America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion

"The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.

As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.

In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks.

As our own agency winds down and we prepare to release our final report this year, we raise a fundamental and too rarely asked question: Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise? For two decades, officials publicly asserted that continuing the mission in Afghanistan was essential to national interests, until, eventually, two presidents — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — concluded it was not.

The incoming Trump administration, Congress and the long-suffering American taxpayer must ask how this happened so that the United States can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other conflict zones.

We should start with what “success” in Afghanistan was ever supposed to mean. I believe many Americans who worked there over the years wanted to not only achieve important U.S. strategic interests — such as eliminating a haven for terrorists — but also secure a better future for the Afghan people.

But a perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.

They also aren’t good business for the contractors on which the U.S. mission relied to manage and support programs and projects. For contractors, claiming success, whether real or imaginary, was vital to obtaining future business. So spending became the measure of success. (The same, of course, is true in Washington, where unspent allocations are tantamount to failure, leading to budget cuts.) Accountability for how money was spent was poor. One general told us that he faced a challenge: How to spend the remaining $1 billion from his annual budget in just over a month? Returning the money was not an option. Another official we spoke to said he refused to cancel a multimillion-dollar building project that field commanders did not want, because the funding had to be spent. The building was never used.

As one former U.S. military adviser told my office, the entire system became a self-licking ice cream cone: More money was always being spent to justify previous spending. Old staff departed, new staff arrived with “better” ideas, and new iterations of the same old solutions were repeated, for years. At the same time, many of the problems the U.S. programs faced were simply beyond our control. The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban showed that the United States could not buy favorable Afghan perceptions of the country’s corrupt leaders and government, or of America’s intentions.

Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility.

Our final report will detail what many experts and senior government officials now say to us, with hindsight: that these entrenched, fundamental challenges doomed any real possibility of long-term success. Some argued that decisions made as early as 2002 — such as partnering with warlords and refusing to include the Taliban in discussions about Afghanistan’s future — set a course for inevitable failure. 

Others blamed poor interagency coordination, rampant Afghan corruption, ignorance of local culture and the distance between U.S. goals and Afghanistan’s realities.

There were key moments when American officials could have come clean. Before the United States began, in 2014, to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghans, a succession of U.S. generals and officials made optimistic claims that Afghan forces would be effective in fighting the Taliban, that corruption and human rights abuses were contained and that Afghan elections were democratic and fair — assessments that did not align with my agency’s reporting to Congress or basic reality. In 2013, one senior official even suggested that Afghanistan might prove to be the most successful reconstruction effort over the last quarter-century.

The fall of Kunduz in 2015 — which represented the first time since 2001 that the Taliban regained control of a major city — should have punctured the delusion that Afghan forces could hold their own. But building those forces had been the cornerstone of the U.S. reconstruction effort, whose success would pave the way for eventual U.S. withdrawal. The rosy narrative had to be maintained.

The reality was that Taliban fighters with Cold War-era rifles and dirt bikes often outperformed Afghan government forces with state-of-the-art equipment and backing from U.S. air power. The Taliban were religiously motivated to rid the country of foreign invaders and what they perceived as a puppet government installed by Washington. The members of the Afghan military — beset by low morale, chronic logistical problems and pervasive corruption — were often motivated solely by their salaries, though they, of course, also suffered hugely in the fight.

Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue. Just six days before the Afghan government collapsed, the Pentagon press secretary declared that Afghanistan had more than 300,000 soldiers and police officers, even though the special inspector general’s office had been warning for years that no one really knew how many soldiers and policemen were available, nor what their operational capabilities were. As early as 2015, I informed Congress that corrupt Afghan officials were listing “ghost” soldiers and police officers on rosters, and pocketing the salaries.

Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was — at times deliberately — hidden from Congress and the American public, including USAID-funded assessments that concluded Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance. Despite vigorous efforts by the U.S. bureaucracy to stop us, my office made such material public.

Special interests are a big part of the problem. President Dwight Eisenhower once warned of the growing influence of a “military-industrial complex.” Today, there are multiple complexes: development and humanitarian assistance, anti-corruption and transparency, protection for women and marginalized people, and many others. These are all good and noble causes, to be sure. But when it came to Afghanistan, organizations under these umbrellas, whether because of altruism or more selfish motivations, contributed to the overly optimistic assessments of the situation to keep the funds flowing. Self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.

That delusion continues today. According to data provided to my office by the Treasury Department, since 2021 the United States has funneled $3.3 billion to Afghanistan through public international organizations, mainly United Nations offices, for humanitarian purposes. Some of this money helps the Afghan people, and some goes to the Taliban. In response to a congressional request, my office reported this year that between the American withdrawal in August 2021 and this past May, U.S.-funded partners paid at least $10.9 million in taxes and fees to Taliban authorities. In July, we reported that two out of five State Department bureaus were unable to show that their contractors working in Afghanistan in 2022 had been vetted sufficiently to ensure their work was not benefiting terrorist organizations.

Today, most aid to Afghanistan and other war-torn countries flows through United Nations offices that my agency has identified as having weak oversight. If we are to continue providing taxpayer dollars to these organizations, it must be made conditional on U.S. oversight agencies having full access to their projects and records to make sure funding reaches the people it is intended to help.

In Afghanistan, the office of the special inspector general was often the only government agency reliably reporting on the situation on the ground, and we faced stiff opposition from officials in the Departments of Defense and State, USAID and the organizations that supported their programs. We were able to do our work only because Congress granted us the freedom to operate independently. Inspectors general for the military, State Department and USAID, however, do not enjoy such autonomy. If we are going to fix a broken system that puts bureaucrats and special interests ahead of taxpayers, the first step is to make all federal inspectors general as fully independent as my office has been.

Ultimately, however, if we do not address the incentives in our government that impede truth-telling, we will keep pursuing projects both at home and overseas that do not work, rewarding those who rationalize failure while reporting success, and burning untold billions of dollars. American taxpayers deserve better.

John F. Sopko has served as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012; he was appointed by President Barack Obama and served under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. He has been a prosecutor, congressional counsel, law partner and senior federal government adviser." [1]

1. America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion: Guest Essay. Sopko, John F.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jan 2, 2025.