The U.S. spent billions to rebuild Afghanistan. Was it successful?
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.1 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
A new report from U.S. government watchdog SIGAR gives us the fullest accounting yet of U.S. efforts to rebuild Afghanistan.
In short, they call it "a two-decade long effort fraught with waste.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Consider This from NPR. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Mary Louise Kelly. |
| 0:08.6 | Every other Saturday, we share a bonus episode for our NPR Plus supporters. |
| 0:14.4 | Today, we're making that episode available to everyone so you can get a taste of NPR Plus if you are not a supporter yet. And if you are, |
| 0:23.5 | thank you so much for your support. You can learn more about NPR Plus at plus.npr.org. That link |
| 0:30.1 | is in our episode notes. |
| 0:45.3 | 20 years. Notice how long the U.S. fought in Afghanistan from the invasion in 2001 to the chaotic withdrawal in 2021. The United States has poured billions into rebuilding the country, |
| 0:51.9 | and now we have the fullest accounting yet of what those |
| 0:55.8 | billions bought. It comes in the form of a report from a U.S. government watchdog, the special |
| 1:01.7 | inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, known as Cigar. This is the final report |
| 1:07.5 | from Cigar. The agency shuts down next month, and it chronicles, and I am quoting, a two-decade-long effort fraught with waste. |
| 1:16.5 | John Sopko was the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. |
| 1:20.9 | We have interviewed him many times over the years. |
| 1:23.1 | Today he's in the studio with me in person. |
| 1:25.8 | Mr. Sopko, good to see you and speak with you once again. |
| 1:28.8 | Well, thank you for inviting me. |
| 1:29.9 | It is a pleasure to be here. |
| 1:31.3 | So this is a report that runs 137 pages. |
| 1:35.6 | It summarizes years, the full accounting, the totality of cigars work. |
| 1:40.9 | If I were to ask you to write the headline in a sentence or two, what would it be? |
| 1:44.9 | The headline is we spent 20 years in Afghanistan and spent $144 billion on reconstruction, |
| 1:55.6 | and the vast majority of it was a failure. This report identified the failures and identified how much that |
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