The 122-page report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, tends to confirm President Joe Biden’s view that the mission was doomed to fail, regardless of how much longer U.S. troops were kept there. But the timing of the release is sheer coincidence. The report, titled What We Need to Learn: Lessons From Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction—based on interviews with more than 700 officials and a review of thousands of documents—has been in the works for many months and is the 12th “lessons learned” report conducted by SIGAR, which was created in 2008 to monitor waste, fraud, and abuse in the Afghanistan war.
The latest report is a critique not so much of the military operations but rather of the premise underlying the war: that U.S. troops could someday leave Afghanistan in a good enough place to thrive as a functioning state.
It concludes that the U.S. presence improved Afghanistan’s conditions in medical care, women’s health, and the environment, but not so much in any other aspect of life—and that even in the few successful realms, the “prospects for sustaining the progress that was made are dubious.”
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