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The $148 billion failure: Watchdog’s final report excoriates America’s attempt to rebuild Afghanistan

After nearly two decades of oversight, SIGAR will conclude its work early next year.

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/12/watchdogs-final-report-highlights-us-govs-148-billion-afghanistan-reconstruction-failure/409909/

Excerpt:

More than $148 billion was spent by the U.S. government in its failed attempt to build a free Afghanistan, according to the final report by the official watchdog office, whose careful documentation of waste and fraud, and its warnings of Taliban resurgence, went largely unheeded.

For 17 years, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, tracked every dollar allocated to the country for security, development, and humanitarian aid. As early as 2012, the office saw signs that the U.S. government and military’s efforts were falling short.

“A lot of people knew this wasn’t working. This war wasn’t working. In our quarterly reports we would report on ‘the number of districts falling to the Taliban is increasing’,” Gene Aloise, SIGAR’s acting inspector general, told reporters at a Defense Writers Group roundtable on Wednesday. “Our quarterly reports laid out what was happening, and you could predict the future based on what we were saying.”

Aloise spoke as SIGAR released its final report, a 125-page “forensic audit” that condenses its thousands of pages of analysis and documentation of the Afghanistan-reconstruction effort, which consumed more money than was sent to Europe under the post-World War II Marshall Plan. Per the 2025 defense authorization act, the office will close Jan. 31.

“The mission promised to bring stability and democracy to Afghanistan, yet ultimately delivered neither,” the report said. “The outcome in Afghanistan should serve as a cautionary tale for policymakers contemplating similar reconstruction efforts in the future.”

“If there is one overarching lesson to be learned from a tragedy that unfolded over 20 years, it is that any U.S. mission similar in context, scale, and ambition must confront the real possibility of failure,” it said.

Aloise said the group’s independent nature and fierce pursuit of information should also inform future watchdogs—but he fears they won’t.

Scrapped aircraft, vacant hotels, and corrupt contracts

Since SIGAR began its investigations in 2008, the watchdog has determined that $26 billion to $29 billion allocated to Afghanistan reconstruction efforts disappeared to waste, fraud, and abuse.

The U.S. government’s counternarcotics missions in Afghanistan accounted for a large chunk of wasted funds. A June 2018 SIGAR report identified that despite spending $7.3 billion on counter-drug efforts, the country was still “the world’s largest opium supplier.” and rampant corruption in the nation’s narcotics industry “made U.S. efforts to stabilize the country challenging, if not impossible.”

In 2015, SIGAR found that a $355 million USAID power plant was operating at “less than one percent of its capacity.” The next year, it found that $85 million in loans meant to build a hotel and apartments across from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul had not been repaid and had produced only “abandoned empty shells.” In 2018, it found that $486 million for 20 G-222 aircraft for the Afghan air force, purchased for $486 million, fell short of operational requirements. Some were collecting dust; others had been scrapped for “six cents per pound.”

Poor quality work by contractors also led to U.S. service member deaths, SIGAR reported. In 2012, two soldiers were killed after an improvised explosive device hidden in a culvert on a frequently used highway route detonated. An Afghan-owned construction company tasked with installing grates over the culverts did not follow contact specifications, which made them “easy to breach,” SIGAR found, adding “the company’s deceit and shoddy work made it possible for insurgents to bypass the grates and plant explosives that killed the two soldiers.”

Through investigations of criminal activity, SIGAR agents helped convict 171 U.S. and Afghan defendants, which resulted in nearly $1.7 billion in fines, restitutions, asset forfeitures, settlements and savings, the report detailed.

Aloise told reporters that the rampant corruption was perhaps the largest factor that undermined the U.S. government’s efforts in Afghanistan.

“The biggest thing throughout the whole 20 years was corruption. Corruption affected everything,” Aloise said. “It turned the population against the government that we were trying to build over there. It weakened the armed forces, it weakened everything we tried to do.”

.....About 60 percent of the $148 billion went to security initiatives, SIGAR’s report said. Some of that went to buy arms and materiel for the Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces, included 96,000 ground vehicles, 51,180 general or light tactical vehicles, 23,825 humvees, nearly 900 armored combat vehicles, 427,300 weapons, 17,400 helmet-worn night vision devices, and at least 162 aircraft.

When the United States evacuated in August 2021, it left behind roughly $7.1 billion in equipment it had given the ANDSF, the Defense Department concluded. All of it fell into the hands of the Taliban.

“As noted above, due to the Taliban takeover, SIGAR was unable to inspect any of the equipment provided to, or facilities constructed for, the ANDSF following the Afghan government’s collapse,” the report read. “These U.S. taxpayer-funded equipment, weapons, and facilities have formed the core of the Taliban security apparatus.”

.....In May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a review of the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan......