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US wasted billions on nation-building project in Afghanistan

By Yaron Steinbuch

December 9, 2019 | 2:46pm

Despite vows by President Trump and his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama that Washington would not engage in “nation-building,” the US has tried to do just that in war-ravaged Afghanistan, according to a report.

Since 2001, the US has allocated $133 billion for reconstruction, aid programs and the Afghan security forces, spending more on nation-building there than in any other country in history, according to the Washington Post.

Adjusted for inflation, that is more than the US spent in Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II — but, unlike the recovery program from 1948 in which the government gave over $12 billion in economic assistance, the nation-building project in Afghanistan quickly went off the rails, the paper reported.

Diplomats, military officials and aid workers who played a direct role in the conflict said in confidential government interviews obtained by the Washington Post that instead of creating stability and ushering in peace, Washington unwittingly built a corrupt, dysfunctional government that depends on US military power.

American officials have said the government in Kabul will need billions more dollars in aid each year, for decades, to survive.

The officials who were interviewed said the US foolishly tried to reinvent Afghanistan in its own image by imposing a centralized democracy and a free-market economy on the ancient, destitute, tribal society.

To make matters worse, they said, the White House and Congress flooded Afghanistan with far more money than it could absorb — peaking during Obama’s first term, when he raised the number of troops in the war zone to 100,000, according to the report.

“During the surge there were massive amounts of people and money going into Afghanistan,” David Marsden, a former official with the US Agency for International Development, told government interviewers.

“It’s like pouring a lot of water into a funnel; if you pour it too fast, the water overflows that funnel onto the ground. We were flooding the ground,” he said, according to the Washington Post.

Despite improvements including an economy that has almost quintupled and infant mortality rates that have plummeted, the American nation-building project has backfired enough that even foreign-aid advocates suggested that Afghanistan might have been better off without any US assistance, the documents show.

“I mean, the writing is on the wall now,” Michael Callen, an economist with the University of California at San Diego who specializes in the Afghan public sector, told government interviewers.

“We spent so much money and there is so little to show for it,” he said.

Many officials said the “overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything,” according to the paper.

Much of the money, they said, lined the pockets of greedy contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while schools, clinics and roads financed by the US fell into disrepair.

Some said the outcome was foreseeable, citing the US track record of military interventions in other countries, including Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Haiti and Somalia.

“We just don’t have a post-conflict stabilization model that works,” Stephen Hadley, who served as White House national security adviser under Bush, told the interviewers.

“Every time we have one of these things, it is a pickup game. I don’t have any confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better,” he added.

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