The Pentagon and State Department are at war with an official government auditor, refusing to cooperate with a probe of how 20 years of missteps by top Washington brass led to Afghanistan being ceded to the ragtag Taliban despite $90 billion in U.S. funds, a government report revealed Monday.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has been one of the most incisive watchdogs in Washington, keeping tabs on a foreign matter that was largely out of the public eye even as U.S. “experts” appeared to make one blunder after another. After numerous embarrassing reports, DOD and State are now refusing to cooperate with SIGAR, stating that it only has the authority to audit Afghanistan reconstruction–which ended when the U.S. pulled out.
In August 2021, President Joe Biden withdrew troops and contractors from the country overnight, without even telling Afghan soldiers on patrol. It left equipment behind, which the Taliban took and used for combat and propaganda, and some of the Afghan forces that the U.S. had trained to fight the Taliban themselves joined “extremist groups,” the report said.
Biden subsequently began allowing former Taliban employees to migrate to the U.S. under a refugee program billed as being for “interpreters,” while Russia and China moved in to Afghanistan to exploit its natural resources.
“We identified eight systemic factors that explain why, after 20 years and nearly $90 billion in U.S. security assistance, the [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] was vulnerable to collapse in the first place,” SIGAR said.
In May 2022, SIGAR provided DOD and State with an interim report, but “DOD and State declined to review that interim draft, denied us access to their staff, and mostly declined to answer requests for information,” SIGAR wrote in its new report.
By this month, a cold war was emerging in the normally-mundane letters exchanging information between them.
“We offered to continue to meet regularly to further discuss the range of issues covered in the draft, but the author did not follow up,” S. Rebecca Zimmerman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, claimed February 16.
SIGAR responded: “DOD’s assertion that the author ‘never followed up’ on its offer to discuss the draft report is simply false. Moreover, DOD’s highlighting of ‘the efforts undertaken by DoD to cooperate with SIGAR’ should be viewed in the context of a history of extensive delays, missed deadlines, and incomplete answers to questions.”
“SIGAR strongly disagrees with DOD’s characterization of their engagement on this report. In fact, DOD only provided limited responses to SIGAR’s request for information (RFI) and missed every deadline for responding to SIGAR’s questions or for providing feedback to vetting drafts of this report,” it continued.
Hellbound and Down 