Efforts to make the reconstruction program “sustainable” continued even as Afghanistan’s government and economy remained almost entirely dependent on foreign funding, creating a fundamental mismatch between expectations and reality.
“The collapse of Afghanistan’s internationally supported government felt inevitable to me back in 2011, when I left Afghanistan,” Kane says. “At the time, I was working at USAID, and we were constantly being asked to make our work ‘more sustainable,’” she says.
“While that in itself is an important and noble goal, it was impossible at my level because the entire government and economy was externally funded.”
Kaine argues that the US-led invasion of Afghanistan was never a sustainable structure under the political constraints that the US government was willing to accept.
“The only way the intervention could have been sustainable would have been for it to be orders of magnitude less ambitious and for some form of permanent Western involvement,” she said, adding that this would have required a decades-long presence similar to the U.S. role in South Korea or Germany, with permanent bases and security.
Years after the war, one of the clearest lessons from Afghanistan is how deeply the conflict was misunderstood by those tasked with managing it.
Former U.S. officials and humanitarian workers say the conflict was shaped not just by violence but also by distorted perceptions of loyalty, legitimacy and authority.
Drawing on his experience working with USAID in Kandahar at the height of the conflict, Kane explains how counterinsurgency principles and intelligence operations collided with the everyday realities faced by Afghan civilians, often with deadly consequences for those caught between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed government.
In Kandahar City, Kaine recalls, local community elders charged with overseeing a U.S.-funded road construction project became embroiled in the realities of Afghanistan’s war economy.
He was supported by US military units and employed through a USAID program, but was found to have paid a 20 percent tax to the Taliban under pressure from his brother, who was in control of the surrounding area.
Such payments were reportedly not unusual and were widely understood as a cost of operating in southern Afghanistan, where families spread allegiances between the government and the Taliban as a means of survival, often defending themselves against the side that ultimately won.
“Then my army colleague heard my wakil (community representative) colleague’s brother demanding that he steal a bike from the project,” Kane says.
“My colleague refused to steal his motorcycle and was shot in the face in retaliation soon after. While I lived in a heavily guarded base and traveled by helicopter and MRAP, he didn’t even have a permit to carry a gun for self-defense and was living unprotected in Kandahar city.”
“Before he died, I was trying to convince the State Department to distribute bulletproof vests that had been gathering dust in storage facilities to their Afghan counterparts, who were frequently killed and were begging me in meetings for things like gun permits.
“He wasn’t an enemy or a terrorist sympathizer or any of those ugly things I’m sure were called. He was a victim of war and just trying to survive and protect his family.”
political censorship
From 2017 to 2025, SIGAR’s Lessons Learned program operated with an unusually broad mandate to challenge official narratives, publicly expose disturbing findings, and bring government accountability to the national spotlight.
Under then-Inspector General John Sopko, staffers were encouraged to write in plain language, interact directly with the press, and ensure that surveillance reports reached the American people beyond the Washington bureaucracy.
Kaine said that culture began to erode in 2021, when material suggesting that close associates of the US-backed former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani were involved in election manipulation was removed from the SIGAR report before publication.
After Sopko, the change accelerated. removal In January 2025, President Trump fired him along with dozens of other inspectors general.
Then there was a sharp turn toward internal self-censorship, driven more by fear of political retaliation than by factual disputes, Cain said.
She says senior leadership has gradually begun to narrow the scope of analysis that is considered politically sensitive.
“Under the Acting Secretary, who replaced Mr. Sopko, our front office feared attracting the attention of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), so they began to heavily censor our work, especially the reports that I had been leading for two years. broken aid system Without my input,” Kane says.
“They removed the politically inconvenient parts of the report, even though it was a continuation of policy and not the political analysis that the lessons learned program had produced over the years.
“I have been writing in public reports for years about the fact that contracts are generally more effective and efficient when fewer dollars are monitored. But while USAID and much of the state’s foreign assistance offices were being dismantled, SIGAR’s senior leadership censored this analysis from their reports.”
The effects of that internal narrowing have spread far beyond Afghanistan, she says, undermining the core mission of inspector generals across the government, which is to expose fraud, waste and abuse regardless of political discomfort.
This restriction of what can be said within government did not occur in a vacuum. This reflects a broader contradiction in US foreign policy, with official language increasingly emphasizing restraint and disengagement even as intervention mechanisms remain largely intact.
The publication of SIGAR’s final report was intended to mark an endpoint, a final accounting of two decades of war and accompanying reconstruction efforts.
Instead, for those working on this document, it arrived after much of its content had already been removed.
What appeared to be an end was actually a diminishing record of lessons learned, shaped not only by failures to document but also by domestic political pressures.
“Political censorship by SIGAR’s own senior leadership had been devastating for many months by the time the final report was released. I had long ago personally finished with that work and that chapter of my career,” Kane says.
“Serving the American people through my work at SIGAR, helping the people of Afghanistan to uncover waste and improve policymaking has been the highlight and greatest honor of my career,” she says.
“But the end of my time at SIGAR was most intensely marked by anger at the premature dismantling from within an incredibly valuable U.S. government office.”
