Afghanistan lost because money won
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AFGHANISTAN
As someone who wasn’t John F. Kennedy first remarked, “victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan” and few defeats are as comprehensively abandoned as that of the West in Afghanistan. Europeans have blamed Americans; Americans have blamed Afghans; and ordinary Afghans once again are paying the price for it all.
Many veterans are saying that they feel betrayed that the sacrifices they and their friends made in fighting the Taliban counted for nothing, including in this moving speech by Tom Tugendhat in the British House of Commons. I can’t help feeling, however, that the seeds of defeat were sown long ago, by our failure to insist that the Afghan officials use the money given to them for the good of the country, rather than keep it for themselves.
- “Civilian officials at the Pentagon and their counterparts at the U.S. Department of State and in the intelligence agencies had long dismissed corruption as a significant factor in the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Many subscribed to the belief that corruption was just part of Afghan culture — as if anyone willingly accepts being humiliated and robbed by government officials. In more than a decade of working to expose and fight corruption in Afghanistan, I was never told by a single Afghan, “We don’t really mind corruption; it’s part of our culture.” Such comments about Afghanistan invariably came only from Westerners,” wrote Sarah Chayes in Foreign Affairs.
Chayes is not just being wise after the fact, she was making the same points a decade ago, and published an excellent book in 2015 laying them out in detail. A year after that, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, made similar points in a report for Congress.