SIGAR 25-05 Staffing the Mission: Lessons from the U.S. Reconstruction of Afghanistan

Lessons learned reports such as this one comply with SIGAR’s legislative mandate to provide independent and objective leadership and recommendations to promote economy, efficiency, and effectiveness; prevent and detect waste, fraud, and abuse; and inform the Congress, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the administrator for USAID about reconstruction-related problems and the need for correc. [...] They are unique in the Inspector General community, and through these reports, we hope to reach a diverse audience in the legislative and executive branches, and at the strategic and programmatic levels, both in Washington and in the field. [...] Therefore, rather than attempting to train thousands of experts fluent in the local dialects and well-versed in the history of all the nations that could be subjects of reconstruction operations, a more pragmatic apporach would be to train staff in how to communicate with the locals they work with through the skilled use of interpreters. [...] SIGAR has extensively chronicled the obstacles in this effort, many of which came down to the choice of personnel involved in making and implementing those decisions.21 For the first 16 years of the war, a collection of ad hoc training and advisory models was used to build the Afghan security sector. [...] government entities have documented the various kinds of problems related to the use of contractors in Afghanistan.28 This report was written to help policymakers and agency officials understand the challenges in deploying thousands of U.