August 18, 2021
SIGAR recently released its 11th lessons learned report, What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction. The report examines the past two decades of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, drawing on SIGAR’s 13 years of oversight work. In addition to acknowledging the mistakes and underestimations made by US which paved way for its failure in Afghanistan, the report covers the institutional flaws and shortcomings which led to a wastage of millions of US reconstruction dollars, as most of the reconstruction projects failed due to corruption and lack of sustainability of the implementing bodies. The report considered America’s inability to understand Afghan context, as the biggest reason for its failure because due to lack of understanding, the policies made and implemented always had defects. The key findings of the report are as follows:
— Twenty years later, much had improved, and much had not in Afghanistan. If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that could sustain itself and pose little threat to U.S. national security interests, the overall picture in Afghanistan is bleak.
— There is no doubt, however, that the lives of millions of Afghans had been improved by U.S. government interventions, including gains in life expectancy, the mortality of children under five, GDP per capita, and literacy rates, among others. Though these are gains, but they are neither commensurate with the U.S. investment nor are they expected to sustain after the U.S. drawdown.
— The U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for achieving success in Afghanistan, but no agency had the necessary mindset, expertise, and resources to develop and manage the strategy to rebuild Afghanistan.
— The bureaucratic disarray over who should and would ultimately own the strategy made it more likely that senior U.S. officials would struggle to address basic challenges in that strategy. The most fundamental of questions were continuously revisited, including who America’s enemies and allies were, and exactly what the U.S. government should try to accomplish. The ends were murky, and grew in number and complexity.
— The U.S. 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.
— U.S. officials prioritized their own political preferences for what Afghanistan’s reconstruction should look like, rather than what they could realistically achieve.
— Many of the institutions and infrastructure projects the United States built in Afghanistan were not sustainable. Over time, U.S. policies emphasized that all U.S. reconstruction projects must be sustainable, but Afghans often lacked the capacity to take responsibility for projects. In response, the U.S. government tried to help Afghan institutions build their capacity, but those institutions often could not keep up with U.S. demands for fast progress. Billions of U.S. reconstruction dollars were wasted in Afghanistan as projects went unused or fell into disrepair.
— Counterproductive civilian and military personnel policies and practices thwarted the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. The U.S. government’s inability to get the right people into the right jobs at the right times was one of the most significant failures of the mission. It is also one of the hardest to repair. U.S. personnel in Afghanistan were often unqualified and poorly trained, and those who were qualified were difficult to retain.
— Persistent insecurity severely undermined the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. The absence of violence was a critical precondition for everything U.S. officials tried to do in Afghanistan, the U.S. effort to rebuild the country took place while it was being torn apart.
— At several points over the last two decades, rising insecurity forced policymakers to accept problematic compromises in the development of the country’s official uniformed security forces.
— The U.S. government did not understand the Afghan context and therefore failed to tailor its efforts accordingly. Ignorance of prevailing social, cultural, and political contexts in Afghanistan has been a significant contributing factor to failures at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.
— U.S. officials rarely had even a mediocre understanding of the Afghan environment, much less how it was responding to U.S. interventions. Many mistakes were borne from a willful disregard for information that may have been available. In many cases, the U.S. government’s very purpose was to usher in an orderly revolution that would replace existing Afghan social systems with western or “modern” systems. If the intention was to build institutions from scratch, understanding and working within the country’s traditional systems was unnecessary.
— U.S. government agencies rarely conducted sufficient monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to understand the impact of their reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.
— There will likely be times in the future when insurgent control or influence over a particular area or population is deemed an imminent threat to U.S. interests. If the U.S. government does not prepare for that likelihood, it may once again try to build the necessary knowledge and capacity on the fly. As seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, doing so has proven difficult, costly, and prone to avoidable mistakes.
