Matrix Report
In what amounted to a literal indictment of the way successive US administrations and the military handled the Afghan war , the US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko Thursday (July 29 ) ripped apart the US engagement in Afghanistan since late 2001 and suggested it was a mission built on over-ambitious plans, shifting goalposts and misreporting of facts on ground by the military.
Sopko, who has been exposing financial irregularities in the USAID, security and related contracting jobs since 2012, made these remarks at an event on in Washington DC.
Following are some of the quotes from Sopko’s talk.
# You know, you really shouldn’t be surprised if you’ve been reading our reports for at least the nine years that I’ve been there. We’ve been highlighting problems with our train, advise and assist mission with the Afghan military.
# We exaggerated, over exaggerated. Our generals did. Our ambassadors did. All of our officials did to go to Congress and the American people about ‘we’re just turning the corner.. We turned the corner so much, we did 360 degrees. We’re like a top”
# US military leadership on the ground “turned the corner” so many times that they’ve been going in circles for years, and it appears the U.S. has settled back into its original goal in Afghanistan.
# Every time we took a look at the assessment tools, our U.S. military would change the goal posts and say, ‘Oh no, no, that’s not the test you want to do,’ to raising serious questions about the sustainability of all this high-tech hardware we gave them.
# We have a tendency of building other governments & other militaries in our image & likeness. We came into Afghanistan thinking that we would create a strong central government. That was a mistake.
# Pouring a lot more money just created more waste & created more corruption, which alienated the Afghan people” “So we we basically hurt ourselves by doing this”
# Two words that can describe Afghanistan…1st is this hubris, that we can somehow take a country from that was desolate in 2001 and turn it into little Norway. The other thing is mendacity
# The job” has had many faces since fall 2001. What started as a mission to dismantle the Taliban government that allowed al-Qaida to train in Afghanistan morphed into a nation-building exercise, an effort to beat back numerous insurgent groups and strengthen a central Afghan government and military that would eventually fend for itself.
That effort was more involved than the Marshall Plan, Sopko said, the U.S.-led program to rebuild Europe after World War II.
# And to the real serious problem : we focused on the more urgent warfighting and not looking at the what I call the ‘long tail,’ the whole issue of logistics.
# Effort was more involved than the Marshall Plan (the U.S.-led program to rebuild Europe after World War II) in the post World War 11 Europe. (It was a reference to the $2.6 trillion that the US claims to have spent in Afghanistan since late 2001 both on security as well as reconstruction efforts.
