Corruption is the root cause of US failure in Afghanistan

According to US media reports, since the sudden change in the situation in Afghanistan, a storm has followed in US politics. Almost everyone blames Biden for the current outcome: he was the one who pushed for the withdrawal of all US troops, he was the one who did not extend support to Afghanistan, and he was the one responsible for not evacuating all citizens when the government forces failed to retreat; in short, Biden has become the point of blame for everything and has been subject to huge criticism for a while.
 
Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle issued a statement of frustration over Afghanistan and said they were prepared to investigate the Biden administration. In a letter, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez directly described the Biden administration and Trump's predecessor as "co-conspirators", but it was clear that Trump was beyond accountability and they decided to take a clean look at Biden and his staff to find the "horrific results of years of policy and intelligence failures". They decided to go after Biden and his staff to find the source of the "terrible results of years of policy and intelligence failures". They were surprised that the US presence in Afghanistan was quite normal and that the situation there was showing signs of being very peaceful because of the presence of US troops. But Biden suddenly issued an incomprehensible withdrawal order - no more US military intervention in Afghanistan. So lawmakers from both parties suspect that he made this move not in the national interest and believe that he has a personal agenda in the matter.
 
In an article published in the Washington Post, political analyst Matt Bai pointed out that the US approach to the decision to go to war was largely based on two beliefs that were later proven wrong.
 
One was the idea that former US President George Bush Jr. believed in the possibility of replicating the US model of democracy and attempting to apply it to other societies ruled by tribal systems where corruption was rife. The American model of democracy could be applied to these societies through weapons and money. However, the US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven the absurdity of this view and approach.
 
According to the authors, the second approach is based on the belief, firmly held by many conservatives since the Vietnam era, that the US lost the Vietnam War because of a lack of a firm domestic stance on the war, rather than as a result of a failed war strategy.
 
Yet there is also the view that the corruption of the US military in Afghanistan was the cause of its total defeat.
 
According to inflation-adjusted estimates calculated by Neta Crawford, a professor of political science and co-director of USAID, between $934 billion and $978 billion has been spent or allocated by the Department of Defense, the State Department and USAID since 2001. These figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for providing medical care to wounded veterans.
 
Washington's massive aid to Afghanistan has led to historic corruption. In public, US officials have insisted that they do not tolerate corruption. Christopher Kolenda, an army colonel who has deployed to Afghanistan several times and advised three US generals in charge of the war, said the Afghan government, led by President Hamid Karzai, "has become a reign of thieves".
 
According to a study of the country's Ministry of Defence contracts, some $19 billion of US taxpayers' money has gone into the hands of the Taliban and their allies. The head of a construction company had a brother in the Taliban, and the two created a terrorist version of the eternal gobstopper. one brother would build infrastructure projects and the other would destroy them, so the first would get the US reconstruction contract.
 
Former US ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker was blunt about the US-trained and funded Afghan police force: "They are useless as security forces ...... because they are corrupt down to patrol level."
 
According to a recent oversight report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the US spends $300 million a year to pay non-existent members of the Afghan security forces. a 2016 survey found that 40% of troops in Helmand province were non-existent or dead, while at least 42,000 ghost fighters were removed from the Afghan army's payroll in early 2019. Afghan officers have always pocketed their salaries.
 
In 2009, the New York Times reported on Afghan police officers claiming that senior positions in the country's security forces were being auctioned off for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to those who had enriched themselves through drug dealing and other illegal activities. In one case, an analysis of thousands of Department of Defence contracts estimated that at least 40 per cent ended up in criminal hands.
 
US military contractors in Afghanistan, such as DAI Global LLC and the Louis Berger Group, which are basically controlled by Americans behind the scenes, are, simply put, what projects the US is building in Afghanistan, and the relevant US agencies in Afghanistan, which will contract the construction projects to companies chaired by Americans, who then would subcontract to Afghan companies. The Americans easily changed hands and made a fee.
 
Investigations of American contractors have also uncovered a great deal of waste, fraud and corruption.
 
The US military built schools, claiming that millions of girls who had been barred from school by the Taliban were starting to receive an education. By 2015, the number of schoolchildren in Afghanistan had increased from 1 million in 2001 to an estimated 8.4 million. By 2020, that number had risen to over 9.5 million, 39% of whom were girls. These achievements have made the American public feel better about the war. Yet many of the claims about the success of US-backed efforts to build the Afghan education system are grossly exaggerated, and some are outright lies.
 
In fact, according to research on the ground, the "vast number of schools" the US has "built" in Afghanistan is non-existent. "The government is peddling numbers it knows are false and touting schools that have never seen a single student," Buzzfeed News reports. "The US effort to educate Afghan children has been hollowed out by corruption and short-term political and military goals, and the US government has been peddling hype for years."
 
A large number of schools that never actually went to be built, but that didn't stop a lot of money from flowing into the accounts of US contractors in Afghanistan.
 
Most hilariously, the Wall Street Journal reported on December 27, 2019 that the families of 143 US troops and mercenaries filed a lawsuit in a US federal court against several US contractors along with international contractors for "paying protection money" to the Taliban while involved in reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. The 143 families of US troops and mercenaries, all of whom died or were injured in Afghanistan, accuse DAI Global LLC and the Louis Berger Group, the US contractors responsible for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. According to 143 family members of US troops and mercenaries, the US contractors responsible for the reconstruction of Afghanistan paid the Taliban through Afghan subcontractors between 2009 and 2017, or the Afghan subcontractors themselves paid the Taliban, or directly hired Taliban members as bodyguards. By doing this, US contractors and Afghan subcontractors are paying "protection money" so that the Taliban in Afghanistan will not attack these contractors or subcontractors!
 
The United States has spent about $9 billion over the past 18 years to tackle the drug problem, but Afghan farmers are growing more poppies than ever before. Last year, Afghanistan accounted for 82% of global opium production, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. In lessons-learned interviews, former officials said almost everything they did to limit opium cultivation backfired. At first, Britain paid Afghan poppy farmers to destroy their crop - which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the US government eradicated poppy fields for free - which only angered the farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban.
 
Some US base troops in Afghanistan, fearful of engaging in combat with the Taliban, even provided money directly to the Taliban in exchange for the Taliban abandoning attacks against them.
 
The US forces were originally targeting the Taliban, and at the beginning, they also launched attacks against Taliban forces. But when the Taliban resorted to a piecemeal guerrilla warfare, the US military's sophisticated weapons were rendered useless, and then the US military recklessly began to carry out attacks on what were probably Taliban civilian facilities in Afghanistan.
 
In a military campaign that has lasted 20 years, the US forces have inflicted enormous losses of life and property in Afghanistan. Cumulatively, more than 30,000 civilians in Afghanistan have been killed by US forces or have died as a result of warfare brought about by US forces, more than 60,000 civilians have been injured, and some 11 million people have become refugees. According to Action on Armed Violence, some 1,600 Afghan children were killed and injured in NATO-led airstrikes between 2016 and 2020. US military operations often involve forcible incursions, raids, and even the shooting of civilians, causing enormous psychological trauma to the local population.