Lessons Learned from Afghanistan Discussed at Quincy Institute
By Elaine Pasquini

Washington: On July 27, the Quincy Institute convened a panel, moderated by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, editorial director of QI’s online magazine Responsible Statecraft, to discuss lessons learned from the United States’ 20-year occupation of Afghanistan and whether there was proper oversight of the billions of US dollars spent on reconstruction of the country.

According to John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the US has poured more than $146 billion into Afghanistan’s reconstruction since 2002, but Washington has spent more money in Ukraine in one year than it spent in Afghanistan in 12 years. In addition, by the end of 2023, the US will have spent more money in Ukraine than it did to implement the entire Marshall Plan after World War II. “I just want to make sure it’s done correctly and that there is oversight,” Sopko said in opening remarks.

How the US spent money in Afghanistan is similar to how Washington is now spending money in Ukraine, he continued. “It’s not just humanitarian…or rebuilding things, it’s also a train, advise and assist mission which was one of the biggest bulks of the Afghan expenditure and that’s what we’re doing in Ukraine: training, advising and assisting the host government’s military.”

Sopko related that his agency has issued 12 lessons learned reports and is now looking at warning lights and anything going on that Congress should know about with respect to Ukraine. “We have highlighted a number of actions that should be considered based upon our 12 years of experience in Afghanistan,” he noted. These include 140 recommendations to various agencies, as well as 27 actions recommended that the administration take moving forward.

One key lesson his group identified, which was a serious problem in Afghanistan, was the failure to develop a workable and coherent strategy. “And without a strategy you’re running into problems because you don’t know where you’re actually going,” he said.

In addition, a coordinated approach to reconstruction in a country when other countries and international donors are involved is needed, which was not the case in Afghanistan, Sopko acknowledged. “Nobody was really in charge.”

It is also important to be mindful of the amount of money being given to assist a country. In Afghanistan, the US was “usually spending $375 million per month for security assistance,” Sopko said. In contrast, in Ukraine “we are spending $2.5 billion per month on security assistance.”

“If you’re spending that amount of money you have to realize there are unanticipated consequences,” Sopko pointed out. “You can just overload the host government. And with that amount of money coming in you know some of it is going to be stolen and that leads… to the problem of corruption. In Afghanistan, corruption was the existential threat. It wasn’t the Taliban; it was corruption that did us in.”

Sopko went on to stress the importance of monitoring and evaluating not just on what is purchased or spent on security, but what was the end result of spending all of that money. This was a “serious problem” in Afghanistan, he said. “The US government…has a horrible record on effective monitoring and evaluation.”

Today, Sopko is still overseeing the $8 billion in Afghan aid and reconstruction. For a time, the White House, Congress and federal agencies hindered his work, he said. But the situation has improved because of the support of Congress for his “mission and agency.”

Danielle Brian, executive director and president of the Project of Government Oversight, said it’s essential when there is a surge of funding to a country to have a commensurate surge in resources to conduct the necessary oversight. She criticized the US Department of Defense for not having proper systems in place to track assets, claiming the DOD cannot identify and locate two-thirds of their assets.

Perhaps the most salient lesson learned from Afghanistan, Brian stated, is that Congress and the president need to pay attention to the red flags raised by inspector generals (IGs) monitoring the US’s overseas military missions. “If they had listened to John Sopko, they would not only have known they should have withdrawn from Afghanistan years earlier, but they also would not have been surprised by the speed of the collapse after our withdrawal,” she argued.

The second lesson is when DOD and State start withholding information from an IG and/or Congress “it likely means there is embarrassing news they would rather not share,” she added.

“I think everyone can see in plain daylight how valuable having the Special Inspector General was for Afghanistan,” Brian said. His team – the only agency since 2012 with a dedicated staff looking at lessons learned – were all “giving us lessons and telling truths that were not coming from agency IGs.”   

Andrew Bacevich, co-founder of the Quincy Institute and chairman of its Board of Directors, said, as a student of American imperialism, one of the things that strikes him in terms of a common theme – whether it was in the Philippines back in 1903, Vietnam in the 1960s, or in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 – is the “wildly inflated expectations of what the United States government is capable of doing if it sets its mind to some task and if it's willing to expend a certain number of resources. I’m struck by the extent to which the definition of the task is defined in ideological terms, usually that we're in the business of exporting democracy.”

(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)