Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). This week, a sobering assessment of Western reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan was released. It achieved little, with a large portion of the funds allocated disappearing. Corruption was the biggest problem, according to the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). “Deliberate fraud and sloppy work” accounted for the rest.
Just under four and a half years after the chaotic withdrawal of the US from Kabul, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has presented its latest 125-page report. The message is sobering: more than $148 billion was pumped into rebuilding the country into a democratic state based on the neoliberal Western model – more than the entire Marshall Plan for post-war Europe – into a country that was ultimately neither stable nor democratic.
The surreal mission to build the Afghan nation has failed spectacularly. According to the inspector general, corruption was the main reason. Gene Aloise, acting head of SIGAR, told reporters on September 3: “Corruption was the biggest problem throughout the 20 years. It turned the population against the government we were trying to build there. It weakened the (Afghan) armed forces, it weakened everything we tried to do.”
As early as 2012, quarterly reports revealed how more and more districts of the country were falling to the Taliban, but these warnings were ignored in Washington and Kabul. Noteworthy, but not mentioned, is the fact that even SIGAR only realized where things were heading eleven years after the start of the brutal, unprovoked US war of aggression against the country in the Hindu Kush, justified with the false flag of 9/11.
Corruption ate up billions and killed people
According to the SIGAR final report, between $26 billion and $29 billion of the $148 billion in reconstruction funds disappeared through fraud, waste, and abuse. That is up to 20 percent of the total budget. The list of scandals is long and depressing. Here are a few examples from the report:
– A $355 million power plant built by the US development agency USAID was at times operating at less than one percent of its capacity.
– A luxury hotel and apartment complex opposite the US embassy in Kabul, subsidized with $85 million, remains an empty shell to this day.
– Twenty G-222 transport aircraft were purchased for $486 million – and later scrapped, in some cases for six cents per pound.
The fight against opium cultivation alone cost another $7.3 billion, with the result that Afghanistan remained the world’s leading heroin exporter. Corruption in the Afghan drug economy made any stabilization of the country by the US impossible.
Corruption even led to the deaths of American soldiers. In 2012, two GIs died when a booby trap exploded in a drainage pipe. An Afghan construction company had deliberately installed substandard grates so that Taliban fighters could easily place explosives underneath them. SIGAR spoke of “deliberate fraud and shoddy workmanship” – with deadly consequences.
60 percent for weapons, all in Taliban hands
The most astonishing aspect of the SIGAR report is that around 60 percent of the $148 billion spent on rebuilding the country into a thriving and stable democracy was spent on weapons purchases; specifically, 427,300 firearms, nearly 100,000 vehicles, including 23,825 military Humvees, 162 aircraft, 17,400 night vision devices, etc. During the hasty withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan in August 2021, the US military left behind $7.1 billion worth of equipment – virtually all of the Afghan puppet army’s equipment fell intact into the hands of the Taliban. Today, it is precisely this US-funded equipment that forms the backbone of the Taliban’s security apparatus.
“This is a bitter irony,” the SIGAR report states. “US taxpayers financed weapons and facilities that we gave to the Afghan armed forces and that now form the backbone of the Taliban.”
The US Doha Agreement with the Taliban sealed the end
Several high-ranking US officers and government officials interviewed by SIGAR blame the Doha agreement with the Taliban, concluded in February 2020 under Trump, for the final US collapse in Afghanistan. They say it delegitimized the Afghan government and emboldened the Taliban. According to insiders such as Carter Malkasian, a former adviser to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, by 2012, almost a decade before the US collapse, hardly anyone believed that the insurgents could be defeated and the puppet government in Kabul kept in power permanently.
Total cost of the US war adventure in Afghanistan: $2.3 trillion.
The $148 billion reconstruction costs are only a small fraction of the total “costs of war.” This is the conclusion of the “Costs of War” project conducted by the renowned Brown University (USA), which has estimated the total direct and indirect costs of the Afghanistan war for the USA at more than $2.3 trillion. Indirect costs also include war-related costs such as disability pensions, veteran care until 2050, interest payments on the debts incurred, etc. Even without these long-term effects, the pure cost of the war was around $900 billion – six times as much as the reconstruction.
The cost in human lives
The war took a terrible toll on human lives. However, the figures vary greatly on the Afghan side, depending on the source: The UN mission UNAMA counted at least 46,000 civilians killed between 2009 and 2021. Brown University’s “Costs of War” project estimates well over 176,000 deaths when indirect consequences such as disease, hunger, and the collapse of health care after the withdrawal are taken into account. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers and government police officers also died.
On the US side, 2,459 soldiers were killed and more than 20,700 were wounded, many of them severely, with lifelong disabilities. In addition, more than 3,800 US mercenaries were killed.
A warning that will probably go unheeded
“If there is one key lesson to be learned from this 20-year tragedy,” the SIGAR report states, “it is this: any similar mission in a comparable context, scope, and ambition must face the real possibility of total failure.” However, SIGAR chief Aloise fears that this is precisely what will not happen. You don’t need to have studied political science to see, with regard to Ukraine, that his warning has so far gone unheeded in the US Congress.
And as for the corruption between the main players in the US/EU/NATO and Ukraine, Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University in the US, recently gave us an idea of its gigantic dimensions: “Since 2022, a total of about $360 billion has been pumped into Ukraine. According to my calculations, the corruption rate is between 15 and 30 percent, probably closer to 30 percent. Exactly the same amount of US aid was stolen in Afghanistan, where corruption amounted to exactly 30 percent. I think it’s similar in Ukraine. Even at just 15 percent, the thieves have pocketed $54 billion; at 30 percent, it’s $108 billion. That’s no small change!”
That is indeed a lot of money. It is fairly safe to assume that not all of it stayed in Ukraine, but that a large part of it disappeared into the pockets of European and American profiteers via “kickbacks.”
