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Unrest
Saeed Ahmed, NPR

A watchdog group had been sounding the warning about Afghanistan's meltdown for wears

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A Taliban fighter sits on the back of a vehicle with a machine gun in front of the main gate leading to the Afghan presidential palace, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. The U.S. military has taken over Afghanistan's airspace as it struggles to manage a chaotic evacuation after the Taliban rolled into the capital.
A Taliban fighter sits on the back of a vehicle with a machine gun in front of the main gate leading to the Afghan presidential palace, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. The U.S. military has taken over Afghanistan's airspace as it struggles to manage a chaotic evacuation after the Taliban rolled into the capital.
Rahmat Gul/AP

For those wondering how Afghanistan could fall so swiftly to the Taliban, the dozens of dispatches from a Congress-created watchdog group reflect it didn't: the meltdown was a slow-motion disaster years in the making.

This link will take you to every report filed by SIGAR, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Congress created the agency to maintain an independent oversight on the billions of dollars the U.S. appropriated for Afghanistan's reconstruction since 2002.

"All the signs have been there," the head of the watchdog agency, John Sopko, told NPR on Sunday.

Sopko said his agency released multiple reports and he testified more than 50 times to sound the warning in the last decade.

John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, poses for a portrait in his office in Arlington, Va., on Dec. 18, 2015.
John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, poses for a portrait in his office in Arlington, Va., on Dec. 18, 2015.
Congressional Quarterly/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

"I mean, we've been shining a light on it in multiple reports going back to when I started 2012 about changing metrics, about ghosts, ghost soldiers who didn't exist, about poor logistics, about the fact that the Afghans couldn't sustain what we were giving them. So these reports have come out," he said.

The speed with which the Taliban overtook Afghanistan "maybe is a little bit of a surprise," Sopko said. But "the fact that the ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] could not fight on their own should not have been a surprise to anyone."

Sopko said the final report from his agency comes out Tuesday.

It'll lay out what the U.S. can do differently in other countries where it's involved in relief and reconstruction.

"Well, the top-line lesson is that we have a very difficult time developing and implementing a coherent rule, a multi-agency approach to these type of problems. And we got serious problems with the way we send people over there and HR the system.

"We have serious problems about our procurement system. And we have serious problems of going into a country and not understanding the culture and the makeup of that country."

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.