With an official report in, we can officially state that America officially effed up in Afghanistan.
There was no coherent U.S. Afghanistan strategy:
As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, I, with my staff, 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.
The end result in Afghanistan, if all goes well, will be a nominal national government that controls the capital region and reigns but does not rule local tribes and which actually helps the locals a bit rather than sucking resources from the locals, who in turn do not make trouble for the central government or allow their areas to be used by jihadis to plan attacks on the West. We press for reasonable economic opportunities, with bribes all around (I mean, foreign aid), to keep a fragile peace.
And we stick around this time, unlike after the Soviets left Afghanistan when we ignored the place, for a generation or two to see if we can move Afghanistan into the 19th century (hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves).
The sad thing is, even with our faulty strategy based on pretending that having a UN seat meant you were a real country, if we hadn't botched it by totally withdrawing from Afghanistan in the worst possible way, we could have avoided the fall of the Afghanistan government and security forces. Then we might have gotten to that decentralized version of Afghanistan eventually. The need to help the locals govern and oppose the Taliban absent a sufficiently capable central government could have pushed us in that direction.
But instead, Afghanistan is a jihadi sanctuary again. What could possibly go wrong?
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NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
