San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
For 13 years, Afghanistan alarms blared
Congress’ watchdog on Afghanistan sounded alarms about the war for 13 years, but they weren’t loud enough.
Usually, when alarms sound, bad things are happening — fire, flood, crime, crash or incoming rockets. The noise says: Do something now.
But nobody listened to John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, or SIGAR, since 2012. He presented report after report, the equivalent of sirens and flashing lights, that were conveniently ignored.
As our country marks the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that plunged us into the global war on terrorism, SIGAR joins the ranks of history’s unheard whistleblowers.
Sopko was neither crying wolf nor was he being quiet about his findings about the 20-year endeavor that claimed 2,352 American lives, wounded more than 20,000 and cost, according to the Associated Press, $145 billion in rebuilding efforts, as well as $837 billion to fight.
Since 2008, the SIGAR office produced 680 audits, reports, lessons learned and criminal investigations that resulted in 160 convictions and $3.8 billion in savings for U.S. taxpayers. The organization’s website has dozens of pages of reports, news releases, speeches, testimony, videos and podcasts.
Over the years, the SIGAR highlighted rampant corruption throughout the Afghan government and security forces, contractors and the U.S. military. It conducted 760 interviews and scoured thousands of documents to uncover widespread fraud, bribes, theft and poor oversight.
Last month, the day after Kabul fell, the SIGAR released its latest report: What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction. The 140-page report rails against the U.S. government’s shifting strategy, unrealistic timelines, unsustainable projects, staffing issues, problems with rising insecurity, lack of understanding of Afghan context, and poor project monitoring and evaluation.
The report “raises critical questions about the U.S. government’s ability to carry out reconstruction efforts on the scale seen in Afghanistan.” And it offers a list of reasons the U.S. should develop its country-reconstruction capabilities.
But if you boil down the rhetoric, the reasons translate into warnings: Such efforts are expensive ($6.4 trillion for war costs across Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan since 2001) and poorly executed.
And yet poor execution didn’t prevent reconstruction efforts. The result: “a continuous U.S. government endeavor,” or a quagmire. And then there is mission creep: “large reconstruction campaigns usually start small, so it would not be hard for the U.S. government to slip down this slope again.”
The report notes the prospect of nation building was doomed: “The U.S. government has been often overwhelmed by the magnitude of rebuilding a country that, at the time of the U.S. invasion, had already seen two decades of Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban brutality.”
Despite the candid reports, in 2019, SIGAR veered into the limelight in the Washington Post investigation “The Afghanistan Papers,” by Craig Whitlock. The series argues SIGAR held back the most scathing comments from senior officials in its reports.
In a 2019 letter to the editor, Sopko called the allegations “absurd” and noted “SIGAR routinely speaks truth to power and exposes mismanagement of reconstruction programs, often provoking the ire of generals, ambassadors and other high-ranking officials.”
Regardless, Whitlock turned the series into a book by the same name, and the timing is a marketer’s dream — it hit shelves Aug. 31, the deadline for America to leave Afghanistan.
While no bureaucratic watchdog is perfect, we should be thankful for the hard-won truths SIGAR brought to light. Like so many, SIGAR staff put themselves at risk in Afghanistan throughout the war.
And what’s is the ultimate lesson?
Listen and take action when the alarms are ringing. It’s far easier to criticize a botched and tragic withdrawal than learn from 20 years of failure.