U.S. military describes its mistakes in Afghanistan

When President Obama met top NATO officials in Brussels on March 26, he publicly expressed renewed optimism that America's estimated $120 billion effort to reconstruct Afghanistan will leave behind "a stable and secure country that serves the prosperity and the security of the Afghan people."

A month earlier, however, a group of senior U.S. military officers rendered a much harsher judgment in private about the legacy of the 12-year U.S.-led intervention. The officers concluded in a report for the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Afghanistan's ability to serve its citizens' needs remains directly threatened by a deeply entrenched culture of corruption that not only defied the West's intervention but grew substantially worse because of it.

The report, written by a division of the Joint Staff assigned to draw lessons for the future, was based on dozens of interviews with government officials and experts — including 11 flag or general military officers — and its judgments were approved by top commanders, according to a spokesman.

Among the conclusions:

• In retrospect, U.S. military forces were unprepared to deal with a country where private profit-making dominated public policymaking.
• Early U.S. alliances with Afghani warlords helped solidify a corrupt leadership style and a climate of impunity for those involved.
• Washington made the problem worse by inundating Afghanistan with more cash than it could absorb in legitimate channels to undertake needed reforms.
• American military officers and civilian aid workers alike were unprepared to manage Afghan contractors, resulting in what the report said was "the expenditure of millions of dollars with almost no oversight or alignment with other … [U.S. government] efforts."

Obama heard some of this bad news directly in an exit briefing a year ago from the outgoing head of the multilateral military force in Afghanistan, Marine Corps Gen. John Allen. According to the report, Allen told the president that corruption — not an incompetent military, not an inadequate police force, and not the Taliban's sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, all longstanding U.S. concerns — currently remains "the existential, strategic threat to Afghanistan."

Allen's assessment was in some ways unsurprising: The Obama administration is considering an accelerated drawdown of forces there — from a peak of 63,500 in 2012 to as few as 5,000 next year — at least partly due to frustration over the country's kleptocratic political culture.

Independent experts, congressional panels, and John Sopko, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, have all voiced similar criticisms that Washington and its allies failed to combat what is now generally recognized as that war-torn nation's most intractable and consequential problem.

But the Joint Chiefs of Staff report stands out for two reasons: It makes clear that some senior officers recognize that a major military incursion can be disastrously undermined by an overriding, non-military factor, namely an illicit national economy. And it acknowledges that the U.S. military itself bears much blame for Afghanistan's enduring mess, due to its poor understanding of Afghan traditions, mismanagement of key reform efforts, and weak oversight of its local partners.

The report displays "a critical awareness and candor often missing from official documents," says Sopko, the special inspector general.

The depth of the problem should have been clearer, the report suggests, from polls showing that many Afghan citizens believed local officials abused their power and that federal decision-making was itself corrupt. Some citizens viewed the Taliban and its shadowy judicial processes as less prone to the bribery, selective prosecution, and extortion that permeated official government actions.

But international and U.S. forces headquarters were mostly clueless about how to respond, the report suggested. It quoted a complaint from the head of the Defense Contract Management Agency's efforts in the country that none of the military services "man, train, or equip for countering corruption." A senior military adviser to the Afghan Interior Ministry said this shortcoming played into contractors' hands and made those deployed seem like "amateurs confronted with professionals."