Tom Temin: Tell us about personnel practices in Afghanistan. It’s not something that comes to top of mind given the kinetic and difficult situation there, but lots of agencies were operating and lots of agencies had employees.

David Young: Absolutely. So I think it helps to zoom out a bit on this issue because it is a little niche. Basically, when the Vietnam War ended 50 years ago, the U.S. government dismantled a lot of the staff and institutions that we used to rebuild a country at war. And so the U.S. government basically concluded that the war didn’t go well and that we should never do it again. And so that’s of course an understandable instinct. But we really don’t have the magic wand that we think we do when it comes to never doing this again. And we didn’t really know that we would end up fighting two similar wars at the same time in Iraq and Afghanistan just a few decades later. And so by the time 9/11 happened, our own government institutions did not have the staff and expertise needed for those two efforts. And so for the 20 years following that in Afghanistan, we patched together what we could on getting the right people into the right jobs at the right time. But it was generally just not enough. And that’s because developing expertise takes a long time. And we had 20 years, but we constantly thought we were about to leave. And so their motivation to create a robust system to get the right people and make sure that you could replace them with more good people, that those incentives were really just never there. And so a 20-year war became 21-year wars.

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Tom Temin: Interesting. And your report then looked at those personnel practices and the lack of quality practices was evident to the people sent over there to work. This is primarily DoD agencies outside of the military itself and also USAID and the State Department, I’m thinking?

David Young: Yes, absolutely. And the challenge there, especially with the civilian agencies, including state and aid, is that when you have this reconstruction effort like this, you have to ask, put your bureaucrat hat on and say, ‘Where do these people come from?’ They can either be cannibalized from other government offices, doing other work in other countries, or you can stand up and fire people off the open market from scratch. And the challenge with the latter option, it’s more efficient if you’ve got the money for it, but the people might not be qualified. And that was often the case here. So these agencies didn’t have a reserve of people waiting to flood the ranks of those deploying to Afghanistan. And it showed even the people who deployed, they were very humble and some people we interviewed said, ‘I got this job because I have a master’s degree and a heartbeat.’ It wasn’t because I’ve got decades of experience in it because the numbers of those people tended to be quite few and far between. And then replacing them became a whole other challenge. Even if you can get a tranche of very talented people, let’s say a few thousand of them, to oversee all the contracts and to train Afghan police and all that, you’ve got to replace them a year later because you can’t keep them in these hardship environments year after year after year. And that requires planning and bureaucracy and forethought. And we were short on all those things in Afghanistan.

Tom Temin: Right. And one of the things in the report too early on says training. It says once personnel were hired or chosen to deploy, that is, guess what, you’re going, the process of properly training them posed a significant hurdle because Afghanistan was not exactly like going to the Chicago suburbs.

David Young: Certainly, yes. There’s multiple facets of what an effective training would look like for these staff. One is just your basic awareness of what Afghanistan is, the people, the culture, the language. And for those who are embedding in or partnering with Afghan government, they need to be aware of how the Afghan government is supposed to work and how that contrasts with how the Afghan government actually does work in practice, warts and all. And that component was you’d be lucky if you’re a state official or USAID official or DoD official and you get a week or two on all of that. You might get a week on how to operate in case you’re a military base gets overrun, what to do then, like those kinds of what-if scenarios. A lot of the trainings are those sort of box-checking exercises, making sure that you can survive and sustain yourself for the year that you’re there. But getting thoughtful, the trainings frequently did not help people do their jobs properly or even successfully. And so those shortcomings were often driven by this idea that we can’t keep these people in training for six months, which honestly was what would have been required because we had to get those bodies downrange. We had to get those people into the field because the tempo, the mission, there was a demand for fast progress back here in Washington.

Tom Temin: Right.

David Young: And so you had to get people you can’t keep people in training if you had to have this impact. And this was very shortsighted because, of course, if you are sending unqualified, unprepared people to do this complex work, the likelihood of it backfiring is substantial. And that’s what happened.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with David Young, deputy director for Lessons Learned at the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. And you personally have spent substantial time in Afghanistan. What did you find? And you did this in different roles.

David Young: Certainly, yeah. So from 2010 to 12, I was an embedded adviser to the Department of Defense, so I was a social scientist advising U.S. troops, the State Department and USAID how to build relationships with Afghan government officials, Afghan civil society, tribal elders and people like that to facilitate what at the time was a very robust U.S. counterinsurgency mission. Then joining SIGAR in 2016, almost a decade ago, for our Lessons Learned effort to try and make sense of this bigger picture. A typical inspector general does a lot of audits. What’s wrong with this program? Let’s find some ways to save money on another program. And our program was established in 2015 and 16 to try and understand what does it all mean, what reforms sort of within our government bureaucracy are necessary to do all of this more effectively.

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Tom Temin: And one question I had concerns, another set of people that often get overlooked or unthought of, and that is the contractors that sent people over there to support the federal agencies. Were they part of your look see for personnel practices?

David Young: SIGAR has looked at contracts a great deal. For perspective, this can run from who are the individuals who are repairing Afghan military aircraft. We had contractors doing that. USAID hires contractors to build wells and roads and to help staff schools and things like that. And so the variance of what contractors actually accomplished was substantial and what the task that they performed was substantial because we don’t have enough U.S. government officials to perform all this work. And it was much more efficient or in theory, much more efficient to hire contractors to do this on a short-term basis. This particular report doesn’t examine contractors. It instead focuses on the U.S. government personnel staffing constraints Because our perspective is that is upstream of all of the contractors. It was U.S. officials who decided what contracts were necessary, how to staff them, how to pay for them, and all of those details. And so if you can’t, as we couldn’t when we often struggled, get good people into the right jobs as U.S. officials. Then, of course, it’s going to have problematic downstream implications for the kinds of contracts that I just described in that you’re talking about Tom.

Tom Temin: And SIGAR will sunset in September of 2025. You will have left behind a huge body of work. I mean, I remember reading the Iraq reconstruction and everything from urinals emptying into light fixtures to some of these global problems that affected the entire effort, 13 so far, volumes of Lessons Learned. What happens to any of it? Is anyone listening? How do you hope this will be inculcated in how somebody thinks in the government?

David Young: SIGAR has the good fortune of having a great deal of influence historically on congressional legislation where if our recommendations are frequently implemented by Congress through legislation requiring U.S. agencies to do A, B and C, U.S. Agencies themselves adopt our best practices on a regular basis based on our extensive research and the relationships we built with them. The bigger hope is that we’ve spent all this money, we’ve lost so many people and experienced so much hardship as a result of this war and the rebuilding of Afghanistan. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a library of data and information and insight so that a decade from now or two decades from now, when the U.S. Government is considering another large scale operation like this and large scale reconstruction effort, they’ve got tangible, sober, honest analysis as to what it would take to be successful and compare that to whatever state of play they have at the time or whether or not it matches to do we have what it takes to succeed? And if not, should we be proceeding with this? So as sort of a we view ourselves as an institutional stress tester for the rest of the government and its plans and assumptions. We might not have to wait two decades. We’ve got talk of Ukraine and Gaza and others and we’re hoping that our reports maintain that relevance both in the near future and in the many, many years to come.

Tom Temin: Right. And now three years or so after we abandoned Afghanistan in kind of a messy way, it’s the Taliban running the show. It’s almost like they’re being set back another century in many ways. Do you personally ever envision the day when there will be some kind of normalcy for Afghanistan and its relations with the United States?

David Young: It’s a little difficult to speculate on that, but what I will say is that we are writing another Lessons Learned report on how U.S. assistance can help the Afghan people while bypassing the Taliban and other governments like that. They’re called estranged regimes or estranged context where there’s humanitarian assistance that needs to go to a population that is being obstructed in many ways by a problematic government, a government that we don’t have a strong or any relationship with. And this idea of a repaired or a long-term relationship with the Taliban comes into play where it is normal for times like this as the years move on for the U.S. government to eventually come to recognize that engagement is better than not engaging. And so we couldn’t speculate where the U.S. government will go. But what I can say is the normal trajectory when there is an undemocratic seizure of power that the U.S. government often eventually engages. So that may be many years from now.

Tom Temin: That brings us back to Vietnam. In some ways, we’re engaged. It’s become a huge tourist attraction for Americans. But you wouldn’t want to live there as a Vietnamese if you like liberty and opportunity.

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David Young: What we can say is that we’re trying to still provide insight to the U.S. government for how it can operate in these kinds of environments where you don’t want to work with the government. But the people depend on your assistance and in ways that are productive. So that’s the sort of the needle that we’re trying to thread as the U.S. government is constantly determining the appropriate policy on how to move forward with the Taliban.