Global leaders have spent these last critical weeks asking themselves: “What went wrong in Afghanistan?” They’d be better off asking: “What did we do wrong in Afghanistan?”
To get a sense of how badly the foreign intervention went off-course, you could do worse than to scroll through the Twitter feed of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as Sigar. This group, created by Congress, oversaw the nearly $145 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction programs in the country.
In the hours leading up to the Aug. 31 deadline for the U.S. troop withdrawal, Sigar dropped some truth bombs. Like this: “U.S. prioritized tangible projects on which money could be spent and success claimed more quickly, over less tangible types of programming with potential to be more enduring, such as capacity building. This trend would last more than a decade.”
And this: “Rather than reform and improve, #Afghan institutions and powerbrokers found ways to co-opt U.S. funds for their own purposes, which only worsened problems U.S. programs meant to address.” When the U.S. government “refused opportunities to reconcile with defeated Taliban and declined to implement an inclusive, post-conflict peace process, the Taliban soon rebuilt itself as a powerful insurgency.”
You get the picture. The fact that this official oversight group is now tweeting publicly what it’s clearly been telling U.S. officials for years reflects the deep frustration at the failure of successive administrations to heed its warnings. Call it hubris, call it American imperialism at its worst, the mission’s implosion was the ultimate outcome. And the only winner? The U.S. military-industrial complex – the giant defense industry and the contractors who feed off it.