The final inspector general report regarding the United States’s two-decade reconstruction attempt in Afghanistan found that “corruption affected everything.”
Congress appropriated more than $140 billion from 2002 through the middle of 2021 for Afghanistan reconstruction and another $763 billion for warfighting. However, the collapse of the West-supported Afghan government in that final year demonstrated its fragility, which was concealed by the U.S.’s stance of supposed progress and stability.
US efforts entangled with corruption
“The government we created over there, we being the United States and the other donor countries, was essentially a white collar criminal enterprise,” acting Inspector General Gene Aloise with the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said on Wednesday during a Defense Writers Group event.
“It was full of corruption,” he added.
Corruption “turned the population against the government that we were trying to build over there,” Aloise continued. “It weakened the armed forces. It weakened everything we tried to do.”
The total cost of the two-decade war far exceeded the billions of dollars spent, including the 2,450 U.S. service members who were killed, 20,760 U.S. troops who were wounded, and 66,000 Afghan troops and 48,000 Afghan civilians who were killed.
SIGAR, an independent oversight body that has been releasing quarterly reports on U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan since 2008, will close its doors at the end of January 2026. The report released Wednesday was its final one.
Its work has consistently portrayed what Washington failed to realize long before it occurred: The U.S. reconstruction strategy was mired with failures largely as a result of corruption.
Warning signs ignored during war
Aloise said SIGAR’s “quarterly reports laid out what was happening, and you could predict the future based on what we were saying.”
“This was not what winning looked like, and that’s what we were reporting in our quarterly reports,” he added.
SIGAR often had a hard time getting its message heard by relevant stakeholders in Washington during the war.
“Well, we were fighting a war. We were just a little blip in this whole room of noise, and it was hard for us,” Aloise said.
According to the final report, SIGAR oversight identified more than $4.6 billion in cost savings to U.S. taxpayers. Through audits and investigations, it uncovered more than 1,300 instances of waste, fraud, and abuse, totaling between $26 billion and $29.2 billion.
Its investigations resulted in 171 criminal convictions, which resulted in the forfeiture of about $1.7 billion in criminal fines, asset forfeitures, civil settlements, and more. In some instances, the fraudulent practices had fatal consequences for U.S. service members.
In one instance, an Afghan-owned company, Afghan Mercury Construction Company, was awarded a U.S. contract to install tamper-proof grates over the openings of culverts running beneath Highway 1, a route frequently used by U.S. and coalition forces in Ghazni province. The substandard work led to the death of two U.S. service members when insurgents detonated an explosive device hidden in one of the culverts. Using evidence obtained by SIGAR, the Afghan Attorney General’s Office arrested Abdul Anas Sultani, the president of AMCC, as well as a contractor, on charges of fraud.
Even though the U.S. military left Afghanistan at the end of August 2021, SIGAR’s work did not stop, as the U.S. continued to provide funds to the beleaguered country. However, it encountered some roadblocks, particularly from former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Aloise cited the Biden administration as the one that was least receptive to SIGAR’s work, saying it effectively sought to sideline the oversight agency, arguing that its mandate had ended, given there were no U.S. forces left in Afghanistan.
“The worst part of it was during the Biden administration, they just shut us down for a year,” he said. “They wouldn’t talk to us. They wouldn’t work with our people. They told their people not to work with our people. It was terrible. They said the troops are gone. Your jurisdiction is over. And we said, wait a minute, our jurisdiction was never tied to the troops; it was only tied to the money. And from 2021 on, there was $3.6 billion of humanitarian aid going into Afghanistan.”
Challenges of evacuated Afghans
At the end of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, the U.S. military carried out what ultimately became the largest noncombatant evacuation operation in the country’s history. It evacuated tens of thousands of Afghans, many of whom worked alongside U.S. forces over the course of the war and faced a perilous situation with the Taliban’s quick rise to power as the U.S. military left.
The evacuation and the vetting of those Afghans at the time have come under renewed scrutiny following the suspected targeted shooting of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., by an accused evacuated Afghan who worked with U.S. personnel.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, the suspect in the shooting, pleaded not guilty to the charges. Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, one of the National Guard soldiers, died of her injuries while the other, U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remains in serious condition.
SIGAR’s quarterly reports last year noted that many Afghans were struggling to assimilate into life in the U.S.
“Nearly all the interviewees also described the new challenges they are facing in the United States. Many of the recently resettled suffer from depression, culture shock, lack of support, and poverty — stresses that are compounded for families separated from their loved ones left behind in Afghanistan,” the April 30, 2024, SIGAR quarterly report said.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION DID NOT VET OR RUN LAKANWAL’S NAME THROUGH DATABASES IN 2021
In response to the shooting, the Trump administration froze immigration requests from 19 countries deemed “high risk” for national security reasons.
Separate from SIGAR’s work, the Pentagon is conducting a new review of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, led by Sean Parnell, the department’s top spokesman. Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson said on Tuesday that this report “is expected to be complete by summer of 2026.”
