28 OCTOBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL UPI/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO above downward onto their staffs until it eventually reached the trainers and mentors working side by side with Afghan security forces. Yet those trainers were also perpetually new to the job and inherited problems beyond their power to fix. Still, they heard the message loud and clear—demonstrate progress or else. Unable to accelerate the improvement of Afghan forces, they did what was in their power—namely, to change how improvement was measured to give the impression of more improvement. Between 2010 and 2014, when the pressure to transition authority to Afghan forces was greatest, DoD cycled through seven different systems for evaluating the capabilities of troops and police. After the seventh, DoD opted to start classifying the assessments. Several iterations in the framework allowed senior U.S. officials to take credit for gains that were almost entirely on paper, perpetuating the illusion that sufficient progress could be made to permit withdrawal in the near future. In SIGAR’s experience, many U.S. staff working in Afghanistan were genuinely devoted to building Afghan institutions. Still, these DoD officials—like those at State and USAID—became experts at distortion, in part because they were held accountable for the wrong things. Progress vs. Learning Oversight of foreign assistance often centers on the question, “What progress have you made?” This is certainly an important question, but learning and improving is far harder when U.S. officials constantly feel the pressure to demonstrate tangible progress on timelines that are often absurdly short. Foreign assistance frequently fails and, even when successful, takes considerable time to yield results. Pressure to show progress in such conditions creates a very simple path of least resistance— game the system. Even a leader with integrity who demands fast progress from their staff may unintentionally pass down the message that the appearance of progress is more important than progress itself. So rather than learn why those Afghan battalions were not becoming independent and speak openly about constraints that must be addressed if that independence is to be achieved, it seemed that DoD as an institution learned that avoiding criticism was more important than exploring meaningful ways to improve. Indeed, avoiding the appearance of failure often seems to be the North Star for large bureaucracies operating under traditional oversight. The daily expectation of progress makes real learning far harder because staff are too preoccupied finding quick victories, even if they are fleeting or, worse, pyrrhic. Over time, the effort hollows out to become a house of cards and collapses, just as the U.S.-supported Afghan government did. What is Congress or an oversight office to do—not ask about progress? Not exactly. Rather than asking, “What progress have you made?” perhaps the overriding question guiding oversight of foreign assistance should be: “What have you learned?” In different ways and in varying degrees, DoD, State, and USAID are slowly coming around to the idea that they need clear evidence demonstrating that any given strategy or program is likely to work. That low bar is quite an improvement over their work in Afghanistan, where SIGAR’s lessons learned reports describe in detail many U.S. government strategies and programs based on dubious or false assumptions, untested theories of change, and mere hope. When Congress and SIGAR criticized U.S. agencies for problems in Afghanistan, those agencies seldom raced to collect the evidence necessary to improve, but rather they opted to find creative ways of avoiding the appearance of failure. This is certainly an accountability problem but one that deserves a different approach. Particularly with foreign assistance, U.S. agencies should be held accountable first and foremost for their failure to learn, not their failure to succeed at any given moment. Moreover, the answer to the question “What have you learned?” will likely lead Congress or an oversight organization to the same information as asking more directly about progress, but through a much healthier pathway—one that incentivizes U.S. officials to base their decisions on evidence and convince overseers of the merits of doing so. A New Model for Assessment What would this look like in practice? Members of Congress and oversight organizations would direct more scrutiny toward the systems the agencies have in place for collecting and analyzing data about their efforts, what their evidence tells the General John F. Campbell, commander of Resolute Support Mission and United States Forces–Afghanistan, testifies during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the ongoing situation in Afghanistan on Oct. 6, 2015.
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