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babylonsister

(171,042 posts) Tue Aug 17, 2021, 09:31 AM Aug 2021

Internal Government Watchdog Slams Afghanistan War Effort as Inept and Reckless

Internal Government Watchdog Slams Afghanistan War Effort as Inept and Reckless
“The overall picture is bleak,” writes the inspector general.
AJ Vincens

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But the new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko—the official tasked by Congress with monitoring US government spending in Afghanistan—says there’s plenty of blame to go around. SIGAR issues an annual report on the state of the war in Afghanistan, and Sopko’s latest one, released at midnight on Monday night, not only delivers a blistering critique of US actions in Afghanistan but offers lessons for decision-makers for the next time the US government takes over a country and seeks to rebuild it.

“Twenty years later, much has improved, and much has not in Afghanistan,” Sopko writes. “If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that can sustain itself and post little threat to the US national security interests, the overall picture is bleak.”

Sopko notes improvements in life expectancy, GDP, and literacy since the US invasion. But he adds, “Despite these gains, the key question is whether they are commensurate with the U.S. investment or sustainable after a U.S. drawdown. In SIGAR’s analysis, they are neither.”

Sopko writes that the myriad problems and challenges his office and other oversight bodies identified over 13 years—spanning 427 audits, 191 special project reports, 52 quarterly reports, and 10 lessons-learned reports—is “staggering.” Stephen Hadley, a former national security adviser to former President George W. Bush, who launched the war in Afghanistan in October 2001, told Sopko that the US government doesn’t “have a post-conflict stabilization model that works. Every time we have one of these things, it is a pick-up game. I don’t have confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better.”

Sopko’s report goes in depth on seven lessons from the failed campaign: incoherent strategy, timelines divorced from reality and past experience, unsustainable institutions and projects, poorly trained and inexperienced staffing (American and otherwise), persistent lack of security, a failure to understand and apply cultural context, and the inability to accurately measure results while simultaneously declaring “success.”

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/08/internal-government-watchdog-slams-afghanistan-war-effort-as-inept-and-reckless/