--------------------
BUILT TO FAIL
Despite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get mired in ‘nation-building,’ it’s wasted billions doing just that
George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all promised the same thing: The United States would not get stuck with the burden of “nation-building” in Afghanistan.
In October 2001, shortly after ordering U.S. forces to invade, Bush said he would push the United Nations to “take over the so-called nation-building.”
Eight years later, Obama insisted his government would not get mired in a long “nation-building project,” either. Eight years after that, Trump made a similar vow: “We’re not nation-building again.”
Yet nation-building is exactly what the United States has tried to do in war-battered Afghanistan — on a colossal scale.
Since 2001, Washington has spent more on nation-building in Afghanistan than in any country ever, allocating $133 billion for reconstruction, aid programs and the Afghan security forces.
Adjusted for inflation, that is more than the United States spent in Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Unlike the Marshall Plan, however, the exorbitant nation-building project for Afghanistan went awry from the start and grew worse as the war dragged on, according to a trove of confidential government interviews with diplomats, military officials and aid workers who played a direct role in the conflict.
Instead of bringing stability and peace, they said, the United States inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that remains dependent on U.S. military power for its survival. Assuming it does not collapse, U.S. officials have said it will need billions more dollars in aid annually, for decades.
Speaking candidly on the assumption that most of their remarks would not be made public, those interviewed said Washington foolishly tried to reinvent Afghanistan in its own image by imposing a centralized democracy and a free-market economy on an ancient, tribal society that was unsuited for either.
Then, they said, Congress and the White House made matters worse by drenching the destitute country with far more money than it could possibly absorb. The flood crested during Obama’s first term as president, as he escalated the number of U.S. troops in the war zone to 100,000.
“During the surge there were massive amounts of people and money going into Afghanistan,” David Marsden, a former official with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told government interviewers. “It’s like pouring a lot of water into a funnel; if you pour it too fast, the water overflows that funnel onto the ground. We were flooding the ground.”
By some measures, life in Afghanistan has improved markedly since 2001. Infant mortality rates have dropped. The number of children in school has soared. The size of the Afghan economy has nearly quintupled.
But the U.S. nation-building project backfired in so many other ways that even foreign-aid advocates questioned whether Afghanistan, in the abstract, might have been better off without any U.S. help at all, according to the documents.
“I mean, the writing is on the wall now,” Michael Callen, an economist with the University of California at San Diego specializing on the Afghan public sector, told government interviewers. “We spent so much money and there is so little to show for it.”
Callen and others blamed an array of mistakes committed again and again over 18 years — haphazard planning, misguided policies, bureaucratic feuding. Many said the overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything.
Much of the money, they said, ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair, if they were built at all.
Some said the outcome was foreseeable. They cited the U.S. track record of military interventions in other countries — Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia — over the past quarter-century.
“We just don’t have a post-conflict stabilization model that works,” Stephen Hadley, who served as White House national security adviser under Bush, told government interviewers. “Every time we have one of these things, it is a pickup game. I don’t have any confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better.”
Troubles plaguing many reconstruction programs in Afghanistan have been well documented, but the interview records obtained by The Washington Post contain new narratives from insiders on what went wrong.
“Once in a while, ok, we can overspend,” Douglas Lute, an Army lieutenant general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013, told government interviewers. “We are a rich country and can pour money down a hole and it doesn’t bust the bank. But should we? Can’t we get a bit more rational about this?”
In comments echoed by other officials who shaped the war, Lute said the United States lavished money on dams and highways just “to show we could spend it,” fully aware that the Afghans, among the poorest and least educated people in the world, could never maintain such huge infrastructure projects.
“One poignant example of this is a ribbon-cutting ceremony complete with the giant scissors I attended for the district police chief in some God-forsaken province,”
Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Lute said. He recalled how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had overseen the design and construction of a police headquarters that featured a glass facade and an atrium.
“The police chief couldn’t even open the door,” Lute said. “He had never seen a doorknob like this. To me, this encapsulates the whole experience in Afghanistan.”
----------------
No comments:
Post a Comment