[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
U.S. LESSONS LEARNED IN AFGHANISTAN
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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
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/, http://
docs.house.gov,
or http://www.govinfo.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
38-915 PDF 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
C O N T E N T S
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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
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 materials, 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
Committee. 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 exhaustion 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 sacrifice 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 thousands 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
firsthand the challenges we faced and the opportunities we had
to succeed. We have led the charge on other important issues as
well beyond those on the battlefield. They include supporting
democracy and women's rights, countering the drug trade,
developing the private sector, promoting economic growth,
fighting corruption, stabilizing 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
performed by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction. 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 example, we have spent nine billion on counternarcotics
programs, yet today Afghanistan is the largest producer of
opium, which finances our enemies. How is it possible that
after two decades, billions 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 reminder 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
involvement. 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 complex challenges we face. These
evaluations provide opportunities for Congress and the
executive branch to prevent the same mistakes 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 important 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
General 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 convicting over 130 individuals for
misconduct related to that reconstruction effort.
Although this is the twenty-second time I have presented
testimony 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
strategies nor our warfighting capabilities. Likewise, we are
not producing an oral history of our involvement in Afghanistan
nor opining 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. reconstruction 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 continuing insecurity. Second, unchecked corruption in
Afghanistan has undermined our goals there and, unfortunately,
we helped foster that corruption.
Third, after the Taliban's initial defeat there was no
clear reconstruction strategy and no single military service,
agency, or country in charge of reconstruction efforts in
Afghanistan. Fourth, politically 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, reconstruction
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 manner, it should require
agencies to provide regular reports to Congress disclosing
risks to major reconstruction projects and programs 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 measures in place. Fourth, oversight is still
mission-critical in Afghanistan. Congress must require that
this administration continues to ensure adequate oversight,
monitoring, and evaluation capabilities continue.
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 mandated 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:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Engel. Good morning. Our nation has been at war in
Afghanistan 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 decades, 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
objective: defeat al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts and prevent a
repeat of September 11th. By December of that year, American
and coalition 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 followed 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 distracted 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 continued 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 Afghanistan Reconstruction, what we call SIGAR, to conduct
oversight 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 lessons learned.
This past December, the Washington Post published a review
of hundreds of interviews and documents SIGAR collected for the
Lessons Learned Program after obtaining them through the
Freedom of Information Act. These documents and the Post's
excellent reporting 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 conversation 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
Administration is not righting the ship on our Afghanistan
policy. SIGAR's Lessons Learned reports have confirmed the
longstanding view that there is no military solution to the
conflict in Afghanistan. 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 reconciliation. 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 Twitter, as we have come to expect from the President. The
announcement came after over a year of the administration
blocking key information 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 opening 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
General 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
account that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was failing,
the Trump Administration made no real change in strategy. The
President'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 evidence 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 comment 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 been one of initial success, followed by long
years of floundering and ultimate failure. We are not going to
repeat that mistake. Unquote.
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
statement 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 subsequent administrations did repeat that mistake,
subsequent administrations 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 Administration'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 Administration of troops as well as a surge on
reconstruction or development aid. So that was in response to
that not focusing on the Afghanistan 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 respond to some of the observations of the interviewees?
For example, 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
possible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable, but
reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we
became a self-licking 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 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 disincentive, 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 people 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 throughout 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 reconstruction 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 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 people. 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 defined in the negative. We do not do nation
building, somebody else does. But we were trying to make
certain that an Afghan Government 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
identify, 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 Afghanistan where we have consistency in our
training and we bring people over there for more than 6 months.
And you see that particularly 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 connected 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 particularly 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 tremendous; that is one of the best
programs we have and we were advising 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
military, and particularly the Afghan police, has been a
hopeless nightmare 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 complicated, but something needs to
change. The status quo is not acceptable here.
Yes, sir.
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
international 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 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 services so that the locals would go back and
support the central government. 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 fathers 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 happened 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 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
advocating 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
convictions, a thousand investigations, criminal and civil, 600
audits, inspections, 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 convicted 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
testimony is just amazing, you talk about how in 2014, then
USAID administrator--and I know him, Dr. Shah. He was a very,
very honorable 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.
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 people 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
inspector 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
Afghanistan the difference is that these people would be
killed. Simple, 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 expectancy. And we talked to experts in
the health field. We talked to experts at the CIA that said it
was statistically impossible, statistically impossible to
double the life expectancy of any country over that timeframe.
But that is--and I am certain some President and some AID
administrator, 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
tremendous person to work with. But we find this. But I think
the problem is, again, we did not send liars and thieves and
troublemakers to Afghanistan to work for USAID or for the
Department of Defense 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 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
elevated an important discussion, but it is not the first
attempt to highlight problems with the U.S. role in
Afghanistan. Congress established 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
Afghanistan 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 second.
According to the Afghanistan Papers, in 2014 a senior State
Department 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 interview in 2016, an anonymous USAID official
said, ``Taliban's presence 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 instead of achieving the
achievable.''
All these quotes help demonstrate how a lack of cohesive
strategy 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 assistance 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
strategy 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 strategy is and what was the objective of the overall
strategy in Afghanistan, 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 understand. 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 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
attrition metrics for the ANA Corps and ANA zone level, that is
classified. 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
classification 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 Afghanistan.
Mr. Deutch. Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this
hearing. And for the over 2,400 American lives lost and over
20,000 wounded, 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 determine 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
innocence 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.
You highlighted challenges regarding coordination of
reconstruction 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 regarding 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 military. It is a problem and I really think it
is something that Congress 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, unfortunately, 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 difference 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 reconstruction 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
autonomously 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 government 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 committee up here are the best ones to
decide, but it should be recognized 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 regarding 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 responsibility to get things right, we are going to be
talking about billions 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
empowerment in Afghanistan this year or early next year. And in
a recently released 2019 High-Risk List, there is a section
focusing on how despite 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
engagement 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 semblance 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 somebody 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?
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 forward?
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 problem of women's rights is men. And all of
our programs have been focusing on giving certificates and
things to women, who are problem 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 oversold 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
talking 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
continual 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 change. Yes, the President can come in and they
can tweak it as needed, but it has to survive an
administration. And that is something 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 reconstruction 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, unfortunately 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 interrupted 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
problems 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
distorted 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 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 assume 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
program? 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
recommendations 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? Because part of what I am trying to figure
out is, is there some failure 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
interviewed 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, certainly, the absence of a clear set of objectives has
to come, you know, developing an objective for our mission in
Afghanistan followed by a strategy and then metrics to measure
it. I think that has been our challenge.
But I am particularly disturbed about what I am learning in
this most recent report with respect to the issue of
corruption. The Department 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 reported 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 significantly 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 measure 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 warlords 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 purposes? That seems to be an especially
serious cause or a contributing 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 intentions, 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 expects 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.
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 attack 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,
``Congress 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 winning 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 downside 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
perspective, 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 examples 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 somebody 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 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
Administration, 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 obviously 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, assist 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
governments?
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
Afghanistan 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 Europe, 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
values, culture, et cetera, in Afghanistan and that probably
foundationally, is one of the things that has led us to be not
so efficient. 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 future? 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,
certainly, 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
administration is work with us on this. And if we were to do
that there probably 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 taxpayers and whatever, and that is
not going to change once you sign 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 entertaining 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 appreciate what you have said up here.
I have actually been listening and I had a couple of good
questions 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 jurisdiction 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.
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
warlords who are probably more powerful than the Taliban? They
corrupt 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 problems. The sad thing is, over the last 18 years
drug usage in Afghanistan 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 annually, 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
Afghanistan, more military was not always the right answer.
Whether 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.
Mr. Castro. What I was going to ask you about, about the
interplay 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 Afghanistan, 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
experts. 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 opportunity 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. Because, for example, our military assistance program has
been run by the military. We have trained the Afghans to deal
with the military. They have not been trained to deal through
the normal embassy 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
adversely affect overall messaging and indirectly
reconstruction efforts on the ground. The articulation of goals
for the purpose of 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
support 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--
because 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 insulate the budgeting and policymaking processes from
political pressures when it comes to matters of war and peace
or, just narrowly speaking, this war and peace in Afghanistan.
Maybe to put it another way, how do we keep this from happening
that we are spending 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 dollars 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 somebody 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 Stated goals were not properly tailored to the Afghan
context as you 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 mendacity 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 cannot do it in one administration. So if you wanted
to help the Afghans, 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 overflowing. The story about Afghanistan and the United
States' military 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 accountability. 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 report 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, implement 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.
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
problems 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 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 recommendations 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 recommendations 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 because 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.
Particularly, 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 actually a decent job. And I
was wondering if you could provide you and your agency's
opinion on the generation of leadership that is coming 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 progressing.
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 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 Afghan 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.
taxpayer 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 programs. 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 particular specific issues. I am sorry I cannot answer in
more detail.
Ms. Spanberger. No, that is a really great starting point
for those of us as we move into the appropriations season, so I
appreciate that.
And one next piece, as we are kind of zooming out from the
challenges 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
examining what has happened in Afghanistan and looking at the
range of national security challenges that we see today, do you
have concerns about escalating tensions in the region
particularly with Iran and how that may impact our efforts in
Afghanistan moving forward?
Mr. Sopko. I think any security issue in that region causes
concern 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 obviously that region is something we have to focus on.
And, ultimately, the success of peace there is going to have to
involve the region. If you read the book, The Great Game, which
is a fascinating book by a British historian on it, what he
says about Afghanistan 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 particular 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 another, and would you point us in a particular place
to have concerns 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
commanders 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.
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
effectively testified and talked about for the last couple
hours the fact that we have basically failed all of our
objectives in Afghanistan 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 selection of those timelines?
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
Afghanistan 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 question. 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 Congress and that we certainly canot provide
oversight or fulfill the responsibilities that we have if we do
not have access to that information.
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 flourished because terrorism is in many ways a
response in Afghanistan, 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 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 Afghanistan 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
precipitously 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 support, particularly
their air. We do a lot of support of that and with the Special
Forces, so you would have a very bloody stalemate continuing
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 difficulty 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 organization 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 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
buying 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, almost 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 report 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
referring 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 conditionality
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 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.
taxpayers' 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
dealing 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
Afghanistan has been a partner since 2016, but we have a very
difficult 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.]
APPENDIX
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RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
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