U.S.

LESSONS LEARNED IN
AFGHANISTAN

HEARING
BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION

January 15, 2020

Serial No. 116–91

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs

(
Available: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/, http://docs.house.gov,
or http://www.govinfo.gov

U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

38–915PDF WASHINGTON : 2020
 COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS

ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York, Chairman

BRAD SHERMAN, California MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas, Ranking

GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York Member
ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey
GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida JOE WILSON, South Carolina
KAREN BASS, California SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania
WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts TED S. YOHO, Florida
DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois
AMI BERA, California LEE ZELDIN, New York
JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas JIM SENSENBRENNER, Wisconsin
DINA TITUS, Nevada ANN WAGNER, Missouri
ADRIANO ESPAILLAT, New York BRIAN MAST, Florida
TED LIEU, California FRANCIS ROONEY, Florida
SUSAN WILD, Pennsylvania BRIAN FITZPATRICK, Pennsylvania
DEAN PHILLIPS, Minnesota JOHN CURTIS, Utah
ILHAN OMAR, Minnesota KEN BUCK, Colorado
COLIN ALLRED, Texas RON WRIGHT, Texas
ANDY LEVIN, Michigan GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
ABIGAIL SPANBERGER, Virginia TIM BURCHETT, Tennessee
CHRISSY HOULAHAN, Pennsylvania GREG PENCE, Indiana
TOM MALINOWSKI, New Jersey STEVE WATKINS, Kansas
DAVID TRONE, Maryland MIKE GUEST, Mississippi
JIM COSTA, California
JUAN VARGAS, California
VICENTE GONZALEZ, Texas
JASON STEINBAUM, Staff Director
BRENDAN SHIELDS, Republican Staff Director

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 CONTENTS

Page

WITNESSES
Sopko, John, Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction .......... 5

APPENDIX
Hearing Notice ......................................................................................................... 88
Hearing Minutes ...................................................................................................... 89
Hearing Attendance ................................................................................................. 90

RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD

Responses to questions submitted for the record from Representative Castro .. 91
Responses to questions submitted for the record from Representative Phillips 98
Responses to questions submitted for the record from Representative Omar .... 102

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 U.S. LESSONS LEARNED IN AFGHANISTAN
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
House of Representatives
Committee on Foreign Affairs

WASHINGTON, DC
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room 2172
Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Eliot Engel (chairman of the
committee) presiding.
Mr. SHERMAN [presiding]. The committee will come to order. The
chairman’s staff has asked me to sit in for a bit. Without objection,
all members will have 5 days to submit statements, extraneous ma-
terials, and questions for the record, subject to length limitations
in the rules.
Pursuant to notice, we are here today to examine the lessons
from America’s war effort in Afghanistan.
Inspector General Sopko, welcome to the Foreign Affairs Com-
mittee. I look forward to learning the lessons of Afghanistan, but
also getting some input as to what we should do in the future. Our
casualties in Afghanistan over the last 6 years have averaged
roughly ten. We mourn those deaths; we take them seriously. But
compared to the other conflicts we are engaged in, compared to the
training deaths we suffer in our military, we cannot have the ex-
haustion of 10 years ago blind us to what is the operation now and
what is its cost.
I know the chairman has an opening statement, but I will first
recognize the ranking member, then I will recognize our witness for
his opening statement, and hopefully by then we will hear the
chairman’s opening statement.
Mr. McCaul.
Mr. MCCAUL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, pro tem.
The United States has been in Afghanistan for almost 19 years.
It is the longest war in the history of the United States. We sac-
rifice much on the battlefield, but we have also achieved a great
deal. We decimated al-Qaida and greatly weakened their global
network. As a result, Afghanistan has not been the staging ground
for another successful attack against our homeland.
After the 9/11 terror attacks, it was clear that our approach to
foreign threats and intelligence efforts needed to change. We could
no longer sit back and wait while our enemies plotted attacks thou-
sands of miles away. We needed to go on the offense, and we did.
Our presence in the region allowed us to capture Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, kill Osama bin Laden, and,
more recently, remove his son Hamza from the battlefield.
I visited Ambassador Crocker there many times and saw first-
hand the challenges we faced and the opportunities we had to suc-
ceed. We have led the charge on other important issues as well be-
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 2

yond those on the battlefield. They include supporting democracy

and women’s rights, countering the drug trade, developing the pri-
vate sector, promoting economic growth, fighting corruption, stabi-
lizing former Taliban-controlled districts, among others, and this
type of work does not always make the news, but it is vital to our
future and our security.
But unfortunately, there have been many costly missteps. We
know about these missteps because of the important work per-
formed by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Recon-
struction. Since 2001, the United States has spent an estimated
$132 billion on development assistance. One hundred and thirty-
two billion. SIGAR has found that much of this money was wasted,
stolen, or failed to address the problems it was meant to fix.
This is clearly not the best use of American tax dollars. For ex-
ample, we have spent nine billion on counternarcotics programs,
yet today Afghanistan is the largest producer of opium, which fi-
nances our enemies. How is it possible that after two decades, bil-
lions of dollars spent, and thousands of lives lost, we still cannot
slow drug production? Our efforts in counternarcotics have clearly
failed.
We have also learned that our strategy to build an Afghan army
and police force has not made the security situation any better. A
lack of coordination, the misuse of funds, and insufficient training
for Afghans has failed to reduce violence across the country. This
is completely unacceptable. And the publication of the Afghanistan
Papers in the Washington Post last month serves as a sober re-
minder of our past mistakes and underscores the importance of the
Trump Administration’s efforts to end this war.
The American people have been very patient with our involve-
ment. We have sacrificed greatly. In fact, two American soldiers
lost their lives in an attack this weekend. We owe it to them and
to others who have served to finally get this right. We need to step
back and learn from the mistakes we have made. SIGAR’s Lessons
Learned Program initiated in 2014 offers key insights into the com-
plex challenges we face. These evaluations provide opportunities
for Congress and the executive branch to prevent the same mis-
takes from happening again in Afghanistan or in other operations
around the world.
So I would like to thank Mr. Sopko for his work on this very im-
portant report and for appearing here today before this committee.
And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. SHERMAN. Thank you.
We will now hear from John Sopko, the Special Inspector Gen-
eral for Afghanistan Reconstruction, for 5 minutes.

STATEMENT OF JOHN SOPKO, SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL

FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION
Mr. SOPKO. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and Ranking
Member McCaul and other members of the committee.
Congress created SIGAR in 2008 to combat waste, fraud, and
abuse in the U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. So far, we
have published over 600 audits, inspections, and other reports that
have saved the American taxpayer over three billion dollars, while
 3

convicting over 130 individuals for misconduct related to that re-

construction effort.
Although this is the twenty-second time I have presented testi-
mony to Congress since my appointment, today is the first time I
have been asked to address SIGAR’s rather unique Lessons
Learned Program and what we have learned from it. I thank you
for that opportunity. In light of the recent attention our reports
have gotten, I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity to
clear up any misconceptions about what that program does or does
not do.
As with everything produced by SIGAR, this Lessons Learned
Program’s mandate is limited just to reconstruction, not the
warfighting. We do not assess U.S. diplomatic and military strate-
gies nor our warfighting capabilities. Likewise, we are not pro-
ducing an oral history of our involvement in Afghanistan nor opin-
ing on whether we should or should not be there. Rather, we are
the only U.S. Government agency focused on conducting research
and analysis which meets strict professional standards aimed at
providing an independent and objective examination of U.S. recon-
struction efforts there and to make practical recommendations to
you, the Congress, and executive branch agencies for improving our
efforts there and elsewhere.
I would like to mention six overarching lessons that you can
draw from these thousands of pages of reports we have issued.
First, that successful reconstruction is incompatible with con-
tinuing insecurity. Second, unchecked corruption in Afghanistan
has undermined our goals there and, unfortunately, we helped fos-
ter that corruption.
Third, after the Taliban’s initial defeat there was no clear recon-
struction strategy and no single military service, agency, or country
in charge of reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. Fourth, politi-
cally driven timelines undermine our reconstruction efforts. Fifth,
the constant turnover of U.S. personnel, or what we have
euphemistically called the ‘‘annual lobotomy,’’ negatively impacted
all of our reconstruction efforts there. And, sixth, to be effective, re-
construction efforts must be based on a better understanding of the
historical, social, legal, and political traditions of the host nation.
In addition to these key lessons, your staff has asked us to give
you certain recommendations that you can focus on now, and here
are six: First, in light of the ongoing peace negotiations Congress
should ensure that the current administration has an actionable
plan for what happens the day after peace is declared. Second, to
ensure that Congress is made aware of problems in a timely man-
ner, it should require agencies to provide regular reports to Con-
gress disclosing risks to major reconstruction projects and pro-
grams as they occur. This would be analogous to the requirement
we impose upon publicly traded corporations for the SEC.
Third, Congress should condition future on-budget assistance on
a rigorous assessment of the Afghan ministries and international
trust funds to ensure that they have strong accountability meas-
ures in place. Fourth, oversight is still mission-critical in Afghani-
stan. Congress must require that this administration continues to
ensure adequate oversight, monitoring, and evaluation capabilities
continue.
 4

Fifth, Congress should require U.S. Government agencies to rack

and stack their programs and projects on at least an annual basis
to identify their best and worst performing programs. And sixth,
Congress should require State, DOD, and USAID to submit the
anticorruption strategy for reconstruction efforts that was man-
dated to be filed by June 2018 and still has not been filed that was
mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act.
So in conclusion, our work at SIGAR is far from done. For all the
lives and treasure the United States and its coalition partners have
expended in Afghanistan, the very least we can do is learn from
our successes and failures there to improve future operations. I
thank you very much for the opportunity to appear today and I
look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Sopko follows:]
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 53

Mr. ENGEL. Good morning. Our nation has been at war in Af-
ghanistan for more than 18 years. Eighteen years. And let that
sink in. More than 2,000 American lives lost and thousands more
wounded, more than 60 thousand Afghan deaths, and more than
$900 billion spent on a war that has dragged on for almost two dec-
ades, and this does not include what we will spend to take care of
our veterans in years to come. And where are we after all that
time? We are in a military stalemate.
In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan with a clear ob-
jective: defeat al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts and prevent a repeat
of September 11th. By December of that year, American and coali-
tion partners defeated the Taliban government. Many of its senior
leaders were dead, others fled into hiding. The following year, in
2002, President George W. Bush said, and I quote: The history of
military conflict in Afghanistan has been one of initial success fol-
lowed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We are not
going to repeat that mistake. Unquote.
And yet here we are today, 18 years later, having made precisely
that mistake. So what happened? There is a lot to unpack when
we look at what went wrong, but some things are clear. We got dis-
tracted by the war in Iraq under an administration whose priority
was defeating Saddam Hussein, not an end game in Afghanistan.
We entered into a questionable alliance with Pakistan which con-
tinued to arm and support the Taliban, providing the group safe
haven and allowing it to strengthen its hand in Afghanistan. We
changed missions, changed priorities, and lost sight of what was
once considered ‘‘the just war’’.
So our role in Afghanistan constantly evolved as we plodded
along year after year until what now feels like a never-ending war.
In 2008, Congress established a Special Inspector General for Af-
ghanistan Reconstruction, what we call SIGAR, to conduct over-
sight of the American war effort in Afghanistan. And in 2014, we
called on SIGAR to do something that had not been done, conduct
deep-dive, original research into the war to look at its successes,
its failures, and lessons learned. So today, we focus on those les-
sons learned.
This past December, the Washington Post published a review of
hundreds of interviews and documents SIGAR collected for the Les-
sons Learned Program after obtaining them through the Freedom
of Information Act. These documents and the Post’s excellent re-
porting help fill in some significant gaps in our understanding of
the U.S. war in Afghanistan. They show a years-long campaign of
misrepresentation by our military officials.
Year after year we heard, ‘‘we are making progress.’’ Year after
year we were ‘‘turning a corner.’’ Three successive administrations
of both parties promised that we would avoid falling into a trap of
nation building in Afghanistan. And while presidents and military
officials were painting a rosy picture, the reality on the ground was
a consistently deepening quagmire with no end in sight. It is a
damning record. It underscores the lack of honest public conversa-
tion between the American people and their leaders about what we
are doing in Afghanistan and why we are doing it.
Yet even in the light of this new information, the Trump Admin-
istration is not righting the ship on our Afghanistan policy.
 54

SIGAR’s Lessons Learned reports have confirmed the longstanding

view that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghani-
stan. Nevertheless, the Trump Administration, in 2017, announced
it would send more troops to Afghanistan and waited 18 months
before naming a special envoy to focus on Afghanistan reconcili-
ation. That is a heck of a long time when our troops are in the field
coming under fire.
Just this past September, this committee held a hearing after
President Trump derailed peace talks with the Taliban over Twit-
ter, as we have come to expect from the President. The announce-
ment came after over a year of the administration blocking key in-
formation from Congress and the American people about the status
of the war. Secretary Pompeo has, still to this day, refused to let
the top State Department negotiator in Afghanistan, Zalmay
Khalilzad, testify in an open hearing about the status of peace
talks despite a subpoena from this committee.
There is so much more for us to understand about how we wound
up here and how we move forward in Afghanistan so, Inspector
General Sopko, I am pleased you are here to discuss your findings
and share your perspectives. I will recognize you to make an open-
ing statement.
Oh, that you already gave; okay, pending which I will call my
friend, Mr. McCaul of Texas, for any further statements. No, Okay.
So our witness this morning is Inspector, Special Inspector Gen-
eral for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko. Inspector General
Sopko, I now recognize you for 5 minutes. And you have done that.
Okay.
So now it is time for questions.
Okay. Despite SIGAR’s very well documented and detailed ac-
count that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was failing, the
Trump Administration made no real change in strategy. The Presi-
dent’s 2017 South Asia strategy suggested the war would be won
on the battlefield or that it would use military power to force the
Taliban to the negotiating table under favorable terms. He even
dropped the mother of all bombs to shock and awe the Afghans into
bending to our will and it did not work. So my first question is, did
you make your reports available to the White House and other
parts of the Trump Administration, and when presented with evi-
dence that this war would not be won militarily, why do you think
the President sent even more troops to Afghanistan?
Mr. SOPKO. Mr. Chairman, thank you for that question. It is not
really my jurisdiction to evaluate strategic-level policy, so I cannot
really comment directly on why the President did or did not do. We
did brief senior staff. I spent over 2 hours briefing with my staff
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on our Lessons Learned
reports. We briefed senior officials at the State Department as well
as those at the NSC and elsewhere.
So we advise them on what has worked or what has not worked
on military policy and our report has highlighted a number of
things that have worked. I leave it up to them to make the decision
as to how to proceed on that, so I do not think I can really com-
ment further on it.
Mr. ENGEL. OK. In April 2002, President George W. Bush said,
and I quote: The history of military conflict in Afghanistan has
 55

been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering

and ultimate failure. We are not going to repeat that mistake. Un-
quote.
Looking back at this statement, President Bush was right, except
his administration and subsequent administrations did repeat that
mistake. After the initial military victory over the Taliban, there
have been long years of floundering and failure. There are many,
including those your office interviewed, that thought we lost focus
in Afghanistan because of the Bush Administration’s focus on Iraq.
So let me ask you, do you agree with that and to what would you
attribute this failure?
Mr. SOPKO. I am sorry, Mr. Chairman. I did not quite hear your
full question. Do I agree with what? That President Bush’s state-
ment or?
Mr. ENGEL. Well, President Bush said, and this is a quote: The
history of military conflict in Afghanistan has been one of initial
success followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.
We are not going to repeat that mistake. That is the end of the
quote.
And I am saying, looking back at this statement, the President
was right, President Bush, except his administration and subse-
quent administrations did repeat that mistake, subsequent admin-
istrations in both parties. After the initial military victory over the
Taliban, there have been long years of floundering and failure and
there are many, including those that your office interviewed, that
thought we lost focus in Afghanistan because of the Bush Adminis-
tration’s focus on Iraq.
So I am asking you if you agree with any of those and to what
would you attribute this failure?
Mr. SOPKO. We have reported in our Lessons Learned programs
that we did lose focus on Afghanistan and we allowed the Taliban
to basically come back and there was a resurgence of the Taliban.
We have noted that that was obviously a mistake. We have also
noted as a result there was a surge under the Obama Administra-
tion of troops as well as a surge on reconstruction or development
aid. So that was in response to that not focusing on the Afghani-
stan issue, sir.
Mr. ENGEL. Let me ask you a final question. I understand from
your letter to the editor of the Washington Post you feel that the
newspaper mischaracterized your effort, but how would you re-
spond to some of the observations of the interviewees? For exam-
ple, this quote from Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as
a senior counterinsurgency advisor to U.S. military commanders in
2013 and 2014, and this is a quote from Mr. Crowley.
‘‘Every data point was altered to present the best picture pos-
sible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable, but reinforced
that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-lick-
ing ice cream cone.’’ Could you comment on that, please?
Mr. SOPKO. I am happy to do that. That quote is similar to what
we have been reporting almost since I have become the Inspector
General. I noticed and it is not just in the military side, it is also
in the development side. And again, I do not focus on the
warfighting. I am the Inspector General for Reconstruction, not for
 56

how well of a job we did on the warfighting, but on the training

of the military we look at.
But there was a disconnect almost from my first trip over there
between what AID, State, and DOD were saying what was going
on and what I saw and what my staff were seeing on the ground.
That is one of the reasons why we performed or came about to do
the Lessons Learned reports. The problem is there is a disincen-
tive, really, to tell the truth. There is an incentive and it is for
many reasons, and we can go on.
I know my time is up, sir, but there are many reasons we can
discuss. We have created an incentive to almost require or for peo-
ple to lie. I do not want to sound like something from Burl Ives in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but there is an odor of mendacity through-
out the Afghanistan issue.
And I know Congressman Connolly has heard me talk about this
years ago, mendacity and hubris. You create from the bottom up
an incentive because of short timeframes, you are there for 6
months, 9 months, or a year, to show success. That gets reported
up the chain and before you know it, the President is talking about
a success that does not exist. And I think that is a good issue to
look at. Not whether there was lying, but why, and what does that
tell us about the way we do business, whether it is in Afghanistan
or maybe here in the United States.
Mr. ENGEL. Thank you.
Mr. McCaul.
Mr. MCCAUL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I remember visiting with General Wald who led our forces in
Tora Bora. He said if I just had a few more men, we could have
taken them out. And Ioften think about that because had we taken
out bin Laden in the early days, who knows, it would have changed
history. We would not have been talking about this two decades
later, $130 billion later. Who knows if we would have even gone
into Iraq had we taken out the perpetrator of 9/11.
And I have always thought that was our No. 1 mission in country
was to stop terror threats from attacking the homeland, and maybe
we got a little mission—maybe we got into things that perhaps we
should not have. I do think the days of occupying nations and re-
construction with the hope that Jeffersonian democracy is going to
plant its seeds and roots in retrospect, it may have been a little
naive. It is a very primitive country, Afghanistan, and I have been
there many times.
So to my question, as I would advise the President on Syria, a
residual force to protect the homeland, I do not think we can afford
to stay in these countries forever and occupy them forever. I think
the most important thing we can do though is to have a residual
force of some sort to take out terrorist threats to the homeland and
a counterterrorism mission, and maybe we lost sight of what our
mission really was in the first place.
And so, I guess, and I know you are not here to report on policy,
per se, but I would like your comments on that. And to that end,
what programs have been most effective at counterterrorism in
that mission?
Mr. SOPKO. Congressman, I think that is an excellent question.
And I can bring you up to the line to policy and I leave the policy
 57

to you. You have to remember, going back to that time the initial
reason we went in there were to find the people who killed our peo-
ple. Find them, punish them. But the second point was to make
certain that country, Afghanistan, was not a place where terrorists
could breed and attack us again.
So we were trying to create or help create a government that
could manage their country; up to then they could not. So that is
where, we call it nation building. I do not know. That is a word
that I think is abused more than actually defined. It is always de-
fined in the negative. We do not do nation building, somebody else
does. But we were trying to make certain that an Afghan Govern-
ment could keep those terrorists out, so that is why we did build
roads, we did do training. We are doing train, advise, and assist
right now. So those were the two points of that goal, of our goal
in going into Afghanistan.
Taking it to what has worked and what has not worked, we iden-
tify, and this is one of the things we were briefing Joe Dunford and
his team on, on this one Lessons Learned report, which I think
may have helped the President in his decision on what to do in Af-
ghanistan where we have consistency in our training and we bring
people over there for more than 6 months. And you see that par-
ticularly with the Special Forces training, excellent training.
And if you look at the Afghan military right now, the best units
that are fighting are the Special Forces, that our teams are con-
nected with them, they live with them, they work with them. The
other area where we had great success has been with the Afghan
Air Force. Again, the U.S. Air Force has done a wonderful job par-
ticularly with a couple of platforms, the A–29, I think is the best
one, where the Air Force, our mentors, worked for 4 years, 4 years
they spend working with the Afghan Air Force. And that is tremen-
dous; that is one of the best programs we have and we were advis-
ing the President and his team that is what you should do.
So it goes back to we should have actually done a more of a
racking and stacking of what worked and did not. The Afghan mili-
tary, and particularly the Afghan police, has been a hopeless night-
mare and a disaster and part of it is because we rotate units
through who are not trained to do the work and they are gone in
six to 9 months.
I do not blame the military, but you cannot bring in a Black
Hawk pilot to train an Afghan policeman on how to do police work.
And that is what we were doing, we are still doing.
Mr. MCCAUL. Well, this has been very insightful and it will help
us in making our recommendations to the administration. It seems
to me in conclusion that really training their Special Forces, their
Afghan National Defense and Security Forces and their Air Force
with the appropriate people may be the best strategy.
I know the President hopes he can negotiate with the Taliban.
I am a bit skeptical, sir, that you can never negotiate with the
Taliban. I know a complete withdrawal would involve an overrun
by the Taliban, for sure. They would probably take the country
over and then we would have a real mess. So this is very com-
plicated, but something needs to change. The status quo is not ac-
ceptable here.
Yes, sir.
 58

Mr. SOPKO. In response to that, Ranking Member, I agree totally.

But the important thing is you have to be given the facts.
Mr. MCCAUL. Yes.
Mr. SOPKO. To make that decision. And one of the concerns I
have raised for almost, again, the seven or eight or 9 years I have
been doing this—I cannot remember, they kind of merge after a
while—is that a lot of the facts that you need, you are not being
given. They are overclassified or they are not being collected or
they are just ignored.
So to this day, you do not have unless you go into the classified
briefing, and you know how difficult it is to use that, but you are
not told some of the basic facts that you need to make your decision
of whether you should fund programs or not. And I can go through
those lists at some time. That is a still a problem.
And when we talk about mendacity, when we talk about lying,
it is not just by lying about a particular program, it is lying by
omissions by saying, oh, I cannot tell you about the casualties; oh,
I cannot tell you about how good the Afghans are of its weapons;
or I cannot tell you this and that. It turns out that everything that
is bad news has been classified over the last few years.
Mr. MCCAUL. Well, we appreciate your hard work on this. Thank
you, sir.
Mr. ENGEL. Thank you.
Mr. Sherman.
Mr. SHERMAN. We cannot deny terrorists a few acres here or
there, after all, they plotted against us in an apartment building
in Hamburg, we need to prevent terrorists from getting a whole
State or a training facility as large as Tora Bora was in early 2001.
In evaluating our Afghan policy, I think we have got to get away
from looking at the sunk costs, the exhaustion of the last 18 years,
and look only at the future and see what are the future costs of
being involved and what future benefits, if any, are available.
The one lesson I have learned over the last 20 years is we are
very good at breaking things. We broke the Taliban and entered
Kabul. We broke Saddam Hussein’s army and entered Baghdad.
We are not very good at fixing things and at nation building and
so we should restrict our future military involvements to those
where our case for involvement is so strong that we are not morally
obligated to go in and fix it. The Pottery Barn rule should not
apply.
The worst example of our behavior was Iraq. We invaded even
a few days after Saddam Hussein said he would allow all the inter-
national inspections. We found no weapons of mass destruction.
And then to justify our behavior, we had to announce that we were
going to turn Iraq into a democracy with rule of law. I wonder how
well that is working out.
Mr. Sopko, you have shown us that our Afghan nation building
was not done well. Foreign Policy—Foreign Affairs magazine gives
our efforts there a D-minus, but going forward we are going to be
confronted with similar situations. Let’s say we had done a B job,
go with the Federal Government long enough not to expect an A
job. We did a B job.
One view is, we can do nation building at reasonable cost if we
learn from the lessons of Afghanistan and do it about as right as
 59

the government can do it. Another lesson is, we cannot do nation

building. Would a B job from the Federal Government had done the
job in Afghanistan?
Mr. SOPKO. I used to teach in college. I think if you even did a
D job—D.
Mr. SHERMAN. D.
Mr. SOPKO. It would have been OK in Afghanistan.
Mr. SHERMAN. So you are saying if we would had just—if——
Mr. SOPKO. D-minus and it would have worked a lot better.
Mr. SHERMAN. So you have given—what we did was an F, F-
minus, something like that?
Mr. SOPKO. E. You showed up. You showed up for class. That is
it.
All kidding aside——
Mr. SHERMAN. So you are saying that we can do nation building
if we do a good, the kind of good job that the Federal Government
is capable of doing?
Mr. SOPKO. Absolutely. And what we tried to do is we tried to
give the Afghans—and I think one of your staff asked us about
misassumptions that we have identified and there is a whole list
of them. One was trying to give the Afghans what we had when
they only wanted a little bit of peace and a little bit of justice. And
if you look at our report on stabilization, we talk about that.
Mr. SHERMAN. Got you.
Mr. SOPKO. The whole stabilization program was coming in after
our military cleared a district to try to bring in a government serv-
ices so that the locals would go back and support the central gov-
ernment. Well, they wanted a little bit of justice. What did we do?
We built courthouses. They were not looking for courthouses. They
were not looking for something that looked like this. They were
looking for just simple justice. And as much as you hate the
Taliban, and I do, and I hate their brand of justice, to the average
Afghan it is better than the justice provided by the National Unity
Government.
And that was one of my trips was the most shocking thing
where, and I believe, well, Congressman Connolly has left so I can
repeat the story so no one of you will be bored, but I came back
as so depressed because I met three, separately, three Afghans who
I had been working with, smart, young, brave Afghans who risk
their lives every day, and for some reason we all started talking
about their families. And their families lived in the countryside in
Afghanistan and every one of those young, smart, bright Afghans
told me a story where they recommended to their mothers and fa-
thers that if they had a justice problem, and all of them did, go to
the Taliban. Do not go to the local government.
Mr. SHERMAN. So instead of creating a government similar to
what Afghanistan had some time in the last 50 years, we tried to
create the kind of government we have in the United States.
Mr. SOPKO. We tried to create a little America. We tried to create
I call it Norway. What they wanted was fair justice. And what hap-
pened is if you went to the National Unity Government justice,
first of all, the judges weren’t there because they were afraid to go
there. You had to pay bribes, and it is the bribes that determined
 60

wherever you got the land or wherever the dowry was recognized
or whatever.
But the Taliban came in, it was rough justice and I am not advo-
cating Taliban justice. I remember I testified——
Mr. SHERMAN. Is there a period of time in Afghan’s history that
you would say the Afghan had the kind of government that those
villages would have wanted?
Mr. SOPKO. I think it probably would have been before the Soviet
invasion and it goes back to——
Mr. SHERMAN. And before the Communist regime that preceded
the——
Mr. SOPKO. And the Communist regime and the horror of that.
Mr. SHERMAN. I believe my time has expired.
Mr. ENGEL. Thank you, yes. Thank you, Mr. Sherman.
Mr. Smith.
Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And thank
you, Mr. Sopko, for your tenacity. Your frustration level must be
just vexing. I do not know how you do it.
Ranking Member McCaul just mentioned a moment ago about
Osama bin Laden. In another part of the world I visited with
Bashir in Khartoum in Sudan and I was there to talk about
Darfur, and he was almost mocking. And then when I met with
Salah Gosh, one of his people, was mocking as they offered us
Osama bin Laden before he went to Afghanistan and the Clinton
Administration would not take it.
So in terms of hindsight being 20/20, if only.
Let me just ask you a couple questions. You know, 130 convic-
tions, a thousand investigations, criminal and civil, 600 audits, in-
spections, and other reports, maybe you could break out for us and
maybe even do it more for the record, who were those people? Were
they Americans? Were they people from Afghanistan that were con-
victed and what were they convicted of? Where did they go to jail
when they were convicted?
Second, with regards to some examples, and I think your testi-
mony is just amazing, you talk about how in 2014, then USAID ad-
ministrator—and I know him, Dr. Shah. He was a very, very hon-
orable man and I wonder if the information even got to him that
you were trying to provide. But he had said there are three million
girls and five million boys enrolled in schools compared to just
90,000 when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, and you pointed out
that that information was gotten from the government and it was
contradicted by other government people and there was no attempt
to verify the accuracy. And I think that is very troubling.
You also point out on the rule of law programs, a billion dollars,
that in 2013 the strategy had no performance measures. I think
you know that is appalling and maybe you might want to touch on
that. And finally, you point out in the interviews for this Lessons
Learned Program, 80 percent of the people interviewed wanted
their names removed to be anonymous. Again, does that fall in—
was there retaliation against anyone as far as you know?
And that is a very, very, as you pointed out, (they have) a well-
founded fear of retribution from political and tribal enemies. Maybe
you could speak to that. And again, thank you.
 61

Mr. SOPKO. Those are all good questions. Let me start at the end.
On retaliation, we know of no retaliation but we are concerned.
One of the concerns I have is that there is a lawsuit now pending
and the Washington Post wants to get the names of all of our peo-
ple who asked for anonymity. As an IG, I cannot work if I cannot
offer anonymity and protection to a witness or a whistleblower.
Well, you know what, whistleblowers are a lifeblood as an inspec-
tor general or any law enforcement agency. I have law enforcement
credentials. You have to have them. I mean, I find it so ironic, this
is the same Washington Post, if I recall, had an informant that I
believe it was for 30 years they kept the identity of Deep Throat
from the American people, but for some reason we have a new
Washington Post where they want to know our informants.
These people who spoke to us risked a lot, and you know what
this town is like. You know what is like if somebody bad mouths
their old boss or whatever. These people had realistic fear and
whatever. We do not give them a litmus test of whether your fear
is reasonable or not. We just ask them if they want us to use their
name. And so that is so important.
So—but there is no retaliation that we know of. I mean in Af-
ghanistan the difference is that these people would be killed. Sim-
ple, OK. But I suppose the Washington Post wants their names for
some reason. Why? They have the information, why do they need
the name? But I do not want to go there.
The question, I believe, and I am sorry if I lost——
Mr. SMITH. The rule of law and also the education of children
and 130 convictions.
Mr. SOPKO. Oh, yes. That is, it is fact versus fantasy. This is this
problem that we identified early on, this odor of mendacity. There
was this exaggeration after exaggeration of what we accomplished.
And there is another example we give about the life expectancy,
where USAID Administrator Shah, and it went all the way up to
the President, were saying about how we had doubled the life ex-
pectancy. And we talked to experts in the health field. We talked
to experts at the CIA that said it was statistically impossible, sta-
tistically impossible to double the life expectancy of any country
over that timeframe.
But that is—and I am certain some President and some AID ad-
ministrator, I must say the current AID administrator is totally
different and he sticks to the records and he sticks to the facts. I
am so proud of——
Mr. SMITH. That would be Mark Green?
Mr. SOPKO. Yes, one of your former colleagues. He is a tremen-
dous person to work with. But we find this. But I think the prob-
lem is, again, we did not send liars and thieves and troublemakers
to Afghanistan to work for USAID or for the Department of De-
fense or whatever. We sent the bravest, the smartest—I do not
want to say always the smartest. But we sent the best that we had,
but we gave them a box of broken tools.
We gave them—let’s say if you were a contracting officer you are
rated on how much money you put on contract, not if any of the
contracts work. We rated not on outcomes, but on output. We sent
over military officers with 9 months or less of duty and they had
 62

to show success. You know, I have actually been briefed at one

point about these shark tooth of assessments.
The Afghan—you would be assigned to an Afghan unit. You
would come in and say, ‘‘The Afghan unit can’t walk and chew gum
at the same time.’’ Three months later, ‘‘I am seeing success. They
are getting better.’’ At the time of the end of your tour, ‘‘They are
doing very good. They are meeting all objectives.’’ You leave. The
next captain comes in, ‘‘These people can’t chew gum and walk at
the same time.’’
Why? It is not because that officer is a liar. That officer wants
to get promoted. That officer wants to show success over his tour
of duty. This is the problem we have. Our H.R. system is broken.
Our procurement system is broken. Our rotation system is broken,
you know, you go through the whole list. The problems you see in
Afghanistan are the problems you see of the way the government
operates here. That is the one thing I can say having spent 30
years looking at government operations, first, for Senator Sam
Nunn, then for John Dingell over here in the House.
Mr. ENGEL. Thank you.
Mr. Deutch.
Mr. DEUTCH. Thank you.
Mr. Sopko, good to see you again. Thanks for all of your work
and your team’s work conducting oversight of our policy, our efforts
in Afghanistan.
The publication of the Afghanistan Papers by the Post has ele-
vated an important discussion, but it is not the first attempt to
highlight problems with the U.S. role in Afghanistan. Congress es-
tablished SIGAR to help conduct oversight of the war. SIGAR has
written seven Lessons Learned reports; is that right, Mr. Sopko?
Mr. SOPKO. That is right.
Mr. DEUTCH. That touch on many of the issues covering the Af-
ghanistan Papers. A major concern is the U.S. was dragged into a
conflict in a country that it did not fully understand. There is more
information we should have, Mr. Sopko. I will get to that in a sec-
ond.
According to the Afghanistan Papers, in 2014 a senior State De-
partment official said, ‘‘If I were to write a book, its cover would
be, America goes to war without knowing why it does. We went in
reflexively after 9/11 without knowing what we were trying to
achieve. I would like to write a book about having a plan and an
end game before we go in.’’ And during a Lessons Learned inter-
view in 2016, an anonymous USAID official said, ‘‘Taliban’s pres-
ence was a symptom, but we rarely tried to understand what the
disease was.’’
Richard Boucher, career Foreign Service Officer, who was State
South Asia from 2006 to 2009, told government interviewers in
2015, ‘‘If there was ever a notion of mission creep it is Afghanistan.
We have to say good enough is good enough. That is why we are
there 15 years later. We are trying to achieve the unachievable in-
stead of achieving the achievable.’’
All these quotes help demonstrate how a lack of cohesive strat-
egy and clear policy undermined our efforts in Afghanistan. We did
not fully understand our adversary, our strategic objectives, or the
environment in which we are operating. Despite the amount of as-
 63

sistance that flowed into the country since 2001, even the positive
gains remain fragile.
So, Mr. Sopko, if we are to be honest, Congress is culpable to
many of these problems. Too often we listen to officials without
adequately questioning their assumptions and conclusions. But you
are here today and you have told us that part of the problem is
that we do not have the facts. You said, the basic facts that we
need are not being given. Can you elaborate on that? What are the
basic facts that all these years later that we have been at this, that
you have been at this, we are still missing?
Mr. SOPKO. Well, let’s start with strategy. There is a strategy for
Afghanistan; it is classified. Now I have clearances. You do not
need a clearance to get it; you cannot get it. There is a start.
What is our strategy? There is a strategy for—there is no strat-
egy we think for narcotics.
Mr. DEUTCH. There is—well, let me just stop you there. So when
you are referring to the strategy, you are referring to, what are you
referring to? You are referring to a document?
Mr. SOPKO. Well, usually there are strategic documents.
Mr. DEUTCH. Right.
Mr. SOPKO. You have got to have a strategy and then you have
got to lay out the programs, because without the strategy you don’t
know where your programs should be going. That is the problem
we have had over 18 years. And you also have to have metrics or
ways to measure success.
Mr. DEUTCH. All right. But when you—I just want to stop you
for a second. But when you talk about the constant churn of new
people coming in and starting over, they are all operating pursuant
to that strategy, no?
Mr. SOPKO. No. They get a job assignment. They just go over
there to run a program. They do not know what—that is the whole
problem. They are sent over there without knowing what the strat-
egy is and what was the objective of the overall strategy in Afghan-
istan, but the individual program strategy.
Mr. DEUTCH. OK. Who is the keeper of that strategy? Where——
Mr. SOPKO. Well, usually——
Mr. DEUTCH. You make it sound as if there is this document that
if we all could just see it everything would become clear, if we
shared it with all the military officials and USAID they would un-
derstand. Help me understand.
Mr. SOPKO. Well, I did not mean to imply that this is the silver
bullet or the answer. You are just saying where are the problems
of not getting the facts.
Mr. DEUTCH. Right.
Mr. SOPKO. You start with the strategy and then you look at,
well, how did the programs meet that strategy? And then you look
at metrics for success, then you look at the facts. Now when I
talked about classification, I mean, and I can go through the list
of what is still classified and I think that may help you.
You know, the way to determine whether we are doing a good
job on training, advising, and assisting the Afghan Security Forces,
you would want to know about the Afghan National Security
Forces operation data. That is classified. The Afghan Security
 64

Forces’ casualties, I mean if they are getting killed then obviously

our training has not been very helpful.
You would want to know about the RS Commanders’ assessment
of the Afghan security environment. That is now classified. The at-
trition metrics for the ANA Corps and ANA zone level, that is clas-
sified. Equipment readiness, that is classified.
Mr. DEUTCH. Right. Mr. Sopko, I appreciate it. Let me just close
with this.
Mr. SOPKO. Yes.
Mr. DEUTCH. So in the seven documents that you have produced
so far and all of the times that you have been up here, have we
had this conversation before? I am not being flip. This notion that
if we just had this information for all the years that we have been
at this, have you been screaming from the mountaintops about
this? Is there—help me understand.
Mr. SOPKO. I think I have been raising the issue about classifica-
tion going back at least four or 5 years, and repeatedly, and I think
in every quarterly report we raise it. Not the lessons learned, but
the quarterly reports.
Mr. DEUTCH. Right.
Mr. SOPKO. And I raised it just, what was it, last year. The last
metrics we had for success were—and General Nicholson said these
are the metrics you have to focus on, the amount of territory the
Afghan Government controls and the percentage of the population
they control. They classified that, then they stopped collecting the
data, then they said that is no longer relevant.
So you have no metrics. You as Members of Congress have no
public metrics to rate the billions of dollars we are spending in Af-
ghanistan.
Mr. DEUTCH. Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing.
And for the over 2,400 American lives lost and over 20,000 wound-
ed, we certainly owe it to every one of them to make sure that we
are doing everything now to get this right. And I appreciate this,
thank you.
Mr. ENGEL. Thank you, Mr. Deutch.
Mr. Perry.
Mr. PERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Sopko, for your candor. It seems to me that your
job here from the perspective of some of my colleagues is to make
sure you do a good job at bashing or affirming that President
Trump is pathetic and does not have a strategy and this is all his
fault. And I actually applaud your efforts to kind of stay out of the
fray in that regard. I don’t think any of us are perfect. I think the
President does want to get out of Afghanistan and it is hard to de-
termine what the facts are. The Post’s article kind of laid out the
fact that we do not know the information and you have reaffirmed
that.
Classifications, even in the President’s own defense, when he
wanted to declassify information that would buttress his own inno-
cence in claims against him, he cannot seem to get that done. This
town has a way of sequestering the information most important to
it and most damning to it and the people in it. That having been
said, I would like to get to some of the information.
 65

You highlighted challenges regarding coordination of reconstruc-

tion in Afghanistan and the fact that there is no one in charge.
There is no culpable, whether it is on the Afghan side or whether
on the American side or some NGO, et cetera, the old adage that
if everyone is in charge, no one is in charge. Have there been any
improvements in this since you have continued to decry that over
the course of your reporting have there been any improvements re-
garding culpability, regarding assignment for responsibility, so to
speak, in Afghan reconstruction projects?
Mr. SOPKO. If I could have one moment.
Mr. PERRY. Sure.
Mr. SOPKO. Well, it is unanimous. No. No, we have not seen any
improvements. And again, I don’t want to, you know, turn this into
a comedy routine. The problem is this is a very complicated—this
is a NATO operation. We have multiple donors. We have multiple
donors who are just doing reconstruction. Some are providing mili-
tary. It is a problem and I really think it is something that Con-
gress needs to focus on, because we will do this again and there
are going to be multiple people wearing multiple hats.
And we actually have an entire report looking on, I forget the
title of it is, Divided Responsibility, and that report goes into, un-
fortunately, gory detail of how convoluted the process is. And
again, this is not meant as a criticism of any administration. This
is meant as a criticism of the complexities of government. This has
got over 900 footnotes highlighting, and maybe this is the dif-
ference between us and the Washington Post, you know, we go into
a lot of detail on this.
And no, there is a problem and it is not just in the military field,
although this report focuses on that, but it also goes to the recon-
struction field. So I think this is a worthwhile area for you and
Congress to focus on, divided responsibilities in Afghanistan and in
these post-conflict environments.
Mr. PERRY. With the little time that I have, let me just carry you
a little further on that. It is your studied opinion that that should
be the purview of Congress to assign those responsibilities only in
the context that look, I am a Black Hawk pilot and I do not want
to teach law enforcement and I would not be any good at it. But
while I am surrounded by a lot of really well-intended people that
are smart, I am not sure Congress is the best answer either.
And it seems to me that somebody that can act somewhat auton-
omously determine the problem and see the solution set, somebody
like a Mark Green or anybody in that capacity should be able to
say, look, here is the project, here is the agencies involved, here is
where the funding is. You are in charge. Here is the report, Tom,
knock yourself out. And this is what we expect from you and if you
cannot get the job done, then in 6 months we are going to look for
a replacement.
Why do you think it should be Congress? I am concerned about
that, but I will—I am listening to your answer.
Mr. SOPKO. No, no, no. I think part of the reason is some of these
authorities and responsibilities are established by law, first of all.
And what we are dealing with in Afghanistan is a whole of govern-
ment and whole of government’s approach and a lot of this is going
to have to be done statutorily. I am not saying that any one com-
 66

mittee up here are the best ones to decide, but it should be recog-
nized we have a problem.
And I was going to look at the charting here.
Mr. PERRY. My time has expired, sir, but could you just do this.
With the chairman’s indulgence, could you give us one example re-
garding a statute where you think we could make a difference so
I can kind of contextualize this?
Mr. SOPKO. I will definitely do it. I asked my staff to do it right
now and we will get back to you.
Mr. PERRY. All right, thank you.
Mr. ENGEL. Thank you.
Mr. Keating.
Mr. KEATING. Thank you.
Let’s be clear on one thing right off the bat that our greatest re-
sponsibility to get things right, we are going to be talking about bil-
lions and billions of dollars, but our greatest responsibility to get
things right rests with those families that lost sons and daughters
and loved ones to this war and to the people who are living with
devastating injuries that they suffered in this war that forever will
challenge them both physically and mentally.
Now let me zero in on one area of concern that we raised. My
colleagues and I raised it. I authored with my colleagues a piece
of legislation ensuring that women are a part of the peace process
in Afghanistan and that they are engaged in the activity of being
meaningful partners in creating a lasting peace, something I hope
we will advance, Mr. Chairman, out of this committee shortly.
But you mentioned in your report that you expect, and in your
testimony that you expect to issue a report on women’s empower-
ment in Afghanistan this year or early next year. And in a recently
released 2019 High-Risk List, there is a section focusing on how de-
spite over a billion dollars spent since 2002 to advance the status
of women, gains by women in Afghanistan remain fragile.
So how would you categorize the current state of meaningful en-
gagement for women and what is a clear strategy in your mind
going forward to deal effectively with these gains that not only will
help women, but actually I think help the country achieve any sem-
blance of a lasting peace going forward?
Mr. SOPKO. Congressman, that is a very good question and I am
glad you highlighted our High-Risk List, because this report talks
about the importance of a number of issues and this is when I refer
to Congress needs to do something about ensuring that these risks
are dealt with if we want lasting peace.
I cannot tell you specifically what is the answer. I can just tell
you that although we have made advancements helping women in
Afghanistan, life for a woman in Afghanistan is horrible. Outside
of the cities, major cities, where the majority of the Afghan women
live, it has not improved much. And I have not met an Afghan
woman yet who trusts the Taliban. So that is something, and I
know you are concerned that they have a seat at the table or some-
body represents them at the table so they do not get lost in this
shuffle declaring victory and leaving. That is my concern.
Mr. KEATING. We have been assured that time and time again
by the Afghan——
Mr. SOPKO. By the Taliban?
 67

Mr. KEATING. No, by the Afghan leaders, yet you are right. There
is no place at the table. So, but you categorize it as fragile right
now, so could you talk to us about right now and what we should
have done to make it less fragile and what we can do going for-
ward?
Mr. SOPKO. You know, I do not have specific answers to that. I
will get back to you. But I think one of the critical things about
that issue, and it is a delicate issue because you are talking about
cultures. But one of those things is we have to focus that the prob-
lem of women’s rights is men. And all of our programs have been
focusing on giving certificates and things to women, who are prob-
lem is, and Ms. Ghani, the President’s wife——
Mr. KEATING. I have spoken with her and had discussions with
her on this matter.
Mr. SOPKO. I have spoken with her too, in the palace, and she
says the women’s issue is a men’s issue, so the program should be
focused on them. But one of the things is if you are going to design
a women’s program talk to some Afghan women. And Ms. Ghani
was one of the first people who highlighted the problem with the
Promote Program, which is one of those programs that was over-
sold as the greatest program on earth for women, $250 million, and
there was going to be $250 million of donations from the European
Union and the European allies, and I remember meeting with the
European allies in Afghanistan and none of them had heard about
the program.
But we had already—this is again, this odor of mendacity. We
had already—OK.
Mr. KEATING. All right, I have 20 seconds left.
But there is a recurrent theme regardless whether you are talk-
ing about the judiciary system, the rule of law, whether you are
talking about the narcotics system or what we are talking about
with advancing women’s place in the society, we are not tailoring
our programs around the traditions of the host country. And I
think probably with later testimony that is going to be an area you
are going to highlight that that is a huge oversight on our part.
I have to yield back. My time is up.
Mr. SOPKO. We need to talk to the Afghans, sir.
Mr. ENGEL. Thank you.
Mr. Yoho.
Mr. YOHO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Sopko, thank you for being here. I apologize because I feel
it is like welcome back to groundhog days again because we have
heard this over and over again, and you have done a great job of
highlighting this stuff.
I remember when Rajiv Shah was here when he was with
USAID. I think Afghanistan got a billion dollars through USAID
and they could not account for $300 billion and this has been a con-
tinual problem. I think what you pointed out was a grand plan and
I think Congress can do that and Congress should be the one that
does that and it should be the appropriate committees.
I think the Foreign Affairs Committee working with DOD or one
of the other committees should be able to create a policy that lives
beyond a presidency so that it is something that our allies and the
countries we work with can count on that this policy will not
 68

change. Yes, the President can come in and they can tweak it as
needed, but it has to survive an administration. And that is some-
thing that if we vote on it in the House and the Senate, it will be
hard to change. And that all goes back to making sure we have the
correct policy. I lost my train of thought.
The one thing that you picked up, and you said this in the very
beginning and this is so important. Your reports come out every
year and I think they are spot on. It is this body that does not act.
We are the ones that are in charge of the money. We are the ones
that can direct these programs or not.
And I thought what you said in the very beginning, successful re-
construction is incompatible with continuing insecurity, until we
have a stable government, we can throw all the money you want,
but until there is a stable government, and it does not need to be
a democracy. I am against democracy building in a lot of these
countries because they are not ready for it. That is something that
has to come up from the top down. We cannot force feed a country
that. It has to be a stable government that we can work with.
And the women programs, those are all great and I agree with
you. But when you look at that culture, if you do not understand
that culture, their culture is you walk behind me eight or ten feet,
they are not going to have them at the seat, at the dais, unfortu-
nately as that is. We have been to countries where they have done
that because of our policies and the women are there, but when you
go to ask a question of them, the men answer. And I have inter-
rupted the men and said, I do not want you to hear from you, I
want to hear from the people that are here, the women here.
We need to understand that culture and give them time to
change and adapt, and I think we need to focus on stability. And
when we have stability, then our infrastructure projects can start
creating the economy that we need so that trade can come in a
gradual change. The Taliban, we ran them out and the women
went to school. But when the Taliban comes back, they are going
to be out of school and we know that is going to happen. And so,
I think we need to be a lot smarter in how we do this and this is
a lesson learned that we should never repeat again.
I want to get your sense, do you feel that the military industrial
complex that President Eisenhower forewarned us about, are they
playing a hand in this or impeding a success in this, or is it more
of our policies just being, you know, where it changes every—the
mental lobotomy that happens with talent that we send over there?
Mr. SOPKO. Yes, I can’t really comment on that. I think the prob-
lems we have you have identified. The other problem is there is a
tendency, and I talk about it in the statement, of we think that just
throwing money at it will answer it.
Mr. YOHO. Sure.
Mr. SOPKO. And more money is a problem. We spent too much
money, too fast, in too small of a country, with too little oversight.
Mr. YOHO. Right.
Mr. SOPKO. And that created the corruption problem. That dis-
torted the economy and distorted the culture, so smaller sometimes
is better. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the military
industrial complex, I think it more has to do with maybe it is a
tendency of American culture. We have a view as we are going to
 69

get there with the firstest with the mostest, going back to, I don’t
know if it was General Sherman or something saying we are going
to do that. And we have the same thing about development aid and
we are going to get there with the firstest with the mostest and as-
sume that is good.
Mr. YOHO. And what we need to do is focus on what do you need,
what do you want, what we can help you achieve.
Mr. SOPKO. And what you can use.
And, sir, I would harken back to those seven questions which we
posed within a year of me coming on board. I was trying to, what
are the lessons we have learned and one of those questions is, do
the Afghans know about the program?
Mr. YOHO. Right.
Mr. SOPKO. Do they want the program? Will they use the pro-
gram? If you answered that in the affirmative that program will
probably succeed more than it will fail. But if you answer in the
negative, then why are you doing the program?
Mr. YOHO. Exactly. And your six conclusions and recommenda-
tions is what this body needs to do and we are the ones in charge
of that and I thank you.
Mr. SOPKO. Welcome, sir.
Mr. ENGEL. The gentleman’s time is—Mr. Cicilline.
Mr. CICILLINE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Sopko, for your service. I want to understand a
little bit about the Afghanistan Papers. What was the document
that was being prepared? Was that going to be this report that you
have provided to the committee or is it an internal document? Be-
cause part of what I am trying to figure out is, is there some fail-
ure also of our current model of the Inspector General in terms of
getting this information in a way that will require action, because
I do think sunlight on this is really important.
So what, will you tell us a little bit about what the purpose, like
were you preparing a report that was going to be shared publicly
or shared with Congress?
Mr. SOPKO. That is a good question, and again I think it is one
of the misconceptions. We were not preparing a report. We inter-
viewed people in preparation for these seven reports as well we are
interviewing for the next series of reports. You know, we—these
were raw interview notes——
Mr. CICILLINE. OK.
Mr. SOPKO [continuing]. That we had done for those reports.
Mr. CICILLINE. For the reports that you had previously prepared,
OK.
Mr. SOPKO. Oh, yes. Yes. And it is up——
Mr. CICILLINE. I want to get to some questions.
Mr. SOPKO. Sure, OK. Yes.
Mr. CICILLINE. I appreciate that. I just want to, because I do
think getting this information is really valuable, but I want to
focus my questions very much on corruption, because I think, cer-
tainly, the absence of a clear set of objectives has to come, you
know, developing an objective for our mission in Afghanistan fol-
lowed by a strategy and then metrics to measure it. I think that
has been our challenge.
 70

But I am particularly disturbed about what I am learning in this

most recent report with respect to the issue of corruption. The De-
partment of Defense says corruption remains the top strategic
threat to the legitimacy and success of the Afghan Government,
and you quote that in your report. And your report in 2016 re-
ported on corruption, I think all the reports have, and criticized the
government’s failure to recognize corruption, which was bad
enough, but actually the American activities contributed signifi-
cantly to the corruption.
And so, would you speak a little bit about that and also about
this notion that we prioritize security over anticorruption efforts
and whether that was the right judgment and how we might meas-
ure metrics in both of those areas?
Mr. SOPKO. Well, that is, I think you have focused on what some
military officers told us is really the major threat to reconstruction
and to the war effort and that is corruption. It is not the Taliban,
it is corruption. And if you talk to General Miller, who is head of
all of our troops right now, he will answer that is still a problem.
It not only saps the money we give to the Afghan Government,
but it also is used as a recruiting tool by the Taliban because they
can point to the corrupt officers. They can point to the corrupt war-
lords who are getting all of the government contracts, and they say,
see, that is what the U.S. Government does. So I think you have
honed in on a serious issue. It still is.
Now I will say in defense of Congress, Congress has recognized
that and they have done legislation on that. They have actually
asked us to assess the corruption situation three times, so you are
aware of it. And we are in currently assessing the condition there,
it is still a serious problem.
Mr. CICILLINE. So one of the most mismanaged pots of money
was the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, or CERP, I
guess it was called. This is a slush fund that was reminiscent of
the war in Iraq. CERP was allowed military commanders in the
field to bypass normal contracting rules and spend up to a million
dollars on infrastructure projects far above the normal cost of such
projects. What role did CERP money play in enabling corruption
and was it ever deconflicted with other foreign assistance programs
to ensure that funding streams were not working at cross pur-
poses? That seems to be an especially serious cause or a contrib-
uting factor, the corruption that we saw on the ground.
Mr. SOPKO. You have highlighted a good point. CERP money was
not deconflicted. Like a lot of the military programs, they were not
deconflicted. I would not say CERP was the worst, I think there
were a couple of other programs I could discuss that are worse. But
we have not actually done an audit on those CERP funding to the
granularity that you are asking, but it was deconflicted. Good in-
tentions, but a lot of waste.
Mr. CICILLINE. And final question, a retired brigadier general
said, and I am quoting, Congress gives us money to spend and ex-
pects us to spend all of it. The attitude became, we do not care
what you do with the money so long as you spend it. End quote.
This sentiment is reflected throughout the Lessons Learned report.
 71

What can Congress do to counter the view among military and

civilian personnel in the field that you are just to spend money no
matter what?
Mr. SOPKO. I think the best answer is for the appropriators to
put language or at least do not hold the agencies vulnerable or at-
tack them for not spending the money. I know a lot of agencies
were attacked for not putting money on contract or not spending
or losing it. So multiyear money may be an answer to that, but
there is an incentive to spend the money.
And we saw an absurd situation down in Camp Leatherneck
where we built a building that we call it the 64K, a 64,000 square-
foot headquarters for the surge. They started construction as the
surge was ending. The military officers, our Marine Corps general
down there said, ‘‘I don’t want it, I don’t need it, I won’t use it.’’
His superior above him, I think it was General Allen at the time,
says, ‘‘We don’t want it, we don’t need it, we won’t use it.’’ And it
went up the chain.
But there was a general back in Kuwait who said, Well, ‘‘Con-
gress gave it to us, so spend it.’’ So there is a beautiful building,
unfortunately, you can’t get to Camp Leatherneck, but when I got
there it was the most best built building I saw in Afghanistan. I
think it was $36 million. As far as I know, it is empty still.
Mr. ENGEL. OK, thank you.
Mr. Wright.
Mr. WRIGHT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Sopko, thank you for being here and thank you for what you
do. It is pretty clear our experience in Afghanistan is a case of win-
ning the war but not winning the peace or we would not still be
there.
But I have a couple questions with regards to some specifics and
the first has to do with deployments. There is a significant down-
side to long deployments in terms of the effect on our men and
women in the military and their families, but as you have pointed
out there is also a significant downside to short deployments.
Not from a military perspective, but from a reconstruction per-
spective, how do you reconcile that? How do we know when we
have got it right?
Mr. SOPKO. That is a very good question. And I think what we
can do is again look to where there have been successes. And what
the Air Force has done is they have assigned the same people for
4 years. They do not spend the whole 4 years in Afghanistan, they
basically work with the Afghan pilots, they bring them back so you
are assigned to a similar task.
Special Forces has the same thing. You are assigned, but then
you have been there for a certain amount of time, you come back
to a pool that then it is the same pool that works very closely with
the same units so there is a connectivity. So those are two exam-
ples we cite. We are actually going to be doing a Lessons Learned
report on what are the best practices for doing that in with AID
or State or DoD. How are you able—you do not want to send some-
body over there for 18 years, that is impossible.
Mr. WRIGHT. Right.
Mr. SOPKO. My dad was drafted for World War II and he was
there for the length of the war however long it lasted, but that is
 72

a little different. But there is a way to do that so you do not lose

that connectivity, you do not lose that experience, you do not lose
that connection with this Afghan unit, and you work together and
that Afghan feels closer to you, the American advisor, than he does
to the Taliban.
Mr. WRIGHT. And I want to pick up on something Mr. Yoho was
talking about earlier and that is changes in administration. And I
am not asking you to judge the administrations or their policies,
but we have had three Presidents during this time, both parties.
To what extent does a change in administration hamper our ability
to, in terms of the reconstruction efforts?
Mr. SOPKO. I have not really seen that as a problem.
Mr. WRIGHT. OK.
Mr. SOPKO. But when the new administration, the Trump Ad-
ministration, came in they did a policy review we participated at
and they actually were very responsive to our bringing information
to their attention. A lot of the career people do not change, so obvi-
ously we are dealing with them. The Ambassadors do not change.
The AID people out there do not change, so I do not see that as
a problem.
Mr. WRIGHT. OK.
Mr. SOPKO. We did not really see much of a difference between
the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration in that.
That we have not seen as a problem.
Mr. WRIGHT. OK. My last question has to do with Iraq and based
on your experience, to what extent did the war in Iraq prevent us
from completing what we needed to complete in Afghanistan?
Mr. SOPKO. Well, again I have not looked at the warfighting side.
Remember, we have spent $132 billion on reconstruction. We have
spent close to 700 billion on the warfighting in Afghanistan. So all
I can tell you is when we did an analysis on the train, advise, as-
sist and on the reconstruction, what everybody told us was when
the focus turned on Iraq we lost interest in a lot of the key issues
in Afghanistan. That is all I can tell you.
And I—other than that——
Mr. WRIGHT. Would that include the establishment of civil gov-
ernments?
Mr. SOPKO. Yes, to some extent.
Mr. WRIGHT. OK, great. Thank you and I yield back.
Mr. SOPKO. Yes.
Mr. CASTRO [presiding]. Thank you, Representative Wright.
Ami Bera.
Mr. BERA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
So $132 billion on reconstruction, we have spent more on Afghan-
istan than we spent on the whole Marshall Plan rebuilding.
Mr. SOPKO. That is correct, sir.
Mr. BERA. After World War II, so it is pretty amazing. And when
I think about that I think some of it is when we approached Eu-
rope, we had similar cultures, similar, an understanding of Europe,
similar forms of government, et cetera, so that probably contributed
to some of that success.
And it does seem evident from your answers and from what I
have looked at, we do not have that same understanding of the val-
ues, culture, et cetera, in Afghanistan and that probably
 73

foundationally, is one of the things that has led us to be not so effi-

cient. I think you stated or Mr. Yoho stated our goal is to define
lasting peace. But the problem is how we define lasting peace may
not be how the Afghans define lasting peace. How would you say
they define lasting peace?
Mr. SOPKO. I think I would use, probably, the Webster’s—well,
it is, will the gains that the Afghans have made continue in the fu-
ture? So the women’s rights, the rule of law, some of the gains they
have made on corruption, I mean the question is, is will a peace
treaty just end up into civil war again.
Mr. BERA. Right.
Mr. SOPKO. So its sustainability of any of the gains, and we have
made some gains over the 18 years, the Afghans have made some
improvements, will those continue?
Mr. BERA. So then it behooves us on the committee and, cer-
tainly, the subcommittee I chair has jurisdiction over Afghanistan
and it is an area that we are going to look at, so we should define
what those gains are. We should define those parameters. But we
should also, you know, Mr. Perry is not here, but none of us is
bashing President Trump here, or any particular administration.
Each administration has got some things right, but they have also
got a lot wrong.
And we know the current administration wants to consider a
withdrawal/drawdown in Afghanistan and probably will proceed in
that direction. Congress should insert itself into this process and
it does not have to be adversarial the message to the administra-
tion is work with us on this. And if we were to do that there prob-
ably is no peace process that does not involve the Taliban. They are
not just going to disappear.
So if we accept that as a reality, then we have to think about
the gains within that context. And it would be my sense that some
of our interests are certainly in the counterterrorism space we do
not want to see a resurgence of al-Qaida and so am I thinking
about this correctly in terms of, well, what would that remaining
force be on the counterterrorism side.
And then the last thing that I would think about and, you know,
I would love for you to comment on is it is my sense that we have
created a dependency in Afghanistan on U.S. dollars. And there is
going to be a big hole that is left in the Afghan economy as we exit.
How do we fill that hole? I mean, and now the complicating factor
is regional dynamics as well.
Obviously the Afghans have a relationship with the Indians. The
Indians have an economy that could step in there. The Pakistanis
do not like the Indians much of—so the whole regional dynamics
are challenging as well, and how do we create that conversation as
we are drawing down to create some regional, you know, am I, I
guess, am I thinking about this correctly in how to engage?
Mr. SOPKO. You are absolutely. And, Congressman, again, I
would ask you to go back to our High-Risk List that we issued and
I think you—these are the risks to that stable, lasting peace and
one of them definitely is finances. The Afghan economy is abysmal.
It is reality. Seventy-percent of their budget for their government
comes from the United States taxpayer and the European tax-
payers and whatever, and that is not going to change once you sign
 74

peace. Now maybe the cost of the warfighting may change, but just
because you sign peace with the Taliban does not mean you are
going to have peace with ISIS or the other 30-some terrorist groups
and the other warlords and gangs who are operating.
So you are going to have a cost. We have to face the reality there
and try to work with them. But that is one of the biggest concerns
we have in here because you also have to reintegrate. Let’s assume
it is a successful peace. You have 60,000 talib plus their families
who have to be reintegrated. That costs money. Can the Afghans
do that? No. We just had a major surrender of ISIS troops. I have
seen no evidence that the Afghan Government has done anything
to reintegrate those ISIS troops.
And, actually, if you talk to General Miller, you talk to our——
Mr. CASTRO. You will have to give the rest of it for the record.
I have to move on to another Representative.
Mr. SOPKO. I am sorry. But I think those are the conditions.
Mr. BERA. OK. We will continue this conversation.
Mr. SOPKO. I am terribly sorry. I did not hear you. I apologize.
Mr. BERA. Right.
Mr. BURCHETT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for that recognition.
I am probably not as intellectual, but I will probably be more enter-
taining to you, so I appreciate the time.
And I do notice how important you are. Usually we have this
whole line of people up here and they get their 5 minutes and then
they tweet about it and go home. You are by yourself and then you
turn around to the group behind you and then they take note of
whatever you are saying and make notes of it. So they are doing
an excellent job behind you. I do not know if you knew that or not.
I had a couple of questions, brother, and thank you for being
here. Your father was a World War II veteran. My dad enlisted
shortly after December 7th, so I appreciate—my momma flew an
airplane during the war, so I appreciate you, brother, and I appre-
ciate what you have said up here.
I have actually been listening and I had a couple of good ques-
tions here. Have you seen any evidence that foreign State actors
have or are currently undermining U.S. reconstruction efforts and
can you expand specifically on the role Pakistan is playing?
Mr. SOPKO. I have not seen any evidence of that of foreign State
actions on reconstruction. And as for Pakistan’s role, obviously
there is a lot of reporting about their involvement with if they are
supporting various terrorist groups, but that is not within my juris-
diction so I am not the best person. I would just be reporting on
what read in the newspaper too.
Mr. BURCHETT. That is all right. And that is probably wrong, so
I appreciate you saying that, brother.
Should the U.S. continue to fund the counternarcotic programs
even though we have thrown nine billion dollars at the problem
and it seems with little success? And I say that coming to you—
I was a State legislator for 16 years. I was a county mayor. And
I remember when our Attorney General Randy Nichols told me,
talked about the price of brown tar heroin and when it became too
high the opioid epidemic would explode, and he was a prophet on
that. It did.
 75

But I know that overseas the market is flowing in and out and
I was just curious of your opinion on that.
Mr. SOPKO. Well, counternarcotics is the 800-pound gorilla in the
room. It is the largest export from Afghanistan. It dwarfs the licit,
the legal economy. It employs more people than are in the Afghan
Army. So if you ignore it, you ignore it at your peril, particularly
if we are talking about developing lasting peace.
You have peace with the Taliban, but what about the drug war-
lords who are probably more powerful than the Taliban? They cor-
rupt the institution. They are recognized by the Afghan people as
that and if we tolerate them or if we allow the Afghan Government
to tolerate them, you kick the can down the street just so far and
that is a problem. So I do not know if I answered the question, sir.
Mr. BURCHETT. Do you ever see—it seems like these folks, you
know, we get a new regime in or whatever and the drug warlords
just seem to transcend to the next one. Is that because of their, in
its power or their cash-flow or is it a combination thereof?
Mr. SOPKO. I think it is a combination of it. And again, I do not
want to downplay how difficult it is to fight drugs.
Mr. BURCHETT. Yes.
Mr. SOPKO. We have a problem here in the United States.
Mr. BURCHETT. A huge problem.
Mr. SOPKO. You could look at Mexico. You look at Colombia. You
look at developed countries are having a problem with it. You put
it into a country like Afghanistan, it dwarfs a lot of the other prob-
lems. The sad thing is, over the last 18 years drug usage in Af-
ghanistan has skyrocketed. And I cannot remember and I can get
back to you on the data on the United Nations, I think Afghanistan
may have the highest addiction rate of any developing country now,
but I can double check that. I may be wrong.
Mr. BURCHETT. If you could get back to me that would be great
and no big deal. But thank you so much for being here. I yield back
the remainder of my time, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. CASTRO. Thank you, Representative. I would call on myself
now. I am next in the lineup.
I want to ask you, Mr. Sopko, and, first of all, thank you for your
testimony. I want to ask you about our diplomatic corps and the
State Department and the efficacy of our diplomatic efforts. While
the United States has continued to spend billions of dollars annu-
ally, we apparently did not invest enough in our Foreign Service
Officers and diplomacy to train and retrain experts.
Given that we sought to achieve peace and development in Af-
ghanistan, more military was not always the right answer. Wheth-
er rebuilding or negotiating with the Taliban, personnel within the
State Department, of course, is of the utmost importance. So here
are my questions for you. What can be done to empower and
strengthen the diplomatic corps?
Mr. SOPKO. I think, first of all, is I think you hit a right point
on empowering and strengthening. They are essential. The problem
in Afghanistan is the Ambassador has been, it is sort of de facto,
his role as the senior U.S. Government official has been
downplayed by the fact that there is a military officer sitting across
the street.
 76

Mr. CASTRO. What I was going to ask you about, about the inter-
play between——
Mr. SOPKO. He has more money.
Mr. CASTRO. Right. And the interplay between our military folks
that are there and the diplomatic folks that are there.
Mr. SOPKO. The problem is that the State Department, I think
you have hit it on the head, is underfunded. USAID is underfunded
in comparison to the military. We are fighting a war in Afghani-
stan, and I am not saying we should not fund General Miller and
RS the way we are doing it. But I am just saying is you cannot
ignore the diplomats; you cannot ignore USAID.
You particularly saw this at the PRTs and at the regional groups
when we set up, we were supposed to be AID and State and the
military out there in the region. Well, military all showed up. They
had the money. They had the manpower. They had the CERP
funds. Where were the State and AID people? There were not
enough of them to go around. And that is a problem.
I am old school. Development should be done by development ex-
perts. Those are diplomats and AID officials. They should not be
done by the U.S. military. And we highlight, when we give that
task to the U.S. military it almost automatically fails.
Mr. CASTRO. And that segues right into the next question that
I wanted to ask you. Why does the military appear to be at the
forefront of nation building in Afghanistan rather than the State
Department or USAID, especially in light of the fact that this has
been going on now for 18 years? So there has been plenty of oppor-
tunity to make course corrections, why do you think this is?
Mr. SOPKO. Because we have emphasized the warfighting and we
have given short shrift to development and reconstruction. And the
military has the weapons and they have the manpower and they
have the money.
Mr. CASTRO. And what does that say or what does the portend
for when our presence, our military presence is no longer there at
some point?
Mr. SOPKO. It is a big issue. It is one of those risks you face. Be-
cause, for example, our military assistance program has been run
by the military. We have trained the Afghans to deal with the mili-
tary. They have not been trained to deal through the normal em-
bassy functions, so there are some serious problems here and it is
an area I think Congress needs to look at.
Mr. CASTRO. Thank you, Mr. Sopko.
I am going to go now to Mr. Levin from Michigan.
Mr. LEVIN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Sopko, thank you for your public service, I really appreciate
it, and for coming here today. SIGAR interviewees indicated that
politics was partly to blame for the sheer amount of money poured
into Afghanistan even as money from prior years was left unspent,
and officials made clear that Afghanistan did not have the capacity
to put so much money to proper use.
Apparently, policymakers claimed, ‘‘The political signal by a
budget reduction at a turning point in the war effort would ad-
versely affect overall messaging and indirectly reconstruction ef-
forts on the ground. The articulation of goals for the purpose of
 77

budgeting and programming was largely secondary to the political

implications of budgeting.’’
In short, it seems like short-term political expediency was
prioritized over long-term effective policy. No one wanted to sup-
port budget cuts and risk being blamed if things went badly. In
your view, to what extent were budgeting decisions in Afghanistan
made due to political expediency?
Mr. SOPKO. We have not looked at that. I think we have—be-
cause it really goes beyond my mandate, but that issue has come
up of just too much money sloshing around and the motivation was
to spend it and that led to a lot of the problems, but we have never
looked at it back on this side.
Mr. LEVIN. Well, so here you are testifying before Congress and
I really want to get your advice about what we can do here to insu-
late the budgeting and policymaking processes from political pres-
sures when it comes to matters of war and peace or, just narrowly
speaking, this war and peace in Afghanistan. Maybe to put it an-
other way, how do we keep this from happening that we are spend-
ing much more, we are sending much more money than people on
the ground think is appropriate?
I mean it is a big problem when we have domestic priorities here
and peaceful priorities here that we need to take care of our babies
and our pre-K kids, we need to educate them, we need to be able
to afford our infrastructure.
Mr. SOPKO. Congressman, the best answer I can have for that is
having more hearings like this where you bring not just me, you
bring in somebody from AID, State, and DoD to explain and justify
their budget and explain not just the—talk about the inputs and
outputs, but what is the outcome.
And I go back to why some of you may have wondered why did
I attach all of those letters from 2013 when I asked the SecDef,
SecState, and AID administrator what are your ten best successes
and what were your ten worst failures and why. I firmly believe
that if they had honestly answered those questions, we would not
be here today because what they would have done is it would force
them to answer the question, why are we spending nine billion dol-
lars on narcotics if it is a failure? They would answer the question,
why are we spending $2.3 million bringing in rare Italian goats
from Italy to develop the goat industry in Afghanistan over 6
months? They would have been forced to look at what—well, that
is why we talk about racking and stacking.
So, Congressman, take a look at those letters we sent and many
of those letters and what we are asking are the same questions you
should be asking. I cannot answer those, but if you want to stop
the hemorrhage of money to a place like Afghanistan it has got to
start by asking people not to talk about inputs, do not bring some-
body in here from AID who only talks about how much money he
has gotten, or outputs how many kids he says they are training in
Afghanistan, but what is the outcome? Are any of those kids still
in school?
Mr. LEVIN. But in the brief time I have left, I mean you have had
multiple Lessons Learned reports, right, where SIGAR identified
that the approach and programs that the U.S. used to achieve Stat-
ed goals were not properly tailored to the Afghan context as you
 78

are talking about here with goats from Italy and so forth. What
contributed to this gap? What lesson do you take from reading all
these letters, the gap between what the U.S. is supporting and
what the Afghans needed on the ground?
Mr. CASTRO. Do you want to take 15 seconds to answer that?
Mr. SOPKO. I think I go back to the institutional hubris and men-
dacity that I talked about. We have incentivized lying to Congress,
and by that, I mean the whole incentive is to show success and to
ignore the failure. And when there is too much failure, classify it
or do not report it.
Congress has to weigh in and say, hold it, we want to know the
truth as gory as it is. Reconstruction takes a long time. You cannot
do it in 6 months. You cannot do it in 9 months. You probably can-
not do it in one administration. So if you wanted to help the Af-
ghans, it is the long haul. Eighteen——
Mr. CASTRO. Thank you.
Mr. SOPKO. OK, that is—I am sorry.
Mr. LEVIN. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Mr. CASTRO. Thank you. Yes.
Representative Connolly.
Mr. CONNOLLY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And welcome back——
Mr. SOPKO. Good to see you, sir.
Mr. CONNOLLY [continuing]. Mr. Sopko, and thank you for your
work. I mean, frankly, that press table ought to be filled to over-
flowing. The story about Afghanistan and the United States’ mili-
tary and economic assistance to that country really deserves the
kind of scrutiny you have been trying to provide and get attention
to. It is shocking in some ways that the story you are telling has
so little interest by the media, the public, Congress itself. We have
provided at least $132 billion in development assistance that is of
dubious value. Is that a fair——
Mr. SOPKO. Correct.
Mr. CONNOLLY [continuing]. Conclusion? Imagine, $132 billion.
And if I understand it, and I do not want to overstate it, almost
all of the systems put in place are designed to avoid measuring
progress, failure and success, and, for that matter, even account-
ability. So, for example, you earlier testified there are almost no
metrics for how are we doing, did it work? If that did not work,
let’s try something else.
You cannot—and when we have metrics, they classify them so
the public and the Congress and others actually cannot access
them; is that true?
Mr. SOPKO. That was my—basically, I was talking about the
military where the bulk of the 132 billion has been spent, right.
Mr. CONNOLLY. Speaking of the military, in the stabilization re-
port you talked about the fact that in a sense the military stifled,
suppressed USAID by bulldozing the agency into a clear, hold,
build strategy and demanded that AID, despite misgivings, imple-
ment a cash-for-work program despite AID’s protests as well as
misgivings; is that true?
Mr. SOPKO. That is correct.
Mr. CONNOLLY. How does such a thing happen?
Mr. SOPKO. Well.
 79

Mr. CONNOLLY. How did AID lose its independence of judgment?

After all, it is the agency in the Federal Government with the main
expertise and development assistance, not the Pentagon.
Mr. SOPKO. Yes, I cannot fully answer that other than to say that
who you give the money to, and I suppose who you give the guns
to, really calls the shots, but it is who you give the money to. If
there is only one AID person at the table and there is 23 guys and
gals wearing green suits, I think if there is a vote you know who
is going to win.
Mr. CONNOLLY. You talked earlier, passionately, about the prob-
lems with the longest war in American history and our engagement
in reconstruction and you used two words that really struck me:
hubris and mendacity. Almost sounds like a potential title for a
novel. We had Advice and Consent, the modern version is going to
be called Hubris and Mendacity.
And I want to give you an opportunity to give us some examples
of each that affected directly our efforts in Afghanistan. After all,
the stakes, we invaded Afghanistan after 9/11. We worked with
local militias to overthrow the Taliban and to try to expel and
eliminate the presence of al-Qaida. This was a momentous decision
with very high stakes for America directly. And here we are well
over a decade later and we do not seem to have done a very good
job of meeting any kind of objective, including a stable government
accepted by the people.
So can you just give us some examples of hubris and especially
mendacity?
Mr. SOPKO. Well, I think we have referred to, in my statement
I talk about some of the statements made by AID about the great
success on life expectancy. It was statistically impossible to double
the life expectancy of the time given. I think it is a combination
of hubris and mendacity that anybody can do that. I mean the next
thing you know is we are going to be walking on water on an AID
program.
The education where we claimed millions of children were in
school and AID knew that the data was bad but they still reported
it as if those millions of children, is that hubris? Is that mendacity?
Probably a combination of both. I actually think the people on the
ground thought they were doing a great job. They just never looked
at all the data and they were not going to explain that the data
was faulty.
You look at some of the successes we claimed about the power
grid—I am running out of the time and the chairman is strong. So,
I mean those are some of the examples. I am happy to give you a
lot more of those examples.
Mr. CASTRO. Thank you.
Mr. CONNOLLY. I would just say shades of Vietnam.
Mr. SOPKO. True.
Mr. CASTRO. Representative Allred.
Mr. ALLRED. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I was in Afghanistan over the Thanksgiving holiday and while
we were there we had a chance to meet with our military and State
Department leaders. And I met a young Army captain who was a
West Point grad and also a football player and he was tasked with
training the next generation of Afghan military leaders. And he
 80

was tired when we met because he had been out the night before
leading a raid, which we are doing every single night, degrading
the Taliban’s ability, al-Qaida, and ISIS elements as well. And I
have often thought about that captain, especially as we heard the
news of the two service members who were killed this weekend,
and wondered if we are serving him as well as he is serving us,
as well as many of our men and women in conflict are serving us.
And I want to thank you for your work. I think this is one of the
best parts of our democracy is that we can be critical of ourselves
and that we can take a critical eye to our commitments and say
what are we doing wrong and what can we do better. I am not here
to point fingers. There are multiple administrations involved. We
all know how long and how much money we put into this.
But one of my questions for you is that over the years you have
released a number of overarching recommendations for various
parts of the government, I want to know how receptive you found
the agencies involved to your recommendations. I think I read that
13 of them have been adopted; is that correct? And maybe tell us
what you think is standing in the way of some of those rec-
ommendations being adopted.
Mr. SOPKO. Well, that is in regard to, I believe we had about 130
recommendations from the first seven Lessons Learned report.
Overall, from our audits and inspections, about 86 percent to 90
percent of our recommendations are adopted. The reason for the
smaller number, I believe, is because many of our recommenda-
tions are conditional on events occurring such as peace or the
next—many of our recommendations are if you do this again, you
should do the following. So it is hard to say they have complied be-
cause it has not happened, so—but we are happy to report back on
that.
Mr. ALLRED. Yes.
Mr. SOPKO. The Lessons Learned Program have been very well
received by the military, the State Department, and USAID. Par-
ticularly, the military under General Dunford when he was the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was very receptive and we are
using it—we have been asked to do it for training for them as well
as the Foreign Service Institute.
Mr. ALLRED. Oay. Well, I know that this has occurred before, but
while I was there, we were told that a new generation of Afghan
military leaders were emerging particularly in their Special Forces
and they were leading most of the kinetic fighting and doing actu-
ally a decent job. And I was wondering if you could provide you and
your agency’s opinion on the generation of leadership that is com-
ing through the Afghan military, whether or not they will be able
to stand up when we stand down.
And I know that some of that is a military consideration that is
outside of your purview, but from the reviews you have done and
over the years of your experience how you believe that is pro-
gressing.
Mr. SOPKO. Well, Congressman, it is a good point. It is in our
purview because it is part of the train, advise, and assist. So as for
the Special Forces, I think that is a success story. Our training and
advising and assisting the Afghan Special Forces is a success. We
highlight it, we continue to highlight it. I can give you more detail
 81

if I had the time and happy to brief you on it. Just as I said with
the air program, we all are hoping for a new generation of officers,
senior officers in the Afghan military. I know General Nicholson
spoke that this is what we were hoping for. A lot of those officers
were old Soviet-trained officers and they finally got rid of them.
They retired and they pensioned them off.
But it is too early to tell. We are talking about the law that
pensioned all these older officers off was about less than a year old
or maybe older, we do not know. But the problem is that below
that corps level, maybe below that officer level you have a lot of
corruption, a lot of incompetency and it is seriously hurting the Af-
ghan military.
The biggest problem is not casualties, it is desertions. It is people
disappearing or it is people who never existed and we are paying
their salaries. So we all have to respect the Afghans for doing what
they are doing with the current situation. It is a difficult situation.
Many of them are not being paid or fed. They have to buy their
own food from their officers who steal it from them.
Mr. ALLRED. Yes. Thank you. I yield back.
Mr. CASTRO. Representative Spanberger.
Ms. SPANBERGER. Good afternoon, Mr. Sopko. Thank you for
being here. I, like many of my colleagues, recently visited our
armed forces in Afghanistan and had the opportunity to meet with
many of our men and women who are working on training special
forces and Afghan pilots. So it is good as we are discussing the
what is working and what is not to hear some of your discussion
related to those two success stories.
And you have talked a lot today about the fact that we are
spending too much money and the waste and abuse of U.S. tax-
payer dollars that we have seen in Afghanistan. And as we are
moving toward the congressional appropriations process, I was
wondering if you might dive into that question a bit more of where
are we spending too much money? Where are there places where
we are witnessing these abuses, and are there things that we as
Members of Congress could prioritize or should consider as we
move toward appropriations to ensure that we are not seeing the
continued abuse in the way that we have witnessed over the past
decade or more?
Mr. SOPKO. I cannot give you specific recommendations, but what
I would go back to is look at the justification for some of these pro-
grams. What has been the outcome? Ask the agencies, what has
been the outcome of funding, let’s say, counternarcotics. What has
been the outcome of funding rule of law, et cetera. So I think that
is probably the only way I can help you on that. I cannot tell you
for sure.
I think—let’s look—and this is what we did when we briefed
General Dunford. Let’s look at the successes and see if we cannot
duplicate that in, let’s say, the rest of the Afghan military. And we
were very hopeful that we were going to do that and they proposed
and I think they still have these brigades—excuse me—security
forces assistance brigades where they were trying to do that. But
I am not absolutely certain if the latest brigade has gone out.
Yes, it has gone out. That may be an area you want to look in.
I am happy to give you and any member—we can brief you on more
 82

particular specific issues. I am sorry I cannot answer in more de-

tail.
Ms. SPANBERGER. No, that is a really great starting point for
those of us as we move into the appropriations season, so I appre-
ciate that.
And one next piece, as we are kind of zooming out from the chal-
lenges that we have seen in Afghanistan, one of the main findings
of SIGAR’s Lessons Learned studies is that the war that we were
conducting in Iraq did hamper some of our efforts in Afghanistan.
And so my question is, from the experiences that you have exam-
ining what has happened in Afghanistan and looking at the range
of national security challenges that we see today, do you have con-
cerns about escalating tensions in the region particularly with Iran
and how that may impact our efforts in Afghanistan moving for-
ward?
Mr. SOPKO. I think any security issue in that region causes con-
cern and it is concern not only for the security of our people there,
remember, Afghanistan has a border with Iran. There is a lot of
connections with Iran, so I think we have to be cautious about that.
It is even difficult to get people in and out of Afghanistan. It is a
landlocked country now and I have to deal with that because I
have people over there. I was over there at Christmastime and I
do not know if I could have made that trip now that I did back
then.
But I cannot really speak because there is a broader issue of
what is going on with us in Iran that I really do not know, but ob-
viously that region is something we have to focus on. And, ulti-
mately, the success of peace there is going to have to involve the
region. If you read the book, The Great Game, which is a fas-
cinating book by a British historian on it, what he says about Af-
ghanistan is nobody wants to be there, but nobody wants anybody
else there. And I think that is the same thing that is going on now.
And so every one of those countries does not want anybody else
there in that—but we are there now.
Ms. SPANBERGER. But we are there. And one last question in the
time remaining. You mentioned corruption and incompetency that
exists at different levels in the military. Are you saying that in par-
ticular facets of where we are spending money and particular
places where we are working with Afghanistan that there is a
greater level of corruption and incompetency in one place or an-
other, and would you point us in a particular place to have con-
cerns or see room for improvement?
Mr. SOPKO. Fuel and payroll. Fuel is liquid gold. We still do not
have a good way to protect it. One of the former CSTC-A com-
manders said that over 50 percent of the fuel we buy never reaches
its ultimate base. I think that is something, and we are working
very closely with them. The other one is payroll. Even after 18
years, we do not have the payroll system right and we do not even
know how many Afghans we have been paying for.
Mr. CASTRO. Thank you.
Ms. SPANBERGER. Thank you. I yield back.
Mr. CASTRO. Representative Houlahan.
Ms. HOULAHAN. Thank you, Chairman.
 83

Thank you so much for coming here today. I actually really want
to commend you for being so frank. This is only my first year here,
a year and 2 weeks in, but you are, literally, the first person who
I have seen in front of us on any of my committees that I felt was
being honest and fully honest and not just waiting for the right
question to not answer it. So thank you so much for that.
Mr. SOPKO. Thank you.
Ms. HOULAHAN. Really, genuinely. And so given that you have ef-
fectively testified and talked about for the last couple hours the
fact that we have basically failed all of our objectives in Afghani-
stan over the last 17 years or so, 18 years, can you reflect on what
the implications are for efforts that we have in other unstable
countries and whether there is any, I guess, lessons to be learned
or cautionary tales that we should be aware of?
Mr. SOPKO. First of all, I just want to qualify not everything has
failed. There have been some successes. There are more women in
the economy. There are more women going to school. There are
more kids going to school.
Ms. HOULAHAN. So we have an F-plus.
Mr. SOPKO. Yes. Well, D-minus, I think, is a good thing.
Ms. HOULAHAN. D-minus.
Mr. SOPKO. I think it is hard to summarize 130 recommendations
in all these seven reports, but I think small may be better than
large. Definitely deal with corruption, early on. Before you go in,
also know where you are going in. I mean people were designing
and working programs in Afghanistan like they were walking into
Norway. This is not Norway. This is not Kansas, sometimes I felt
I was out of a movie and this does not look like Kansas, Toto.
Our staffers were, not our staffers, but some of the people and,
unfortunately, a lot were with AID, it was unbelievable where they
thought they were. So train our people before we send them in—
they are honest people, but they just do not know where they are—
and develop an understanding of that community. Know who the
warlords are and who their brother and who their seventh cousin
is because you may not want to give the contract to him, but you
just gave it to his cousin. We have that capability. Our intelligence
people know how to do that. But if they are not told to do that and
we do not follow them and follow their advice, we are going to fail.
I mean one of the other things is we have a tendency allowing
counterterrorism to trump countercorruption, and when you do
that you still have a security problem.
Am I over or under?
Ms. HOULAHAN. No, you are under.
Mr. SOPKO. Okay.
Ms. HOULAHAN. But I do have one more question, which you
spoke——
Mr. SOPKO. You are strict.
Ms. HOULAHAN. You spoke a little bit about the importance of
calendar versus condition-based timelines or vice versa. Can you
give us a little bit more detail about why you thought that our
strategy in Afghanistan was not successful because of improper se-
lection of those timelines?
 84

Mr. SOPKO. Well, it just basically goes back to decisions should

be made on the reality on the facts on the ground, not an election
cycle over here or a number pulled out of the air.
Ms. HOULAHAN. How do we make a difference in that we are
driven by calendars and we were driven by election cycles and is
there some changing funding or sources or timelines that we can
be helpful with?
Mr. SOPKO. I think it is having an educated electorate and an
educated Congress to say, look, we are not going to put a timeline
on it because we know it didn’t work in Afghanistan, or it did not
work in this other and that will not work. I think it is being honest
to ourselves that development takes a long time.
Hopefully that is one lesson that we have learned from Afghani-
stan is it takes a long time to try to build a government that is
not corrupt or that can keep the bad guys out, the terrorists. And
if we think we can do it in 1 year or 9 months or 2 years, we are
smoking something. And I cannot—you are asking me how do we—
this is common sense. So, I do not know if that answers the ques-
tion. I am sorry. It could be just after 8 years of this.
Ms. HOULAHAN. Thank you. And I only have about a half a
minute left and I just do want to conclude with an appreciation
particularly of your emphasis on the fact that a lot of information
in the classified environment is not available to us here in the Con-
gress and that we certainly canot provide oversight or fulfill the re-
sponsibilities that we have if we do not have access to that infor-
mation.
Mr. SOPKO. Well, it may be available to you, but it is going to
be in a closed environment and it is going to be very difficult for
your staff to work with it. And, more importantly, it is going to be
very difficult for the American people to know what is going on.
They are the ones paying for this and they have a right to know.
Ms. HOULAHAN. Agreed, and thank you, sir. I yield back.
Mr. CASTRO. Thank you.
Representative Malinowski.
Mr. MALINOWSKI. Thank you, Mr. Sopko. Great to see you.
Thank you for your work and for your honesty. And, of course, we
have been focused over the last minutes or hours of what has gone
wrong in Afghanistan and there is a great deal to talk about there.
In my view there are several fundamental mistakes, many of which
you have touched upon.
First of all, in the early years the decision to try to do this on
the cheap, the diversion of the war in Iraq which then required our
people in Afghanistan to rely on the power brokers who are already
there who happen to be violent, brutal, corrupt warlords, and
under those circumstances building the basic system of justice that
was always the Afghan people’s No. 1 demand, proved impossible.
And then as you just put it very clearly, even after that, even
after we recommitted, we consistently prioritized counterterrorism
over countercorruption. The result of that was the terrorism flour-
ished because terrorism is in many ways a response in Afghani-
stan, or least support for groups like the Taliban is a response to
anger about corruption.
And then just the consistent promising of the American people
that this could be done in a one-or 2-year timeframe and not being
 85

honest about what it would take, but that is where we have been.
There have also been gains. Your job is to look at the problems, but
Afghanistan today is a vastly different country as I am sure you
would acknowledge from the utterly failed state that it was in
2001. People do not want to go back. Anyone who has been to Af-
ghanistan or who knows Afghans knows that.
And so let me ask you looking forward, what happens to this
work that you are evaluating and urging us to improve if we pre-
cipitously withdraw, if our military were to perhaps in response to
a tweet from somebody, just get up and leave?
Mr. SOPKO. We have not done an exact study on it, but just
based upon all of our work and what people are telling me, and I
was just there over Christmas and I have gone four times a year
since I started this job, if the military, our military precipitously
leaves, and I do not know how you define precipitously, but leaves
very quickly, the Afghan military is going to have a hard time
fighting on their own without our support. We give a lot of—we do
not do the bulk of the fighting, they do it, but we do a lot of sup-
port, particularly their air. We do a lot of support of that and with
the Special Forces, so you would have a very bloody stalemate con-
tinuing but probably declining.
If we precipitously cut funding, my prediction, and it is just my
prediction, we have not done a study on it, the Afghan Government
would fall.
Mr. MALINOWSKI. And do you see that the perception that this
might happen is having an impact on choices that Afghans are
making? Have we seen, for example, capital flight? People deciding,
you know what, I am just going to take my money. I am going to
sell my property and my business, move my money to another
country, send my kids to another country because I do not have
confidence that this support is going to continue over the long
term?
Mr. SOPKO. Again, we have not done a study on it, but from the
Afghans we have talked to, and again I have people there who have
been there for years and we have dealt with people are moving
their families out of the country, I assume money is going with it.
We have seen a bit of an uptick in theft of fuel and all of that and
that is what happened the last time when we thought there was
a drawdown, everybody is stealing what they can before we leave.
So that we have seen, so that is a problem.
Mr. MALINOWSKI. Do you have any confidence that there can be
a peace agreement with the power sharing with the Taliban that
would enable us to continue honest, corruption-free development
work in Afghanistan?
Mr. SOPKO. You know, it would be difficult, but it is something
you are hoping the Taliban also cares about. But that is the dif-
ficulty of this negotiation of the Taliban are involved in a lot of the
illegality. Beyond killing us, they are involved in the drug trade,
so what happens after that? They are involved in extortions,
kidnappings, stuff like that. It is a full-service criminal organiza-
tion on top of being a terrorist, so I do not know how that is going
to work.
Mr. MALINOWSKI. Yes. Well, I would conclude by saying this is
obviously difficult and complicated, but I think in all these years
 86

there is one thing that we have not tried in Afghanistan. We have

tried just about everything else, but the one thing we have not
tried is to simply say we are committed, we are not leaving.
And I wonder what impact it would have if we were to simply
say to the Afghan people what we have said to the South Korean
people, to the German people, to others that whatever the nature
of our presence, we are not just going to pack up and leave. And
I yield back. I think I am out of time, but.
Mr. SOPKO. I think I am out of time. Thank you.
Mr. CASTRO. Thank you.
Representative Titus.
Ms. TITUS. Thank you. As I have listened and read through some
of the testimony, it seems to me a couple of things also stand out
in addition to the excellent summary that was just given by Mr.
Malinowski. One thing, just to use some of the jargon, instead of
watering the green spots, we seem to keep rewarding bad behavior.
Instead of helping those that are more secure, we keep investing
in those are that are insecure, and why is that the case and how
do we change that?
And the second thing is, our whole pattern seems to be just buy-
ing results. We will give you some money if you will do this. There
was, I think you noticed, some religious leaders who adopted some
attitudes toward women if we gave them a nice financial package.
Once we have established that as our pattern, how do we break it?
And are there any other kinds of incentives that are noncash that
we could be using so that the commitment to the kind of things we
are trying to encourage is not just short term or superficial but is
really more ingrained?
Mr. SOPKO. Answering your first question about this timeline, al-
most of—well, this, I forget how you phrased it on——
Ms. TITUS. Watering the green spots instead of——
Mr. SOPKO. Yes. A lot of that it comes from our stabilization re-
port when we looked at it and this was driven by the timeline of
troop withdrawal, that our troops there wanted to try to get as
much of the territory free of Taliban before they knew they were
leaving. And that was short-sighted because they did a clear a lot
of places but there was nothing to come in behind it. And that is
what was driving that train, that is having timelines issued from
here not based on the reality on the ground.
As for the second question, and I do not know what you are re-
ferring to on the specifics of that, but what it is, is conditionality
and we are firm believers in conditionality and conditioning it in
many ways. One is a carrot, the other is a stick, but we call it
smart conditionality. So one thing is to say if you do this I will give
you more money. The other thing is, well, if you do it I am going
to take something away from you. So that is knowing who you are
dealing with. So if you know the people on the other side want
their kids to go to school at NYU, well, they have got to get a visa.
They have got to get into the United States, and that is the condi-
tionality you can give that is not exactly monetary. I will give you
a classic example.
We rebuilt the office of, I believe it was this Minister of Defense,
maybe a Minister of Interior because he wanted an office as big as
the Minister of Interior. So we went in and built him an office. He
 87

did not like it and totally ripped it out and rebuilt another one so
it was comparable, so they feel happy, they look the same and all
that. We spent hundreds of thousands, not a lot, but hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
I remember asking the CSTC-A commander after we had done
that—we built an office, ripped everything out, spent U.S. tax-
payers’ dollars to make it look pretty again so he was happy—I
said, what did you get for that? He had no idea what I was talking
about. I said, you just did a favor for him, what did you get? Did
you get him, maybe he is going to fight corruption in some area?
That is smart conditionality. That is knowing who you are deal-
ing with. And that is, I think, a way we can proceed and we have
not really done that too much. As a matter of fact, we are right
now asking for what type of conditions we have imposed on the
funds to the Afghan military. And if I am not mistaken, they are
refusing, I believe, to give us their current conditions. By ‘‘they’’ I
mean our U.S. Government officials.
Ms. TITUS. I serve on the House Democracy Partnership and Af-
ghanistan has been a partner since 2016, but we have a very dif-
ficult time engaging with them and I think it goes back to the point
that you made that early on you said successful reconstruction is
incompatible with continuing insecurity, and that is just one little
example of how very true that is.
Mr. SOPKO. Correct.
Ms. TITUS. Well, thank you very much for your testimony. I yield
back.
Mr. CASTRO. Thank you, Representative.
Mr. Sopko, that concludes our witnesses. Do you have any closing
comments or statement you would like to make?
Mr. SOPKO. Other than to thank you very much and thank the
chairman and all the members for giving us this time. This is very
helpful, I think, for not only you, I hope, but also for the American
people.
Mr. CASTRO. Well, thank you to our Members of Congress and
also to our witness, Mr. Sopko.
Mr. Sopko, thank you for your candor and for your hard work on
these issues. The hearing is concluded and the committee stands
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:21 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
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APPENDIX
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