SIGAR’s 46th quarterly report sketched how the U.S. is propping up a corrupt and weak pauper state.
 | | President Trump and President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan spoke to American troops at Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul, Afghanistan, in November.Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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If you are like most of us, you can be forgiven for missing news during President Trump’s impeachment trial that you might otherwise have caught. The news feeds filled with political news, making it feel as if coverage of other issues was bumped. |
| The Taliban and other groups carried out a record number of attacks in Afghanistan during the last several months of 2019, according to an inspector general report released Friday. The increase in violence occurred during a period in which President Trump tweeted that the United States was “hitting our Enemy harder than at any time in the last ten years!” |
| The number of attacks, detailed in the quarterly report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a government watchdog formed in 2008, highlights once more the disparity between talking points on suppressing the Taliban and the reality on the ground: Despite a concerted bombing campaign and American and Afghan offensive ground operations, Taliban fighters are still able to attack at levels similar to those a decade ago. |
Honest war news is often fundamentally and necessarily dark. And the Afghan war reliably reminds those outsiders still following it of the value of skepticism when listening to a war organizer’s accounts of military campaigns. SIGAR’s 46th quarterly report — a tally that itself underlines the advanced age of the Pentagon’s failed Afghan efforts — sketched how the United States is propping up a corrupt and weak pauper state with military support and cash. The situation, by the numbers, remains beyond precarious. |
SIGAR wrote: “Donors, led by the United States, currently provide some $8.5 billion a year in on-budget grants to the Afghan government and in off-budget spending for reconstruction. These financial inflows account for about 75% of the country’s public expenditures for security, education, law enforcement, health, and other development functions. The United States alone provides more than $4 billion a year for reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan — not including the costs of U.S. military operations there.” |
With these kinds of inflows, it’s no surprise that nearly 70 percent of Afghan respondents on a recent survey said that corruption was a problem in their daily life. |
The Taliban endures, Afghan security forces struggle to operate independently, civilian hunger is widespread and persistent, reported cases of polio are on the rise. If there is a clear strategy to stabilize Afghanistan and fulfill anything like the many ambitions for it that the United States and the Pentagon have expressed for almost 20 years, the report underlined, again, how far off satisfying results still seem. |
SIGAR’s report, much of which focused on Afghan corruption and the United States’ role in it, did not take note of one item in the news that might have offered help in framing the high-level practices of many of the war’s leaders. Gen. Joseph Dunford, who retired after serving as commander of all American and NATO forces in Afghanistan and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was appointed to the board of Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s largest arms supplier. Dunford, who enjoyed friendly relations with many of the journalists who covered him, will assume his new role next week, according to this Reuters report. |
Stagnation and suffering on the ground. Opportunity at the top. Maybe the 47th report from the inspector general, along with the careers of those who led the wars that the Americans and Afghans still fight will receive the wider coverage they deserve. They look very different from what the Pentagon has often described. |
C. J. Chivers is assigned to The New York Times Magazine. He won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and is also the author of “The Gun,” a history of automatic weapons. |
The Afghan War Casualty Report: February 2020 |
 | | Afghan security officials patrol take part in an operation against the Taliban militants, in Nad-e-Ali district of Helmand, Afghanistan, 01 February 2020.Watan Yar/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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At least 23 pro-government forces and seven civilians have been killed in Afghanistan so far this month. [Read the report.] |
 | | The flight preparing to depart from Sana, Yemen, on Monday. The grinding five-year war in the country has caused famine and pushed much of the population to the brink of starvation.Khaled Abdullah/Reuters |
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That is the number of years the Saudi-enforced air-and-sea blockade of northern Yemen lasted before Monday, when a United Nations mercy flight to Jordan was permitted to leave the country. Onboard were seven Yemenis suffering from an array of life-threatening conditions, and an additional 23 people, most of them women and children, are expected to depart the country later in the week on flights to Jordan and Egypt. For five years the airport in Sana, the largest city in Yemen, was closed to civilian air traffic as part of the Saudi-enforced blockade, making it impossible for citizens of the war-torn country to receive health care its own government is ill equipped to provide. This week’s airlift came after 18 months of negotiations with Saudi Arabia, whose sweeping restrictions on the entry of aid and essential goods into the country has resulted in widespread starvation and a humanitarian crisis. Read the full Times report here. |
— Jake Nevins, Times Magazine editorial fellow |
Here are four articles from The Times you might have missed. |
 | | Palestinians inspected the rubble of a house in Jenin demolished by Israeli troops on Thursday. The home belonged to a Palestinian accused of being involved in the drive-by shooting of a rabbi two years ago.Majdi Mohammed/Associated Press |
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Clashes, shootings and a vehicle attack. At least three Palestinians were killed during clashes with Israeli security forces in the West Bank on Wednesday and Thursday, and an Israeli soldier was seriously wounded in a car ramming in Jerusalem overnight, in a surge of violence following the release of the long-awaited — and highly contentious — American plan for Middle East peace. [Read the story.] |
“How could it be that someone who doesn’t know the area could come here and find that firing position and launch an attack?” The United States blamed an Iraqi militia with close ties to Iran for an attack that killed an American contractor. But Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts. [Read the story.] |
“Our keeping combat troops there is not helping.” The United States must stop its involvement in endless wars, say bipartisan critics of both President Trump’s actions and Washington policymakers. [Read the story.] |
“It’s pretty presumptuous of the United States to draw down.” Some members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are considering withdrawing thousands of their forces from Afghanistan once the United States begins to officially cut its own presence in the country, according to American and European officials. [Read the story.] |
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