Daily Archives: October 31, 2026

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) was established in 2008 along the lines of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), the office Congress had created four years earlier. The resemblance is visible in the statutes, the reporting toolkit and the lessons-learned programs. It is also visible in the conclusions. SIGIR’s final report held that its entire oversight experience pointed to a single lesson: the need to reform the U.S. approach to stabilization and reconstruction operations. SIGAR’s 2021 retrospective, written after twenty years and $145 billion, traced the shortcomings of the Afghan effort to failures of strategy, timelines, sustainability, staffing, security, local context and the measurement of impact, themes that echo what SIGIR documented in Iraq. In effect, two offices audited the same failure twice. The sections below set out where the two offices were alike and where they were not. Continue reading →