THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2024 25 David H. Young is deputy director of the Lessons Learned Program at the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). He was the lead researcher for SIGAR’s reports on U.S. stabilization efforts, U.S. support to elections, the agency’s lessons-learned compendium report “What We Need to Learn,” and the congressionally mandated report, “Why the Afghan Security Forces Collapsed.” He has extensive field experience in six conflict/post-conflict environments: Afghanistan, the Sahel, Israel/Palestine, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Northern Ireland. In the past, he has worked as an adviser to the U.S. Department of Defense, the World Bank, the U.S. Institute of Peace, Adam Smith International, and Interpeace. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. An insider to the two-decade-long U.S. mission in Afghanistan offers a refreshing look at the challenge of effective foreign assistance oversight. BY DAVID H. YOUNG Foreign Assistance Lessons from Afghanistan How to Balance Accountability and Learning Despite having a reputation as bean counters and thorns in the sides of agencies, government oversight organizations are integral to ensuring U.S. foreign assistance is effective. The organization I work for, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), reports directly to Congress and has oversight of all U.S. assistance to Afghanistan—from any agency providing it—totaling $148 billion since 2002. Our audits, inspections, and investigations have cumulatively saved the taxpayer $3.97 billion since our founding in 2008. Yet in important ways, oversight offices can sometimes introduce new challenges to the delivery of U.S. foreign assistance. Traditional oversight work by Congress, SIGAR, and similar government organizations tends to reinforce a zero-sum battle between holding U.S. agencies accountable on the one hand, and helping them learn from their mistakes on the other. As the deputy director of SIGAR’s Lessons Learned Program, I spend most of my time at this strange crossroads in U.S. foreign assistance. It seems intuitive that accountability for mistakes would naturally lend itself to learning from those mistakes. After all, upon being dragged through the coals for failure, which U.S. official or agency wouldn’t want to avoid that frustration in the future? It turns out, however, that the way oversight is conducted can have surprising effects on the incentives of senior U.S. officials and what precisely they learn from the oversight. FOCUS ON FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TODAY
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