{"id":42772,"date":"2021-07-29T16:21:11","date_gmt":"2021-07-29T16:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/uncategorized\/2021\/07\/29\/we-will-do-this-again-afghanistan-ig-warns-of-future-drawn-out-wars\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T07:29:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T07:29:06","slug":"we-will-do-this-again-afghanistan-ig-warns-of-future-drawn-out-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/news\/pentagon-congress\/2021\/07\/29\/we-will-do-this-again-afghanistan-ig-warns-of-future-drawn-out-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We will do this again,\u2019 Afghanistan IG warns of future drawn-out wars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction<\/a> ripped apart the government\u2019s handling of two decades of operations in Afghanistan on Thursday, pointing to shifting goal posts and unrealistic timelines as key reasons why the U.S. withdrawal<\/a> is yielding Taliban gains<\/a> against ineffective Afghan security forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most recent SIGAR quarterly report<\/a>, released Thursday, tells the same story it\u2019s been telling all along, John Sopko told reporters at Defense Writers Group event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou know, you really shouldn\u2019t be surprised if you\u2019ve been reading our reports for at least the nine years … that I\u2019ve been there,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been highlighting problems with our train, advise and assist mission with the Afghan military.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the wake of the Biden administration\u2019s May announcement that all troops and contractors would be out by the end of August, public backlash has ranged from disappointment at the war\u2019s \u201cfailure\u201d to lamentations that the U.S. is withdrawing before the job has been finished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The issue, Sopko said, is that \u201cthe job\u201d has had many faces since fall 2001. What started as a mission to dismantle the Taliban government that allowed al-Qaida to train in Afghanistan morphed into a nation-building exercise, an effort to beat back numerous insurgent groups and strengthen a central Afghan government and military that would eventually fend for itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That effort was more involved than the Marshall Plan, Sopko said, the U.S.-led program to rebuild Europe after World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether Afghanistan\u2019s government holds up after the U.S. withdrawal will eventually play out, but when the senior-most American national security officials talk about the reasons for the drawdown, they pin it to one goal: Afghanistan is not currently a place where a terrorist group can plan and train for an attack on the United States. Ergo, mission accomplished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sopko quipped that military leadership on the ground \u201cturned the corner\u201d so many times that they\u2019ve been going in circles for years, and it appears the U.S. has settled back into its original goal in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEvery time we took a look at the assessment tools, our U.S. military would change the goal posts and say, \u2018Oh no, no, that\u2019s not the test you want to do,\u2019 to raising serious questions about the sustainability of all this high-tech hardware we gave them,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd to the real serious problem, that we focused on the more urgent warfighting and not looking at the what I call the \u2018long tail,\u2019 the whole issue of logistics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n