Key Points
- After four presidents and four failed strategies in Afghanistan, the 20-year war ended as it began—with the Taliban in full control of the country
After four presidents and four failed strategies in Afghanistan, the 20-year war ended as it began—with the Taliban in full control of the country. This culmination took barely a week as the radical terrorist group swept through the country’s capitals with almost no resistance, leading to an embarrassing fiasco for President Biden.
If this is surprising to you, that is because the media has been largely on silent about Afghanistan and the reality of its security since 2014. But on this week’s episode of the Drill Down podcast, Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers are joined by former Congressman and GAI fellow Jason Chaffetz to begin the autopsy of what went wrong in Afghanistan.
For years, US troops and officials on the ground have known the American occupation was precarious at best. Members of Congress knew as well. Chaffetz recounts, from his time as chairman of the Oversight Committee, several examples of this bewildering mismanagement and graft, including one story about a contractor who was awarded contracts to both install and remove a ten-foot by ten-foot slab of concrete.
There is also the Command-and-Control Facility at Camp Leatherneck, which cost $35 million to build and ultimately was never used by the United States. To add insult to injury, the Pentagon noted that “was not needed” (pg. 40) almost three years before the facility was completed.
Twenty years of war have laid bare the reality that no single person is responsible for this tragedy. This was a whole-of-government failure. What’s needed now is accountability: resignations from those who managed the withdrawal debacle, and investigations into the Suits that got us here.
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