For those who have followed the situation even somewhat more closely than the average media outlet — which ignored the war in Afghanistan almost entirely after 2002 — there is (sadly) no surprise whenever another pillar of moral justification for the lengthy war and occupation effort collapses or becomes too tenuously thin to make the case anymore.
The twins of propaganda and profligate budget fraud have been skipping hand in hand for years around the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. We have not made the country better and most “evidence” that we did has been fabricated, exaggerated, or erased immediately by local forces we can’t control (including our own political allies).
We don’t want to talk about that because then we would have to admit that thousands of troops died and three-quarters of a trillion dollars were spent over the course of more than a decade…for nothing. Literally nothing. It was a giant, heartbreaking waste.
Now read the details from BuzzFeed News, which sent journalist Azmat Khan and others all over Afghanistan to check just the $1 billion worth of USAID and DOD funded schools alone. And weep.
Here’s a quick summary of the massive report:
The United States trumpets education as one of its shining successes of the war in Afghanistan. But a BuzzFeed News investigation reveals U.S. claims were often outright lies, as the government peddled numbers it knew to be false and touted schools that have never seen a single student.
[…]
a BuzzFeed News investigation — the first comprehensive journalistic reckoning, based on visits to schools across the country, internal U.S. and Afghan databases and documents, and more than 150 interviews — has found those claims to be massively exaggerated, riddled with ghost schools, teachers, and students that exist only on paper. The American effort to educate Afghanistan’s children was hollowed out by corruption and by short-term political and military goals that, time and again, took precedence over building a viable school system. And the U.S. government has known for years that it has been peddling hype.
BuzzFeed News exclusively acquired the GPS coordinates and contractor information for every school that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) claims to have refurbished or built since 2002, as well as Department of Defense records of school constructions funded by the U.S. military.
BuzzFeed News spot-checked more than 50 American-funded schools across seven Afghan provinces, most of which were battlefield provinces — the places that mattered most to the U.S. effort to win hearts and minds, and into which America poured immense sums of aid money.
[…]
Over the last decade, report after report has chronicled the corruption and waste that squandered taxpayer dollars across many U.S. programs in Afghanistan. But American education efforts — long seen as a shining success — have gone mostly unexamined, a truth acknowledged even by one of the U.S. officials who has investigated corruption in Afghanistan.
U.S. Marines in Afghanistan in November 2001. (US Marine Corps Photo)
