The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction rebuked the lack of accountability for the officials who led the Afghanistan War.
John Sopko, who has led SIGAR since 2012, urged lawmakers to “hold people accountable” for the two-decade war that cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives during his Wednesday afternoon testimony in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Hold people accountable,” he said when asked by a lawmaker about how to make sure policy suggestions from SIGAR and other agencies are implemented globally. “All of the reports we’ve done, no one in the government has been held accountable. I always joked that the only person who’s going to get fired over Afghanistan is probably going to be me. Nobody else.”
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In the 20 years U.S. forces were in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense spent $837 billion on warfighting, while the government spent an additional $145 billion trying to rebuild the country, its security forces, and its economy, according to the SIGAR’s August report detailing “lessons from twenty years of Afghanistan reconstruction.”
“Not the generals who came up and spun and spun and spun and the ambassadors and aid administrators who gave bogus data to you — none of them have been held accountable,” he added.
Sopko’s testimony is the latest in the Capitol Hill hearings regarding the Afghanistan War, with much of the focus honing in on the final weeks of the United States’s longest war. The Biden administration has faced scrutiny for the way the withdrawal was executed, including leaving U.S. citizens behind as well as for expecting the Afghan forces to withstand, at least temporarily, a Taliban offensive.
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Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have faced calls for their resignation. Some of those demands were issued during their testimonies on Capitol Hill last week.
The inspector general’s report acknowledged “several areas of improvement — most notably in the areas of health care, maternal health, and equation,” but it noted that the “if the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that can sustain itself and post little threat to U.S. national security interests, the overall picture is bleak.”
