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Days after Taliban forces took control of Afghanistan, the US government’s watchdog for the reconstruction effort released a report recapping the “many failures” of the past two decades.
A report released Tuesday by the Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (SIGAR), which examined US progress – or lack thereof – in the region since 2008 identified fundamental problems with the work being done on the ground.
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“Twenty years later, a lot has improved, and not a lot,” the report read. “If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country capable of sustaining itself and posing little threat to the national security interests of the United States, the bigger picture is grim.”
Almost 20 years since US forces entered Afghanistan in response to the Taliban who harbor the mastermind of 9/11 Osama bin Laden, the United States has spent nearly $ 1,000 billion on war and reconstruction efforts.
“When you look at how much we spent and what we got for it, it’s mind-boggling,” a former senior defense ministry official told SIGAR.
The report noted that despite the planned withdrawal, the Biden administration had requested more than $ 3 billion in additional funds for the coming year to go to reconstruction. Fox News asked the White House what the plan was for that money and if its plans had changed now that the Taliban had regained control, but did not immediately respond.
The losses were far from being purely financial. Since 2001, 2,443 American soldiers have been killed in addition to 1,144 Allied soldiers, at least 66,000 Afghan soldiers and over 48,000 Afghan civilians.
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“The extraordinary costs were intended to serve a purpose, although the definition of that objective has evolved over time,” the SIGAR report said. Shifting goals included defeating Al Qaeda, paralyzing the Taliban, ensuring other terrorist groups could not establish themselves in Afghanistan, and then assisting in the establishment of a new Afghan government. .
This latter part proved too difficult, as SIGAR said its analysis “revealed a troubled reconstruction effort which has yielded some success but has also been marked by too many failures.”
Among the “bright spots”, Special Inspector General John Sopko noted in a letter attached to the report that life expectancy in the country has increased, as have literacy rates and GDP per capita, while infant mortality rates have fallen. Whether or not these improvements will continue is another story.
“Although there have been several areas for improvement, including in the areas of health care, maternal health and education, progress has been elusive and the prospects for sustaining such progress are questionable,” indicates the report. “The US government has often been overwhelmed by the scale of the reconstruction of a country which, by the time of the US invasion, had already experienced two decades of Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban brutality.”
The difficulties with the scale of the reconstruction process were only exacerbated by flaws in the way the United States set goals focused on short-term gains at the expense of the long-term, creating an “anti-cycle”. -productive ”which resulted in new problems with new solutions.
“When none of this worked, the US government developed another short-term goal: to withdraw all troops almost immediately, even if doing so risked depriving the ongoing reconstruction mission of the personnel needed to oversee the aid. to safety, ”the report said.
Another problem was the lack of continuity in the reconstruction effort, as military and civilian personnel often served short periods of service. As a result, the report says: “[b]By the time they found their bearings and formed an important relationship, they began to prepare to leave. “
The report also detailed how the United States has failed to understand the “social landscapes” of the region, including within the Afghan National Defense and Security Force.
“For example, by providing material support and equipment to certain units within the ANDSF without considering the ethnic dynamics between units, the United States could be seen as biased in favor of one ethnic group or d ‘one faction at the expense of another,’ the report says. . “A 2017 SIGAR report on the development of the ANDSF underscored this point, finding that the United States” largely ignored “intra-force political dynamics, which led to” major social and political imbalances “in the within the ANDSF. “
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Another problem that the US government did not appreciate was the degree of corruption that surrounded it.
“The United States has failed to capture the extent to which American largesse has been captured by Afghan elites, even in the face of strong evidence that this is happening,” the report said, noting how “US programs have empowered malicious actors and exacerbated pre-existing inequalities, undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan government they were meant to strengthen. ”
SIGAR said that “for too long the US government has believed that it is creating from scratch a transparent and ruled Afghan government in a way that will benefit the public.”
In addition, a US official told SIGAR “that his team was ‘played by the Afghans all the time’. who were paid to refrain from attacking convoys and project sites.
The report raised issues and questions for policymakers to consider moving forward, both with respect to Afghanistan and other countries where the United States operates, making it clear that it Much work remains to be done when it comes to dealing with the consequences of war.
“[A]After 13 years of surveillance, the cumulative list of systemic challenges identified by SIGAR and other oversight bodies is astounding, ”the report says.
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Former national security adviser Stephen Hadley was pessimistic about the possibility of improvement in the future.
“We just don’t have a working post-conflict stabilization model,” he told SIGAR. “Anytime we have any of these things it’s a repeat game. I don’t trust that if we did it again we’d do better.”
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