Exclusive: What Afghanistan reveals about America’s unfinished wars

For decades, a gap has persisted between the United States’ rhetoric of restraint and its continued reliance on military force abroad.

US President Donald Trump campaigned on ending the “endless wars” and avoiding foreign entanglements, yet his administration has continued to rely on coercive measures abroad, including operations in Venezuela earlier this month. 

More recently, Washington has signalled a willingness to escalate militarily against Iran, further underscoring the gap between its stated restraint and its actions.

That contradiction sits at the core of America’s long interventionist history, and nowhere are its costs more exposed than in Afghanistan.

More than two decades after the US invasion, a final assessment of the war’s reconstruction effort has delivered a stark verdict on how, and why, that project failed. 

A report released on December 1 by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) details how billions of dollars were lost to waste, corruption, and poorly designed programmes that Afghanistan’s institutions were never equipped to sustain.

Created by Congress in 2008, SIGAR was tasked with overseeing nearly $150 billion allocated to rebuild Afghanistan’s security forces, government institutions, and economy after the 2001 invasion. 

Over the next 18 years, the watchdog repeatedly warned that the US strategy was fragmented, timelines were unrealistic, and vast sums were invested in projects the Afghan state could not sustain – failures that ultimately contributed to the rapid collapse of the US-backed government in 2021 and the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul.

Yet behind SIGAR’s findings lies a deeper question: why did these failures persist for so long despite years of internal warnings and mounting evidence that the reconstruction effort was going off course? 

Jordan Kane, a policy analyst who worked on SIGAR’s Lessons Learned program, tells TRT World in an exclusive interview that the answer lies less in technical errors and more in the structural features of US foreign policy that still prioritise military solutions over diplomacy and long-term institution-building.

“The United States has a predisposition towards armed conflict and exerting its will on other countries via force,” Kane tells TRT World.

“This destructive impulse transcends political divisions and stretches across decades.”

Kane argues that economic and political incentives inside Washington helped sustain the war even as its failures became undeniable. 

Major defence contractors, she notes, maintain facilities across dozens of states, creating what scholars have described as a built-in political constituency for continued defence spending. 

“The F-35 fighter jet has parts manufactured in 45 states,” she says, “which makes it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to rationalise or reduce defence budgets, even in the face of damning evidence like SIGAR’s.”

Beyond its military role, the F-35 programme underpins a vast US defence-industrial network, sustaining tens of thousands of jobs across aerospace manufacturing, engineering, and advanced technology sectors.

“Sixty percent of all reconstruction spending went to security,” she said, citing SIGAR’s final report. “And 91 percent of that was used to sustain the military and police forces of the former Afghan government — a capacity the US military does not maintain outside of large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns.”

As a result, Afghan forces were structurally dependent on US support and collapsed once that support was withdrawn.

Today, more than half of Afghanistan’s estimated population of 42 million relies on humanitarian aid to meet basic needs, a stark reversal from the self-sufficiency repeatedly promised during the reconstruction effort. 

When the money stopped

International funding has declined sharply since 2021, as the US, EU member states, and major multilateral donors such as the World Bank and UN agencies redirected attention to other global crises and remained hesitant to engage with the Taliban government, who are not internationally recognised.  

Only Russia has recognised the de facto Taliban government. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Pakistan, and Uzbekistan have appointed or accepted Taliban ambassadors or restored diplomatic ties, signalling pragmatic engagement without full diplomatic recognition.

The funding shortfall worsened in 2025 due to the near-total global disbanding of the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) operations, leaving international and local aid agencies struggling to fill the gap.

As a result, only a fraction of the $3.1 billion requested by the United Nations for Afghanistan in 2025 has been secured.

Taliban spokesperson and deputy information minister Zabihullah Mujahid has urged donors to separate humanitarian assistance from politics, arguing that aid distribution has improved under the current authorities. 

“The women and children of Afghanistan need humanitarian assistance,” he said, claiming that a significantly larger share of aid now reaches vulnerable communities.

The impact of the funding collapse is becoming increasingly visible on the ground.  

More than 400 healthcare facilities have closed, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without access to food and medical services, while doctors warn that children are dying from illnesses that could be easily treated with adequate support.

“I was surprised and disappointed to see that, when the administration dismantled the US Agency for International Development and significant portions of the State Department, they also dismantled the parts of these two agencies that specialised in conflict prevention and stabilisation across the globe in places as diverse as Libya, Haiti, and the Sahel,” Kane says.

These government entities were the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) and USAID’s Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization (CPS), tasked with conflict prevention, stabilisation, and early intervention.

The decision surprised Kane and many stabilisation experts, she says, because until recently this work had enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Washington.

A conflict significantly misunderstood

For many US officials and aid workers in Afghanistan, the collapse of the Afghan government in 2021 came as a shock. 

For those working within the system, the government appeared to be deeply embedded in the core structure of the intervention itself. 

Efforts to make reconstruction programmes “sustainable” continued even as Afghanistan’s government and economy remained almost entirely dependent on foreign funding, creating a fundamental mismatch between expectations and reality. 

“The collapse of the internationally supported Afghan government was something that felt inevitable to me as far back as 2011, when I was leaving Afghanistan,” Kane says. “I worked for USAID at the time, and we were constantly being pushed to make our work ‘more sustainable,’” she says.

“On its own, that’s a critical and noble goal, but at the level I was at, it was impossible, as the whole government and economy were externally financed.”

The US-led invasion in Afghanistan was never structured to be sustainable under the political constraints Washington was willing to accept, Kane argues. 

“The only way that the intervention might have been sustainable would have been for it to have been much less ambitious by an order of magnitude and somehow also an enduring Western commitment,” she says, adding that this would have required a decades-long presence similar to the US role in South Korea or Germany that involves permanent bases and security guarantees.

Years after the war, one of the clearest lessons to emerge from Afghanistan is how profoundly the conflict was misunderstood by those tasked with managing it. 

Former US officials and humanitarian workers have since described a conflict shaped not only by violence, but also by warped perceptions of allegiance, legitimacy, and authority 

Drawing from her experience working with USAID in Kandahar during the height of the conflict, Kane describes how counterinsurgency doctrine and intelligence practices collided with the daily realities facing Afghan civilians, which frequently resulted in deadly consequences for those caught between the Taliban and the US-backed government.

In Kandahar City, a local community elder responsible for overseeing a US-funded road construction project became entangled in the realities of Afghanistan’s war economy, Kane recalls.

Although backed by a US Army unit and employed through a USAID programme, he was found to be paying a 20 percent tax to the Taliban, who controlled the surrounding area, under pressure from a brother affiliated with the group. 

Such payments were reportedly not an anomaly but a widely understood cost of operating in southern Afghanistan, where families often spread their allegiances between the government and the Taliban as a means of survival, insulating themselves against whichever side ultimately prevailed.

“My Army colleagues then overheard my wakil (community representative) colleague’s brother demand that he steal a motorcycle from the project,” Kane says. 

“My colleague refused to steal the motorcycle and he was shot in the face shortly thereafter in retaliation. While I was living on a heavily guarded base and travelling via helicopter or MRAP, he was living in Kandahar City unprotected, without even a gun license for self-protection. 

“Prior to his death, I had been trying to convince the State Department to distribute body armour that was collecting dust in a storage facility to our Afghan counterparts, who were regularly being killed and begging me for things like a gun permit in meetings. 

“He was not the enemy or a terrorist sympathiser or any of the ugly things I’m sure he was called; he was a victim of the war who was just trying to stay alive and protect his family.”

Political censorship 

Between 2017 and 2025, SIGAR’s Lessons Learned programme operated with an unusually broad mandate: to challenge official narratives, publicly expose uncomfortable findings, and push government accountability into the national spotlight. 

Under then-Inspector General John Sopko, staff were encouraged to write in plain language, engage directly with the press, and ensure that oversight reports reached beyond Washington bureaucracies to the American public. 

That culture began to erode in 2021, when material implicating former US-backed Afghan president Ashraf Ghani’s inner circle in election manipulation was removed from a SIGAR report prior to publication, according to Kane. 

The shift accelerated after Sopko’s removal in January 2025, when Trump dismissed him alongside dozens of other inspectors general.

What followed, Kane says, was a sharp turn towards internal self-censorship, driven by fear of political retaliation rather than factual dispute. 

Senior leadership, she says, began gradually narrowing the scope of analysis deemed politically sensitive. 

“Under the Acting IG who replaced Sopko, our Front Office was afraid of attracting the attention of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Therefore, they began heavily censoring our work, particularly the report I had led for two years, which they named A Broken Aid System without my input,” Kane says.

“They stripped out parts of the report that were politically inconvenient, even if they were continuations of policy, not political analysis that the Lessons Learned Program had produced for years. 

“I had been writing about the fact that the lower the number of dollars overseen, generally the more effective and efficient contracting was for years in public reporting. However, during the dismantling of USAID and many of the foreign assistance offices at State, SIGAR’s senior leaders censored this analysis out of the report.”

The consequences of that internal narrowing, she says, extended far beyond Afghanistan, undermining the core mission of inspectors general across government: to expose fraud, waste, and abuse, regardless of political discomfort.

This constriction of what could be said inside government did not occur in isolation. It reflected a broader contradiction in US foreign policy, one in which official language increasingly emphasised restraint and disengagement even as the machinery of intervention remained largely intact.

The publication of SIGAR’s final report was intended to mark an endpoint, a definitive accounting of a twenty-year war and the reconstruction effort that accompanied it. 

Instead, for those who worked on it, the document arrived after much of its substance had already been stripped away. 

What was presented as closure was, in reality, a diminished record of lessons, shaped as much by internal political pressure as by the failures it sought to document.

“The political censorship by SIGAR’s own senior leadership had been crippling for so many months by the time that the Final Report came out, I had personally achieved closure about that work and chapter of my career long ago,” Kane says.

“It was the highlight and greatest honour of my career to serve the American people and try to help the Afghan people through my work at SIGAR to expose waste and improve policymaking,” she says.

“But the end of my time at SIGAR was most intensely characterised by anger at the premature dismantlement from within of an incredibly valuable US government office.”