The US government watchdog for Afghanistan released its final lessons learned report on Tuesday that said a “victorious US withdrawal” was impossible due to unrealistic and shortsighted goals set by Washington.
Since its inception in 2008, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has documented the corruption and waste involved in Washington’s failed nation-building project in Afghanistan. The report released Tuesday says that US officials never took seriously what it would take to establish a sustainable government in Afghanistan.
The report reads: “The US government consistently underestimated the amount of time required to rebuild Afghanistan, and created unrealistic timelines and expectations that prioritized spending quickly. These choices increased corruption and reduced the effectiveness of programs.”
SIGAR said Washington’s view on the project led to “short-term solutions,” such as the surge of troops that started in 2009 during the Obama administration. The report said the US created unrealistic timelines for transforming areas the US captured from the Taliban.
“US officials created explicit timelines in the mistaken belief that a decision in Washington could transform the calculus of complex Afghan institutions, powerbrokers, and communities contested by the Taliban,” the report said. Ultimately, the timelines created “perverse incentives to spend quickly and focus on short-term, unsustainable goals that could not create the conditions to allow a victorious US withdrawal.”
Nothing demonstrated the futility of the US’s nation-building projected better than the speed at which the Taliban took over Afghanistan and how quickly the Afghan military rolled over.
The SIGAR report reads: “When the United States began withdrawing its final forces from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the Taliban took the opportunity to seize more than a quarter of the country in a matter of weeks, as Afghan security forces abandoned their posts or were overrun. Thus, what Ambassador Nicholas Burns observed about the war’s early years has remained true ever since: The Afghan government ‘cannot survive without us.'”
Nicolas Burns served as George W. Bush’s NATO ambassador during the early years of the war. He is one of many US government officials that SIGAR has interviewed over the years. In December 2019, The Washington Post published a cache of SIGAR interviews in a report known as the Afghanistan Papers. The devastating release revealed what most critics of the war already knew: The US government knew it was losing the war and lied about it.
SIGAR chief John Sopko told NPR that he hopes the latest report will teach the US not to do something like this again. “There’s a tendency after failures like this or Vietnam to sweep it under the rug and say, we’re never going to do it again. Well, after Vietnam, we eliminated a lot of the capabilities to carry out counterinsurgencies and to try to develop countries. And guess what? We did do it again. We did it in Iraq. We did it in Afghanistan. So what we’re trying to tell people with this report is, let’s try to learn from the 20 years so we don’t do something this bad … again,” he said.
President Biden is under fire for how the withdrawal was played out. The US is still evacuating personnel and Afghan allies from the Kabul airport. But as the SIGAR report says, what the US would view as a “victorious” withdrawal was impossible. And a “victorious” withdrawal would involve the US funding the Afghan military for years to come, fueling a brutal proxy war.
https://www.indianpunchline.com/reflections-on-events-in-afghanistan/
Collapse of the Afghan Army.
Victorious Withdrawal…. That phrase only comes out of a dumb person…!
Meh, the problem wasn’t any alleged fixation on “short term solutions;” we were there for twenty years! The problem was that the goal was impossible under any “timeline” (shy of eternity!): short term, medium term or long term. It seems to the me the report writers are operating under a presupposition that SOME set of actions, somehow, WOULD have been successful, and that the failure was to identify and implement those actions. Rather than that, as it really was, the failure was in setting an impossible goal in the first place.
Reminds me of the revisionism with respect to Vietnam and the CAP program. Sure, while a group of US Marines are stationed in a village, the enemy is less likely to infliltrate that village and use it as a staging area for further actions and gains. But how long are the Marines going to stay there? I literally have seen complaints that the problem was the “short sitedness” of the higher ups, and, if they had just made it clear to the villagers that that Marines were NEVER going to leave, and followed through on that, all would have been well!
The lesson for today, and “20 years from now,” is not that a set of tactical or even strategic “counterinsurgency” ideas must be learned, preserved and consulted. But that counterinsurgency, by its nature, is a bad business for the USA to be in. Operationally, yes, but also morally. When the USA has to engage in direct counterinsurgency in one of its client states, that almost certainly means that the US client government is garbage. People don’t choose to fight guerillas wars, and most definitely against armed-to-the-teeth US clients, on a whim. And all the more so against the US military itself. If “our” client’s government’s existence provokes a guerilla war, AND our client can’t defeat that guerilla force with its own military, even with our “aid,” “advisors,” “trainers,” “contractors,” “intelligence,” and our economic and diplomatic support, that is proof positive that the client government has minimal to no political support within its own country. And, therefore, any US attempt to prop it up directly, with our own armed forces, is, besides being a Fool’s Errand, morally bankrupt as well.
If you have unlimited money for unlimited time, and unlimited freedom to kill and blow up things, it might seem that any “goal” can be called possible. But some things can’t be accomplished by killing and blowing things up, no matter how much of it you do.
They make a desert and they call it peace.
Why is it so hard to get that the war was the victory? That the point was not ever really a better, more liberal Afghanistan … if such a thing can be imagined and had been our desire, we would have let the communists win. The point was rather what it always is with these rackets: keep the gravy train of jobs, contracts, and status enhancement going as long as possible. They got 20 years out of it, which is quite a victory.
To be a “wartime President” and to demonstrate we will retaliate for 9/11. Thomas Friedman of the NYT went on TV and screamed “suck on this” gun barrel was the message we should be sending; that is what Dubya did. That is all he did. Then the usual suspects made money off it.
Indeed. There are various “flavors” of this, depending on the president and the time. Obama used different language than W and he different from his dad.
But the overriding issue has been the same since the Banana Wars of the early 20th century: as Smedley Butler put it, war is a racket. It makes money and provides useful employment for all the “right” people. And the only cost is dead and injured soldiers and foreigners, who the right people don’t care for at all. So everyone (who matters) is happy.
Maybe the victory in Afghanistan will bring to the West’s attention what Vietnam couldn’t do. Unlike SE Asia [IndoChina] which fell under the French/ Dutch colonial Empires, became a collection of successful economies, the Subcontinent [S Asia] was almost the exclusive domain of the British Empire and remained a collection of failed economies into the 21st century.
For the US to wage a 20-year war with one of the most backward of South Asia’s nations and lose highlights the crippling shortcomings of America in both the war and the loss.
America might as well have waged a similar war with some other South Asian nation like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or Pakistan and lost. Bangladesh has a vast population and by that a large military. Pakistan is a nuclear power, and Sri Lanka is one of the most strategically positioned nations in the world and by that has powerful allies .
It would have saved America some dignity to lose to one these nations. Maybe for an American victory in the subcontinent it would be wiser to wage a war with Bhutan or the Maldives and keep it short.
If fewer people are suffering and getting killed that just might be worth the ridicule. Maybe Mister Biden has seen the light.
It is unrealistic to pretend there were “goals.”
It was war for the sake of war.
It had an ever-changing list of excuses, and no attempt to defend them. They just changed them rather than any discussion.
Dubya and Cheney decided “war” as a show to the American public of retaliation for 9/11, rather than some actual goal, and from there it never got better.
The opium kept flowing and the 2000-2001 ban on poppy cultivation was ended with the end of the first Taliban… government.
That was the only goal. Plans beyond that were just window dressing.
Even the Mackinderan eternal war against Russia seemed to take the back seat to the heroin trade. Certainly a pretext behind closed doors, but drug profits were all anyone cared about.
This is not over until its over. August 31 is the supposed hard deadline for evacuations, but they can’t make that if asylum to the West keeps being hyped.
The Afghan ‘humanitarian crisis’ promoted especially by Europe might see U.S. troops stay on at Kabul International Airport. When the U.S. lost Syria, they invaded and holed up in Al Tanf.
Kabul Airport may be indefensible, but not if the Taliban can be discouraged from attacking. Does anyone really think the neocon elites care about Afghan lives when they offer Afghans refugee asylum?
Every desperate Afghani within thirty miles of Kabul airport is going to head there hoping to win the migrant jackpot.
I have no idea why the US media keeps referring to Afghanistan as “the graveyard of Empires” for no Empire died in Afghanistan or due to wars in Afghanistan. Not the Achaemenid, Roman, Persian, Chinese or Colonial Empires. Certainly not the Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim Empires though Afghanistan was a part of those empires including the Ashokan, Kushan, Mauryan, Mughal and the British Colonial Empire. The only ones that come to mind are the Soviet Union…and America neither one of them are considered Empires in the classical sense of having an Emperor and an Empire.
Maybe it was Alexander the Great from Macedonia but he never died in Afghanistan or created an empire though the Hellenistic legacy is claimed to have the reach of an Empire. If anything Afghanistan was part of the Gandharan school of Buddhism, a result of Hellenism, which gave that faith the first image of the Buddha and a positive force by that