THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2024 27 A conventional oversight approach by Congress or an organization like SIGAR would correctly draw attention to this subterfuge and argue that DoD was simply hiding failure, rather than addressing it. Yet the prevalence of this trend by State, USAID, and DoD across America’s 20 years in Afghanistan is symptomatic of something far worse and more entrenched than U.S. officials occasionally trying to make themselves look good. Experts at Distortion For two decades, the American people heard claims that we were on the right track in Afghanistan, that with a little more time, the Afghan government and its institutions could become selfsustaining and allow a U.S. withdrawal. It was mostly nonsense. DoD knew Afghan security forces were not on track—a third of them had to be replaced every year. State and USAID likewise knew corruption and poor capacity in the Afghan ministries were prohibitive—they kept most U.S. funds away from Afghan government coffers to prevent Afghan officials from stealing or misallocating those funds. So why did these officials give such rosy assessments to Congress and the American people year after year? The answer is simple: The U.S. government’s foreign assistance machinery structurally motivates senior officials to distort, embellish, and spin—even if it means significantly hurting the quality of that foreign assistance or enabling failures to continue. SIGAR’s Lessons Learned Program has conducted more than 1,200 interviews with government officials and contractors who worked in or on Afghanistan, leaving us with a detailed composite of how this incentive system works. Senior U.S. officials were often in a very difficult position. Keeping with the DoD example, legislators and administration officials constantly told them, in effect: “We’ve been at this for years, and Afghan forces are not improving fast enough. Let’s see some progress.” Building a military from scratch takes many decades, and constant turnover in U.S. staff at all levels meant that people who were not around when poor decisions were originally made were still expected to answer for those decisions years later. Under scrutiny, these U.S. officials transferred the pressure coming from
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