A government watchdog agency that tracked the financial costs of America’s two-decade military campaign in Afghanistan will shut its doors at the end of January.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction is an independent U.S. oversight agency established by Congress in 2008 to investigate and report on more than $148 billion spent on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.
SIGAR released its final report in December, noting that the U.S. spent more money on the ambitious but ultimately futile effort to create a democratic Afghanistan than it did on the post-World War II Marshall Plan, which spent about $135 billion in today’s dollars to rebuild more than a dozen European countries ravaged by conflict.
The SIGAR website is no longer functioning as the agency continues its planned termination process. The final archived version, featuring all of SIGAR’s public reports, has been delivered to the U.S. government’s “cyber cemetery.” The archive, based at the University of North Texas, preserves websites and publications from defunct government agencies and commissions.
“SIGAR expected the archived version of the SIGAR.mil website would be available online in the CyberCemetery shortly after the active SIGAR.mil website ceased,” the watchdog group said Wednesday. “As of today, it is not. SIGAR does not know why.”
About $7.1 billion worth of U.S.-funded military weapons and hardware were left behind in Afghanistan when American forces completed their withdrawal in August 2021. The weapons were intended for the Afghan defense and security forces, but fell into the hands of the Taliban.
Also lost to Taliban forces was $24 billion in civilian and military infrastructure paid for by U.S. taxpayers, according to the SIGAR report.
Gene Aloise, the acting head of SIGAR, blamed corruption by Afghan officials for most of the waste from America’s longest war. He compared the government in Kabul to a “white-collar criminal enterprise.”
“Corruption affected everything,” Mr. Aloise told The Washington Times last month when the final report was released. “It turned the people against the government we were trying to build there. It weakened the armed forces. It weakened everything we tried to do.”
The Obama and Trump administrations were largely supportive of the work SIGAR was doing, but Mr. Aloise said that wasn’t the case with the Biden administration.
“They wouldn’t talk to us. They wouldn’t work with our people. They told their people not to work with our people,” he said. “Never in 50 years have I seen such pushback. It took a bipartisan effort in Congress to get that work started again.”
