America's Afghanistan Failure

I will spare you the details, but as we now evaluate the lessons of Afghanistan, our emphasis on the cost in human life and on America’s international reputation obscures our abject failure to bring Afghanistan into the modern world.

The Wall Street Journal lists the numerous aid projects contracted or promoted by the American government. It is appallingly bad. Apparently, we Americans had no sense whatever about what the Afghans needed, what they wanted or what they could maintain. So we built a bunch of what are called white elephant projects, only to see them collapse into rubble. I would say that it is symbolic, if it were not real.

Here is the Journal summary:

The Afghan countryside is littered with abandoned and decaying power plants, prisons, schools, factories, office buildings and military bases, according to a watchdog agency, the legacy of the U.S.’s 20-year effort to fund the establishment of a modern Afghan state that could provide security and basic services for its citizens.

A range of U.S. government agencies poured an estimated $145 billion into construction and infrastructure projects, equipment for the Afghan security forces, humanitarian aid, counternarcotics programs and other spending, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or Sigar.

Across the country, local Afghan partners often lacked the expertise and resources to maintain the buildings and equipment after they were handed over. In many cases, the U.S. government built things the Afghans didn’t want or need, according to Sigar.

Some facilities and equipment were damaged in fighting. In other cases, whether through malfeasance or incompetence, American, Afghan and international contractors never delivered what they were paid for, Sigar’s reports show.

Call it arrogance, an unwillingness to work with other people, with people whose culture is radically different from ours. We imagined that we could impose ourselves on them and that they would thrill to the appearance of large projects that they did not understand, did not need, did not want and did not know how to maintain.