One Big Thing Biden Got Right about Afghanistan
In a highly detailed report released Tuesday, Pentagon auditors concluded that the prospect of building a stable, peaceful Afghanistan was “elusive” from the start and that the U.S. government was never “equipped to undertake something this ambitious in such an uncompromising environment,” no matter how much money it spent.
The 122-page report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, tends to confirm President Joe Biden’s view that the mission was doomed to fail, regardless of how much longer U.S. troops were kept there. But the timing of the release is sheer coincidence. The report, titled What We Need to Learn: Lessons From Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction—based on interviews with more than 700 officials and a review of thousands of documents—has been in the works for many months and is the 12th “lessons learned” report conducted by SIGAR, which was created in 2008 to monitor waste, fraud, and abuse in the Afghanistan war.
The latest report is a critique not so much of the military operations but rather of the premise underlying the war: that U.S. troops could someday leave Afghanistan in a good enough place to thrive as a functioning state.
It concludes that the U.S. presence improved Afghanistan’s conditions in medical care, women’s health, and the environment, but not so much in any other aspect of life—and that even in the few successful realms, the “prospects for sustaining the progress that was made are dubious.”
The U.S. failed in every aspect of its strategy, and often for reasons that are endemic to the way that its bureaucracy functions or to the limits—social, political, and economic—of Afghanistan. The failures were so broad and deep that they raise “questions about the ability of U.S. government agencies to devise, implement, and evaluate reconstruction strategies” in any foreign country. “No single agency had the necessary mindset, expertise, and resources to develop and manage the strategy to rebuild Afghanistan,” the report adds—nor were multiple agencies able to divide powers and responsibilities with one another.
In what may be the most damning section of the report, the authors note that rebuilding Afghanistan “required a detailed understanding of the country’s social, economic, and political dynamics”—yet U.S. policymakers in Washington and field workers on the ground “were consistently operating in the dark.”