Afghanistan Peace CampaignThe United States’ 20-year attempt to stand up democracy in Afghanistan descended into a cesspool of corruption and squandered as much as $29.2 billion in waste, fraud and abuse in pursuit of unrealistic goals, according to a government watchdog report released on Dec. 3.
The scathing report is the culmination of a 17-year investigation by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which Congress created in 2008 to investigate and oversee the United States’ occupation.
Its conclusion: The American occupation was a failure, doomed from the start by unrealistic and uninformed goals, and run through with corruption and abuse of taxpayer dollars.
Former President Joe Biden announced he would withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2021. More than a week before the final American troops left the country that August, the Taliban had already overtaken the capital, the Afghan president had fled and the government collapsed.
The failures of the occupation of Afghanistan resurfaced in recent weeks since a 29-year-old Afghan man who immigrated to the U.S. in the wake of the withdrawal was charged in the shooting of two National Guardsmen blocks from the White House, killing one. The suspect worked for years in Afghanistan with top-secret, CIA-led units known for their brutality and disregard for human rights, and showed signs of severe depression and psychological stress stemming from the experience.
The shooting prompted President Donald Trump to further crack down on refugees from Afghanistan and other countries seeking asylum in the U.S., a move criticized by advocates and some veterans who worked with Afghan allies.
US-backed government was a ‘white collar criminal enterprise’
Congress spent about $144.7 billion on Afghanistan reconstruction – much more than the United States spent on the Marshall Plan, the push to help Europe recuperate after World War II, including accounting for inflation, according to the report. That money, investigators found, stood up an Afghan government and military plagued by corruption and inefficiency, which collapsed within days when the U.S. withdrew its forces in 2021.
“The government we created over there… was essentially a white collar criminal enterprise,” Gene Aloise, SIGAR’s acting inspector general, told reporters at a Defense Writers Group briefing.
For the first 10 or 12 years of the occupation, the United States “just ignored corruption,” Aloise said. SIGAR investigators issued four reports on the issue, generating “window dressing improvements” but no significant change, he said.
Contractors, both Afghan and American, siphoned off billions of dollars in kickbacks and embezzled from U.S. funds, according to the report. An Afghan businessman paid $1.25 million in bribes to American servicemembers, stealing oil from the U.S. military to sell on the black market, in one case investigated by SIGAR. In another case, an American defense contractor and his wife evaded taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars in income from reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan.
SIGAR investigations resulted in 171 criminal convictions and recovered $167 billion in funds, according to the report. But some corrupt Afghan officials and contractors were off limits, Aloise said.
“We would identify guys who were bad guys who earned kickbacks, bribes, whatever, but they could have been working for the CIA or another agency, so we were told, ‘hands off,'” said Aloise.
The United States spent $38.6 billion on military and civilian infrastructure and weapons for the Afghan army, including 96,000 ground vehicles, 427,300 weapons, 162 aircraft and 17,400 pairs of night-vision goggles, the report found.
When the United States withdrew, about $7.1 billion of weapons were left behind. Facilities Americans built for the army that were not destroyed “can be assumed to be under Taliban control,” the report concluded.
In addition, the report found that the U.S. military worked with Afghan warlords accused of human rights atrocities. It maintained a “tacit acceptance of sexual violence by Afghan allies,” including “tolerating” the practice of “boy play,” or the widespread sexual abuse of young boys, according to the report.
Investigators were stonewalled by Biden administration
Throughout the inspector general’s investigations, Aloise said, investigators faced a “general lack of cooperation” from U.S. officials. It was worst during the Biden administration, which “just shut us down for a year,” he said.
“They wouldn’t talk to us, they wouldn’t work with our people,” he said.
In interviews with SIGAR, senior U.S. officials said they felt the effort was doomed years before the Afghan government’s 2021 collapse.
“Even in my early days, at least I had a sense that we were kidding ourselves,” William Wood, the ambassador to Afghanistan from 2007 to 2009, told investigators in the report.
In the 20-year war, more than 2,320 U.S. servicemembers, 69,000 Afghan military and police, and 46,000 civilians were killed, according to Brown University’s “Costs of War” project.
“The cost was much higher than just money,” Aloise said.
Link to SIGAR final report: https://www.sigar.mil/Portals/147/Files/Reports/sigar-final-report.pdf