America’s two decade long war in Afghanistan is over. The Taliban has taken Kabul, president Ashraf Ghani has fled, and planes are flying out of Kabul airport bearing American allies and personnel. The speed at which the U.S.-backed Afghan government fell is only shocking if you haven’t been reading the U.S. government’s own reports, which for years have been documenting its failed reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. The U.S. has wasted billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and millions of hours trying to rebuild Afghanistan, and recorded its failures in stunning detail in reports available to anyone who wants to read them…
We know about a goat farm and other failed efforts because of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a government agency that started keeping track of the war and its material costs in 2008. Since then, the agency has kept detailed records of its investigations into the more than $144 billion the U.S. set aside for reconstruction in Afghanistan.
The office has produced special reports, such as the one about the goats, and quarterly reports for more than a decade. The history of the war is in those thousands of pages of documents. It’s a story of hubris, corruption, and abject failure. The warning signs were there to anyone who wanted to read them.
RTFA. Money wasted on economic projects, wasted trying to build an army that mirrored the US Military – which meant it was incompetent to work and function in Afghanistan. And all of this gets a big “OF COURSE” because we did the same in ‘Nam and pretty much every other nation outside of Europe and North America where we stuck our unwanted noses.
Eideard 
“Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Tuesday that he was concerned that then-President Donald Trump “undermined” the US’ 2020 agreement with the Taliban by pushing for US forces to leave Afghanistan without the Taliban meeting the conditions of the deal.
The Trump administration’s “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” outlined a series of commitments from the US and the Taliban related to troop levels, counterterrorism and intra-Afghan dialogue aimed at bringing about “a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire.”
But, Esper told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “my concern was that President Trump, by continuing to want to withdraw American forces out of Afghanistan, undermined the agreement, which is why in the fall when he was calling for a return of US forces by Christmas, I objected and formally wrote a letter to him, a memo based on recommendations from the military chain of command and my senior civilian leadership that we not go further — that we not reduce below 4,500 troops unless and until conditions were met by the Taliban.”
“Otherwise,” Esper continued, “we would see a number of things play out, which are unfolding right now in many ways.”
Trump fired Esper in November 2020 in the wake of the presidential election.” https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/17/politics/mark-esper-donald-trump-taliban-afghanistan-cnntv/index.html
GOP Removes Page Praising Donald Trump’s ‘Historic’ Peace Deal With Taliban https://www.newsweek.com/gop-removes-webpage-praising-trumps-historic-peace-deal-taliban-1619605
Trump’s deal with the Taliban set the stage for the Afghan collapse https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/568154-trumps-deal-with-the-taliban-set-the-stage-for-the-afghan-collapse
“Amidst the chaos of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, it appears that a handful of friends and air traffic controllers from around the world managed to assist in closing the information gap between circling aircraft and air traffic controllers in Kabul- using a relay chain of social media messages.” https://warisboring.com/21st-century-dunkirk-the-story-of-how-air-traffic-controllers-used-social-media-dms-to-help-rescue-friends-trapped-in-afghanistan/
“The Other Afghan Women : In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.” (The New Yorker, September 6, 2021) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women