The U.S. spent billions to rebuild Afghanistan. Was it successful?

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0:3720 years. Notice how long the U.S. fought in Afghanistan, from the invasion in 2001 to the chaotic withdrawal in 2021. The United States has poured billions into rebuilding the country, and now we have the fullest accounting yet of what those billions bought. It comes in the form of a report from a U.S. government watchdog, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR. This is the final report from SIGAR. The agency shuts down next month. And it chronicles, and I am quoting, a two-decade-long effort fraught with waste. John Sapko was the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

1:20We have interviewed him many times over the years. Today he's in the studio with me in person. And Mr. Sapko, good to see you and speak with you once again. Well, thank you for inviting me. It is a pleasure to be here. So this is a report that runs 137 pages. It summarizes years, the full accounting, the totality of Sigar's work. If I were to ask you to write the headline in a sentence or two, what would it be? The headline is we spent 20 years in Afghanistan and spent$144 billion on reconstruction. and the vast majority of it was a failure. This report identified the failures and identified how much that we determined based upon all of our audits, investigations, and inspections, et cetera, how much was actually wasted, which came to about$26 billion, $26 to$29 billion.

2:17Give me a concrete example of that waste. Well, we bought about 20 airplanes from Italy that were in a junkyard in Sicily. We purchased them to send over to Afghanistan for the Afghans to learn how to fly these planes. They're like smaller versions of the C-130. They're called G-triple-twos. And 400, I believe,$480 million on it. And the planes couldn't fly. They basically were trashed almost immediately. Like literally couldn't get off the ground. Well, they could, but parts fell off. I was reading another example. Cigar found a$335 million power plant, a USAID power plant, that it was operating at less than 1 % of its capacity.

3:09Less than 1%. That's correct. That was one of the things we found, too. And it was a very good power plant. Problem is they didn't need it. It wasn't really connected and there wasn't a grid for it to be connected. Those are the type of things we saw. We saw buildings that melted. We saw roads that were never completed, bridges that fell down. What you're speaking highlights one of my key takeaways from this report, which was the problem wasn't money. It wasn't a lack of funds. It was almost the opposite. The U.S. spent way too much money, way too fast in a country that the report says was woefully unprepared to absorb it.

3:48Absolutely. That is the big problem. We were our worst enemy in many ways. And one was with just the amount of money funneling in. And where the money ended up going to? It wasn't just U.S. contractors or international contractors. A lot of the money was going to Afghan contractors and mainly Afghan contractors who were somehow connected to Afghan warlords because we befriended them. They used their connections with our people to get the money. And this alienated – not only did it waste the money, but it alienated the average Afghan out and outside of Kabul. We were basically the problem. I remember my mother saying, if you go to bed with dogs, you wake up with fleas.

4:36Well, if you go to bed with warlords or oligarchs or whatever you want to call them, you end up in the morning having to explain to the average Afghan why you're doing that, because these are the people who they hated, and these are the people who they kicked out to bring in the Taliban the first time. So what did we do? We made friends with those people. So, John Sopko, I identified you as the former special inspector general. You were among a number of inspectors general fired by President Trump back in January, correct? He has defended that decision. The firings across the board, the White House has cited changing priorities as the reason.

5:17It does prompt me to ask, how involved were you in this final accounting? I originated the idea and got it going and reviewed I don't know how many drafts before January. The report was almost done or should have been done toward the summer. It didn't change too much. When you raised red flags, like, hey, guys, we're spending billions and it's being wasted. And I know you raised red flags because you testified frequently on Capitol Hill. You gave a bunch of interviews. I did some of them with you over the years that you were chronicling this. When you raised red flags to policymakers in Washington, what'd they say?

5:54There was some support by some members of Congress, but that's one of the issues I think we should have addressed more in the report is why did all of our warnings go to naught? And basically it was, thank you very much, Mr. Sapka. You're doing a wonderful job. You know, a little pat on the head. You know, keep up your good work. And they just continued pumping the money. It prompts the question, why? Why was there so much inertia? Why wasn't this documented report by a U.S. government-funded watchdog taken more seriously? Why didn't anything change? Part of it, I think, is that once you start something like this, there's a tendency to just keep it going.

6:39Nobody wants to be the general or the ambassador or the aid administrator who says, well, I think it was a mistake. That's human nature. We confronted that, and we were saying the emperor had no clothes. What we were doing in Afghanistan was not working, and people didn't want to hear that. Is there anything here that should give us hope that lessons have been learned? I'm thinking about wars around the world today, Ukraine, Gaza. The U.S. is presumably going to be involved in reconstruction. Anything that gives you hope that this will be done better with more accountability? No. I usually try to be an optimist, but no, I don't see it.

7:20particularly with the destruction of USAID, you eliminated all oversight, all capability in the government to carry out a reconstruction effort. Although in fairness, we were just talking about a USAID plant that was operating at less than 1 % capacity in Afghanistan. This is not to say that USAID did not make a lot of mistakes, and I think that was a problem. And a lot of the USAID administrators came in and testified and gave happy talk about all the great successes they were doing. But the worker bees out in the field, that's where your expertise was on development. They're gone. They've all taken retirement or been fired.

8:03So if we do do reconstruction, and I think we're planning to do billions of dollars of reconstruction in the Ukraine, if they are going to do reconstruction in Gaza, where's the expertise? There is none. So I'm not optimistic if we go in there because we don't have that expertise. John Sopko. He was Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction from 2012 until this past January. He's been speaking with us about the final report from his former agency. John Sopko, thanks. You're welcome. Thank you very much. Once again, you can go to plus.npr.org to support public media. And as a thank you, you get bonus episodes like this one from many different NPR podcasts.

8:52You also get sponsor-free listening and lots of other great perks, plus.npr.org. This episode was produced by Daniel Offman and Catherine Fink. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Thanks for listening and thanks for supporting Consider This from NPR.