Sobering lessons from Afghan reconstruction
Our efforts to rebuild Afghan security forces has not exactly gone as planned. A new inspector general’s report offers some crucial lessons learned and recommendations.
Newly released report highlights shortcomings of U.S. foreign policy throughout America’s longest war.
The war in Afghanistan has now dragged on for 16 years — the longest war in U.S. history, and about four times as long as the United States’ involvement in World War II.
Yet, the reconstruction effort has been plagued with tens of billions of dollars in waste and fragile local security forces, and still there is no end in sight, with President Donald Trump calling in August for further commitments and more troops in the troubled country.
It is against this backstop that John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, issued a damning report last week about the U.S. government’s failures to reconstruct the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, or ANDSF.
“The United States failed to understand the complexities and scale of the mission required to stand up and mentor security forces in a country suffering from 30 years of war, misrule, corruption and deep poverty,” the report found.
It also criticized the government’s attempt to implement a “one-size-fits-all approach” to building security forces, and concluded: “The U.S. government is not well organized to conduct large-scale security-sector assistance missions in post-conflict nations or in the developing world.”
“The U.S. government lacks a deployable police-development capability for high-threat environments, so we have trained over 100,000 Afghan police using U.S. Army aviators, infantry officers and civilian contractors,” the report continued.
“One U.S. officer watched TV shows like ‘COPS’ and ‘NCIS’ to learn what he should teach.”
Politics also played a role in the reconstruction’s shortcomings. “U.S. military plans for ANDSF readiness were created under politically constrained timelines, rather than based upon realistic assessments of Afghan readiness,” SIGAR noted, and “because these plans consistently underestimated the resilience of the Afghan insurgency and overestimated ANDSF capabilities, the ANDSF was ill-prepared to deal with deteriorating security after the drawdown of U.S. combat forces.”
A 70 percent Afghan illiteracy rate and the lack of technological skills made things even more difficult.
“Providing advanced Western weapons and management systems to a largely illiterate and uneducated force without appropriate training and infrastructure created long-term dependencies, required increased U.S. fiscal support and extended sustainability timelines,” the report stated.
Despite these stinging criticisms — and others — SIGAR Sopko remained “cautiously optimistic” during a speech last week in Washington, D.C.
“I believe resolving to do better, and absorbing even some of the lessons in SIGAR’s new report will offer a better way forward for the Afghan people, and, ultimately, a more successful way to hasten the end of America’s longest war.”
Not only should we hasten the end of our involvement in Afghanistan, we should use our experience as a cautionary tale to help prevent us from making similar errors of aggression and arrogance in the future.
If we can use these lessons to stave off future wars of choice and unnecessary death and suffering, then all of the ruined lives and wasted tax dollars will not have been completely in vain.
“The U.S. government is not well organized to conduct largescale security-sector assistance missions in post-conflict nations or in the developing world.”