The United States leaders persistently ignored warnings that Afghan government's highlevels of corruption would undo the rebuilding process, according to reports.
American officials received persistent, stark warnings that Afghanistan's entrenched culture of official corruption would undermine their efforts to rebuild the country after the West's military invasion 15 years ago, according to recently declassified diplomatic cables and internal government reports.
The diversion of Afghan resources and Western aid for private gain would drain vitally-needed funds from the country's reconstruction and alienate its citizenry, the public and private reports all said. That would in turn fuel renewed public support for the West's enemy - the Taliban, whose social brutality notoriously included draconian punishments for official corruption.
But the US officials in charge of rebuilding the country largely failed to heed these alarms, according to their own assessments. Afghanistan's corruption, said Ryan Crocker, the U.S ambassador from 2011 to 2012, in a newly-released interview with a team of official auditors, was "the ultimate point of failure for our efforts."
Washington has paid a steep price for its mistakes - it has invested more than $800 billion USD in Afghanistan, including about $100 billion in direct payments, and lost more than 2,300 American lives over the past 15 years. At least a tenth of the country's population is still under the Taliban's control, with another 25 percent now being contested, and these numbers have lately been rising, not falling.
Nearly 40 percent of the population subsists on less than $1.35 a day.
In fact, Washington has so little to show for its efforts that a group of 10 former U.S ambassadors and military commanders in Afghanistan declared in a joint statement published by The National Interest magazine on September. 14 that stabilizing the country and ending its continued incubation of terrorism will require at least another generation of US effort.
Read the full story at TOLOnews