The new Republican Congress has plans to hold hearings over the botched final evacuation from Afghanistan. Good. It is altogether fitting and proper that the final images for most Americans of their war in Afghanistan are chaotic airport scenes, all too familiar to many (“Vietnam!”) and all too alien to others. (“We lost? Nobody told me.”)

Those were important two decades of smoldering ruin of American foreign policy—four presidents, six administrations, untold Afghan dead, 2,456 American dead, 20,752 American wounded, and some trillions of dollars spent, the money as uncountable as the Afghan dead and just as meaningless except as an aggregate. Deniers will emerge in the decades to come, so a final set of pedestrian images of failure are necessary to rebuke them in advance. History is not kind; no softening is warranted considering the scale and scope of the folly.

The final judgment on paper at least rests with the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the body set up by Congress to monitor the twenty-some years of nation-building that America set out to accomplish in 2001. SIGAR wrote a wrap-up report entitled Why the Afghan Government Collapsed summarizing its work. 

Here's the bottom line up front, as the military likes to say: The SIGAR report mentioned Iraq, where a similar nation-building effort failed for similar reasons, only three times in 60 pages, once a footnote. Nobody has learned any lessons; as the “blob” salivates over rebuilding Ukraine even as this is written, it is doubtful that any lessons will be carried forward from Afghanistan.

Vietnam begat Iraq, which begat Afghanistan, which will all be forgotten for the next one. Our Southeast Asian adventure was mentioned in the report once only: “U.S. efforts to build and sustain Afghanistan’s governing institutions were a total, epic, predestined failure on par with the same efforts and outcome in the Vietnam war, and for the same reasons.” You'd think a statement like that might be worth a bit of expansion.

SIGAR tells us the U.S. failed in Afghanistan in large part because "[t]he Afghan government failed to recognize that the United States would actually leave." There was thus never a push to solve problems or drive peace talks, simply a well-founded belief the American money fueling abject corruption would continue indefinitely. Standing in the Tim Horton's/Burger King at Bagram Air Base, considering lunch options before a trip to the air conditioned gym with its 75 treadmills in 2009, it all seemed a reasonable assumption.

Left unspoken by SIGAR was the fact that the Taliban saw just the opposite—that eventually, someday, maybe in a long time but not indefinitely, the Americans would have to leave: same as Alexander the Great, same as the British, same as the Soviets. That is one of the wonderful things about the SIGAR report: its historical portability. Change the dates and some adjacent facts and it reads well to describe the British ouster, or the Russian. The failure to win hearts and minds, the great costs to create the appearance of conquering great swaths of territory, the ability of the Afghan plains to absorb the blood of the conquerors, the endemic corruption of the puppet governments: It’s all similar enough.

SIGAR ignores much of what was happening in the field to focus on intra-USG/Afghan government problems, as one might comment effusively on a particularly pretty hat and fail to notice the woman wearing it was naked. Before the collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, the primary U.S. goal in Afghanistan, we're told, was "to achieve a sustainable political settlement that would bring lasting peace and stability." But the Taliban’s refusal to talk to the Afghan government without first negotiating with the United States was an obstacle to that goal. 

A similar occurrence happened in 2018, when the United States began direct talks with the Taliban. The U.S. direct negotiations with the Taliban excluded the Afghan government, weakening its negotiating position and strengthening the Taliban’s. As Hugo Llorens, former U.S. special chargé d’affaires for Afghanistan, summarized, “Just talking to the Taliban alone and excluding our allies proved the Taliban’s point: The Afghan government were our puppets, you didn’t need to talk to them. You only need to talk to the Americans.”

SIGAR then notes with the obviousness of a car wreck: "The U.S.-Taliban agreement appeared to have emboldened the Taliban. All the Taliban really did was agree not to attack U.S. forces on their way out.” As a result, the agreement likely led Taliban leaders to seek a resolution to its conflict with the Afghan government on the battlefield rather than through peace talks. If this wasn't a family report, you'd expect a "no sh*t" to follow. All sides were befuddled. Former Ambassador Michael McKinley told SIGAR that the Afghan president consistently proposed development goals that were “completely off the charts,” and that his apparent “separation from Afghan reality” was concerning. He was “living in fantasyland.”

The key elements of the fantasy was that the reconstruction effort—the idea that rebuilding Afghanistan via $141 billion in roads and schools and bridges and hardware stores—would gut the Taliban's own more brutal hearts-and-minds efforts. That was the same plan as in Iraq only minutes earlier, where between 2003 and 2014 more than $220 billion was spent on rebuilding the country. (Full disclosure: I was part of the Iraqi effort and wrote a book critical of the program, We Meant Well, for which I was punished into involuntary retirement by the U.S. State Department.) Nonetheless, the Iraqi failure on full display, the United States believed that economic and social development programming would increase support for the Afghan government and reduce support for the Taliban insurgency.

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However, SIGAR writes, "The theory that economic and social development programming could produce such outcomes had weak empirical foundations." Former Ambassador McKinley noted, “It wasn’t that everyone, including conservative rural populations, didn’t appreciate services … but that didn’t seem to change their views.” As the Army War College told us, “This idea that if you build a road or a hospital or a school, people will then come on board and support the government—there’s no evidence of that occurring anywhere since 1945, in any internal conflict. It doesn’t work.” As Scott Guggenheim, former senior advisor to President Ghani, told SIGAR, “Building latrines does not make you love Ashraf Ghani.” But that was indeed the plan, and it failed spectacularly: slow over twenty years, then all at once.

You can’t blame SIGAR for anything, though the temptation to mock their prose is great given the importance of the mess they sought to document. But it isn’t fair. The blame lies with six administrations' worth of presidents and the men and women who created the Afghan policy, not those who wrote about it.

The great news is that now, having laid this all out in black and white, we can set the SIGAR report on the shelf alongside a similar one for Iraq, where the watchdog was creatively called SIGIR, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, knowing that it will never, ever, ever happen this way again, promise, certainly not in Ukraine.