility of U.S. claims that things were moving in the right direction, says Sopko.

‘The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban showed that the United States could not buy favorable Afghan perceptions of the country’s corrupt leaders and government, or of America’s intentions,’ he writes. ‘Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility.’ Instead, he pointed to occasions when official spokesmen offered misleading information.

He cited the Pentagon official who said just before the collapse that the Kabul government had more than 300,000 soldiers and police officers, despite evidence of thousands of ‘ghost’ personnel who existed only on paper so that bosses could collect extra salaries. ‘Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was — at times deliberately — hidden from Congress and the American public, including USAID-funded assessments that concluded Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance,’ he writes. ‘Despite vigorous efforts by the U.S. bureaucracy to stop us, my office made such material public.’

He describes how one general said his biggest problem was how to spend the remaining $1 billion from his annual budget in a little over a month, amid a culture that measured spending as the best metric of success. ‘Another official we spoke to said he refused to cancel a multimillion-dollar building project that field commanders did not want, because the funding had to be spent,’ writes Sopko. ‘The building was never used.’ Meanwhile, the spending continues. Sopko said much was routed that United Nations agencies that lacked transparency and proper oversight. And last year, his office reported that since the withdrawal, U.S.-funded partners paid at least $10.9 million in taxes and fees to Taliban authorities.

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