In their latest damning audit of the Afghan War, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) found that Central Command (CENTCOM) has been routinely violating the deployment requirements for advisers to Afghanistan.
Under mandated deployment rules, anyone being sent to Afghanistan to serve as an adviser is meant to undergo adviser training first. Only about half of those surveyed received any training at all, and mostly not the right sorts of training.
SIGAR further found that the Pentagon doesn’t have any metrics to gauge what progress, if any, is being achieved in the costly advisory programs. They not only haven’t been tracking it, but don’t have the means to attempt to do so.
The Pentagon has spent $421 million on the advisory program’s contracts so far. SIGAR warned that with no goals set and no way to measure progress, it’s impossible to tell if anything was accomplished.
The lack of hard data collected by reliable bureaucrats makes it impossible for other bureaucrats to report on success or failure. The lack is not itself evidence of success or failure.
The lack of training for half those sent may be more or less important, depending on whether those in charge got the training, and how much in-country learning on the job is realistic in the teams as they are run.
These two story points thus don’t really tell us much.
However, we do know other things. We know the war is 17-years old and failing. We know the Afghan Army is falling apart. We know it has lost control of half the country. Thus, without data and without knowing real details of the advisers, we know the outcome of it all. Failure.
Get us out of there.
I’ve had several advisory assignments and they are mostly a waste of time. Local conditions far outweigh anything that strangers who can’t even speak the language can offer. The $421 going to contractors is sweet for them, that’s the main subject.