John Hughes Column
NO LESSONS LEARNED FROM AFGHANISTAN FOUR YEARS LATER
By John Hughes
August 25, 2025
Sunrise in Section 35 of Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, Oct. 25, 2018. (U.S. Army photo by Elizabeth Fraser/ Arlington National Cemetery / released)
Four years ago this month, the US ended its longest war in a most embarrassing fashion. The Taliban efficiently retook the entire country in a matter of months, culminating in the surrender of Kabul. The world watched as Afghans chose to fall to their deaths from departing aircraft than to become captives of the Taliban. Newly released terrorists killed even more Americans at the airport gate and the US amateurishly responded by bombing an innocent contractor’s water truck. Amidst all of this, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward famously proclaimed:
“If this isn’t failure, what does failure look like exactly.”
In August 2021, SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) released a report called “What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction.” While focused on the reconstruction debacle, the beginning of the report makes a troubling point that can be generalized to other parts of America’s failure.
“What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction is the 11th lessons learned report issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The report examines the past two decades of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. It details how the U.S. government struggled to develop a coherent strategy, understand how long the reconstruction mission would take, ensure its projects were sustainable, staff the mission with trained professionals, account for the challenges posed by insecurity, tailor efforts to the Afghan context, and understand the impact of programs. There have been bright spots—such as lower child mortality rates, increases in per capita GDP, and increased literacy rates. But after spending 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, the U.S. government has many lessons it needs to learn. Implementing these critical lessons will save lives and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse in Afghanistan, and in future reconstruction missions elsewhere around the world.”1
https://armedforces.press/no-lessons-learned-from-afghanistan-four-years-later/
