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. Several officials pointed to the 2020 Doha Agreement—the peace deal negotiated by the Taliban and the first Trump administration—saying it “ultimately sealed Afghanistan’s fate by undermining the Afghan government’s legitimacy and emboldening the Taliban,” the report read. “My sense was that by 2012, very few people thought the insurgency could be defeated and that we could leave the Afghan government fully in control of things,” Carter Malkasian, a former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told SIGAR in December 2021.
Author: Thomas Novelly
Published at: 2025-12-03 23:03:57
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