Indecision, ignorance, and incompetence: How top US leaders lost Afghanistan
'You wouldn’t invent how to do infantry operations [or] artillery at the start of a war ... you need to have people who think about reconstruction 24/7.'
By David Roza , Jared Keller | Published Aug 18, 2021 1:29 AM
Pentagon News
How exactly did twenty years, billions of dollars, and thousands of American lives result in the total collapse of Afghanistan? The United States has nobody to blame but itself, according to a scathing new report from the top U.S. watchdog for the Afghan reconstruction effort.
Just days after Taliban fighters occupied the presidential palace in Kabul and Americans and Afghans desperately flocked to Hamid Karzai International Airport in search of an escape route from the country, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released its 11th “lessons learned” report, which lists seven reasons why the last two decades of U.S. reconstruction efforts failed.
The SIGAR report paints a dark picture of the U.S. efforts to rebuild the country that followed the September 11th attacks and subsequent U.S. invasion: despite $145 billion spent on reconstituting Afghan security forces, civilian government institutions, and other elements of society, the U.S. government “continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve,” according to the report.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/why-did-we-lose-afghanistan/
