Cover photo credit: USAID Afghanistan photo of the Khost-Gardez road construction project. 
Stabilization: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan is the 

fourth lessons learned report issued by the Special Inspector General for 

Afghanistan Reconstruction. The report examines the U.S. stabilization effort in 

Afghanistan, detailing how the U.S. Agency for International Development and 

the Departments of State and Defense tried to support and legitimize the Afghan 

government in contested districts from 2002 through 2017. The report identifies 

lessons to inform U.S. policies and actions to stabilize a country or region 

before and during a contingency operation and provides recommendations 

to do so. With the rise of the Islamic State and its affiliates, making poorly 

governed spaces inhospitable to transnational terrorist groups remains a vital 

U.S. national security priority. 

Our analysis reveals the U.S. government greatly overestimated its ability 

to build and reform government institutions in Afghanistan as part of its 

stabilization strategy. We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used 

to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes 

in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence 

of coalition troops and civilians. As a result, by the time all prioritized districts 

had transitioned from coalition to Afghan control in 2014, the services and 

protection provided by Afghan forces and civil servants often could not compete 

with a resurgent Taliban as it filled the void in newly vacated territory.

SIGAR began its lessons learned program in late 2014 at the urging of 

General John Allen, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and others who had served 

in Afghanistan. Our lessons learned reports 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 Congress and the Secretaries of State and Defense 

about reconstruction-related problems and the need for corrective action. 

Unlike other inspectors general, Congress created SIGAR as an independent 

agency, not housed within any single department. SIGAR is the only inspector 

general focused solely on the Afghanistan mission, and the only one devoted 

exclusively to reconstruction issues. While other inspectors general have 

jurisdiction over the programs and operations of their respective departments 

or agencies, SIGAR has jurisdiction over all programs and operations supported 

with U.S. reconstruction dollars, regardless of the agency involved. Because 

SIGAR has the authority to look across the entire reconstruction effort, it is 

uniquely positioned to identify and address whole-of-government lessons.

Special Inspector General

for Afghanistan Reconstruction

2530 CRYSTAL DRIVE, ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA 22202
Our lessons learned reports synthesize not only the body of work and expertise 

of SIGAR, but also that of other oversight agencies, government entities, current 

and former officials with on-the-ground experience, academic institutions, and 

independent scholars. The reports document what the U.S. government sought 

to accomplish, assess what it achieved, and evaluate the degree to which these 

efforts helped the United States reach its strategic goals in Afghanistan. They 

also provide recommendations to address the challenges stakeholders face in 

ensuring efficient, effective, and sustainable reconstruction efforts, not just in 

Afghanistan, but in future contingency operations. 

SIGAR’s Lessons Learned Program comprises subject matter experts with 

considerable experience working and living in Afghanistan, aided by a team of 

seasoned research analysts. I want to express my deepest appreciation to the 

team members who produced this report, and thank them for their dedication 

and commitment to the project. I thank David H. Young, project lead; Jordan 

Kane and Paul Kane, research analysts; Jordan Schurter, student trainee; Olivia 

Paek, graphic designer; and Elizabeth Young, editor. In producing its reports, 

the Lessons Learned Program also uses the significant skills and experience 

found in SIGAR’s Audits, Investigations, and Research and Analysis directorates, 

and the Office of Special Projects. I thank all of the individuals who provided 

their time and effort to contribute to this report. It is truly a collaborative effort 

meant to not only identify problems, but also to learn from them and apply 

reasonable solutions to improve future reconstruction efforts. 

I believe our lessons learned reports will be a key legacy of SIGAR. Through 

these reports, we hope to reach a diverse audience in the legislative and 

executive branches, at the strategic and programmatic levels, both in 

Washington and in the field. By leveraging our unique interagency mandate, we 

intend to do everything we can to make sure the lessons from the United States’ 

largest reconstruction effort are identified, acknowledged, and, most 

importantly, remembered and applied to ongoing reconstruction efforts in 

Afghanistan, as well as to future conflicts and reconstruction efforts elsewhere 

in the world. 

John F. Sopko 

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction 

2530 CRYSTAL DRIVE, ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA 22202
STABILIZATION | TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY VI

CHAPTER 1 1

INTRODUCTION 

What is Stabilization? 4

Why Stabilization Matters 6

Scope of This Report 8

CHAPTER 2 11

STABILIZATION TAKES SHAPE (2002–2009)

Early Stabilization Efforts (2003–2005) 13

U.S. Agencies at Odds (2005–2007) 15

Deteriorating Security Drives a Return 

to Stabilization (2008–2009) 20

CHAPTER 3 23

ORIGINS OF THE STABILIZATION STRATEGY (2009)

The Obama Administration’s First Surge 

Created Diverse Expectations 23

New Commander Hints Many More Troops Needed 27

A Glimmer of Hope in the South 

Seems to Validate the Strategy 28

A Long-Term Strategy Compressed into 18 Months 30

CHAPTER 4 37

STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE 

(2009–2012)

Conceiving Stabilization 37

Implementing Stabilization: Programs and Tools 42

Civilian Personnel Issues 50

Spending Too Much, Too Fast 56

Local Government Officials: Too Few and Too Unqualified 58

ISAF was Often a Source of Instability 63

Clear-Hold-Hold: Stabilization Stalls 65

In Washington, a Determination to Show Progress 66

Drawdown Announced 66

CHAPTER 5 69

FROM STABILIZATION TO TRANSITION 

(2012–2017)

Rescoping Stabilization as Subnational Governance 71

Going Small and Local: 

Inspired by the National Solidarity Program 80
TABLE OF CONTENTS | STABILIZATION

CHAPTER 6 91

DOD STABILIZATION PROGRAMS

Commander’s Emergency Response Program 91

Village Stability Operations 107

CHAPTER 7 125

MEASURING THE EFFECTIVENESS 

OF STABILIZATION

Program Flexibility is Key 132

Did Stabilization Work? 135

CHAPTER 8 143

ANALYTICAL REVIEW OF STABILIZATION

The Strategic Impact of Compressed Timelines 143

Theories of Change: How the Rubber Hit the Road 146

Implementation 158

Prioritizing the Most Dangerous Areas 

Made Stabilization Less Effective 166

CHAPTER 9 179

FINDINGS

CHAPTER 10 185

LESSONS

CHAPTER 11 191

CONCLUSIONS

CHAPTER 12 195

RECOMMENDATIONS

Executive Branch 195

Legislative Branch 203

APPENDICES AND ENDNOTES 207

Appendix A: Case Study: Marawara District, 

Kunar Province 207

Appendix B: USAID Stabilization Programs 217

Appendix C: Methodology 233

Appendix D: Abbreviations 235

Endnotes 237

Acknowledgments 284
STABILIZATION | TABLE OF CONTENTS

FIGURES

Figure 1: U.S. Government Strategic Documents for Afghanistan, 2002–2016 16

Figure 2: Afghanistan IEDs—Found and Detonated, Combined, 2003–2009 21

Figure 3: Monthly Combat Events, in Nawa District, Helmand Province, 2005–2014 30

Figure 4: U.S. Government District Priorities in Afghanistan 41

Figure 5: Afghanistan Stabilization Programming From 2002–2017 42

Figure 6: USAID in Afghanistan: Total Expenditures vs. Stabilization Expenditures, 

2002–2017 56 

Figure 7: Southern Afghanistan 59

Figure 8: Afghan Local Governance: Shuras and Councils 78

Figure 9: Afghanistan CERP Disbursements from FY 2004–FY 2017 94

Figure 10: Afghan Districts with Village Stability Operations (VSO) 112

Figure 11: Monthly Combat Events, in Nawa and Nad Ali Districts,

Helmand Province, 2005–2014 176

Figure 12: USAID Projects, Marawara District, Kunar Province, Afghanistan 208

Figure 13: Monthly Combat Events, in Marawara District, Kunar Province, 2005–2014 216
vi | EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This lessons learned report draws important lessons from the U.S. experience 

with stabilization in Afghanistan from 2002–2017, with a special focus on 

the years after 2009 when most of the $4.7 billion in stabilization funds was spent. 

With the rise of the Islamic State and its affiliates, making poorly governed spaces 

inhospitable to transnational terrorist groups remains a vital U.S. national security 

priority. We anticipate U.S. government efforts to stabilize these areas by clearing 

them of terrorist groups and helping generate sufficient governance to keep them 

from returning will continue in fragile and conflict-affected states around the 

world. With U.S. stabilization efforts nascent in Syria and ramping up in Iraq, it is 

important that lessons from stabilizing Afghanistan inform these efforts.

The term “stabilization” is frequently invoked in U.S. foreign policy circles and 

by other donor nations, yet it is not uniformly, precisely defined across relevant 

stakeholders. Definitions have varied by U.S. agency and even changed over time 

within agencies. In 2018, the U.S. government defined stabilization as: 

A political endeavor involving an integrated civilian-military process to create 

conditions where locally legitimate authorities and systems can peaceably 

manage conflict and prevent a resurgence of violence. Transitional in nature, 

stabilization may include efforts to establish civil security, provide access 

to dispute resolution, and deliver targeted basic services, and establish a 

foundation for the return of displaced people and longer-term development.1

However, the concept of stabilization and notions about how it was to be 

implemented in Afghanistan took shape gradually and only coalesced as an 

explicit U.S. strategy in 2009. 

Our analysis identifies seven key findings regarding the stabilization strategy in 

Afghanistan and the programs used to achieve it:

1. The U.S. government greatly overestimated its ability to build and reform 

government institutions in Afghanistan as part of its stabilization strategy.

2. The stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not 

properly tailored to the Afghan context.

3. The large sums of stabilization dollars the United States devoted to 

Afghanistan in search of quick gains often exacerbated conflicts, enabled 

corruption, and bolstered support for insurgents.

4. Because the coalition prioritized the most dangerous districts first, it 

continuously struggled to clear them of insurgents. As a result, the coalition 

couldn’t make sufficient progress to convince Afghans in those or other 

districts that the government could protect them if they openly turned 

against the insurgents. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | vii

5. Efforts by U.S. agencies to monitor and evaluate stabilization programs were 

generally poor.

6. Successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the 

physical presence of coalition troops and civilians.

7. Stabilization was most successful in areas that were clearly under the 

physical control of government security forces, had a modicum of local 

governance in place prior to programming, were supported by coalition 

forces and civilians who recognized the value of close cooperation, and were 

continuously engaged by their government as programming ramped up.

From 2003 to 2005, the U.S. military executed a counterinsurgency (COIN) 

campaign in the east and south of Afghanistan. With only two brigades “to 

prevent a Taliban resurgence and to build support for the coalition and the 

central government,” U.S. military forces, the State Department, and the 

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) used a growing number 

of provincial reconstruction teams to implement projects together and 

strengthen provincial and district governments.2

From 2005 to 2007, military and civilian agencies continued to adopt policies 

that called for synchronized interagency stabilization programming. However, 

on the ground, the agencies rarely operated in concert with one another, as the 

military continued with the “clear, hold, and build” phases of COIN operations, 

and USAID implemented several stabilization programs. U.S. Embassy Kabul 

was “normalizing” its operations as it moved away from a war footing and 

toward the kind of embassy presence State had in most countries. Still, 

momentum for interagency cooperation was building, particularly within the 

International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), as more resources and troops 

were devoted to Afghanistan. 

From 2008 to 2009, it became apparent that security in Afghanistan was 

worsening as the numbers of suicide attacks and improvised explosive devices 

skyrocketed. COIN and stabilization efforts were thought to be responsible 

for dramatic improvements in security in Iraq, and many policymakers felt 

compelled to use the same methods to help the Afghan government secure the 

country and out-govern the Taliban in rural communities.

Throughout 2009 and 2010, the U.S. government committed to an explicit 

stabilization strategy, surged more than 50,000 military forces to clear insurgents 

from the most dangerous and contested districts in the south and east, and 

deployed hundreds of civilians to use stabilization programming to hold and 

build those areas so the Taliban would be unwelcome and unable to return. To 

implement the strategy, State, USAID, and the Department of Defense (DOD) 

leveraged a dramatic increase in resources to refocus existing programs 
viii | EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

and create new ones to “strengthen the reach and legitimacy of the central 

government in outlying regions.”3

 Using a robust framework for civilian-military 

(civ-mil) cooperation extending all the way down to the battalion level, the 

coalition intended to help the Afghan government out-govern the Taliban and 

provide services to contested populations to win their support. The coalition 

surge, however, was constrained to 18 months. These two decisions—to 

prioritize the most dangerous parts of the country and to draw down forces on 

timelines unrelated to conditions on the ground—had a profound and harmful 

impact on countless downstream decisions regarding stabilization planning, 

staffing, and programming. 

For example, during this time, there was significant friction between military 

forces and the civilians tasked with stabilization programming. In theory, ISAF 

would choose the areas to clear in partnership with its civilian counterparts, 

and together they would plan and execute the holding and building of 

those areas. In practice, however, despite a significant increase in civ-mil 

interactions, the military made (or had considerable influence on) most of the 

key decisions on the ground, including deciding which districts to clear, hold, 

and build; determining when communities were ready for civilian stabilization 

programming; and deciding what kind of projects should be implemented to win 

local hearts and minds. 

Some senior USAID officials said ISAF bulldozed the agency into going along 

with clear-hold-build and demanded it implement ineffective cash-for-work 

programs, despite USAID’s protests; other officials said ISAF only needed to 

cite President Obama’s compressed timelines and ask USAID, “How else are we 

going to do this if not quickly and in the most dangerous areas?” Military forces 

were under immense pressure and accountable for making fast progress; that 

pressure also affected civilian personnel, with few at State or USAID in country 

believing they had the ability to push back against the military’s decisions. Only 

rarely did USAID and DOD show significant levels of collaboration, a practice 

that was instrumental in the coalition’s successful stabilization of certain key 

terrain. One example can be found in SIGAR’s case study of Marawara District in 

appendix A.

More broadly, moving at such speed and in such dangerous areas created a 

collection of mutually reinforcing problems. First, by prioritizing the most 

insecure areas, the coalition made it difficult to showcase the full clear-holdbuild cycle, as insecurity kept much of the coalition perpetually stuck in the 

clearing and holding phases as forces moved prematurely from one community 

to the next. Thus, rather than connecting increasingly stabilized “ink spots” of 

government control and influence, creating new ink spots often meant removing 

old ones. Focusing on the most dangerous areas first—and then generally failing 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | ix

to stabilize them—meant Afghans had few models of communities that had been 

rewarded for publicly turning on the insurgents. Lacking reliable and continuous 

security in newly cleared territory, stabilization programs frequently offered 

services in fiercely contested communities because there was no time to wait 

for the fighting to stop.

Second, while insecurity created severe restrictions on coalition access to 

communities, spending on stabilization projects in those communities increased 

significantly in the hope of compensating for a lack of time. In turn, more money 

went to communities whose local political dynamics were poorly understood, 

which often exacerbated conflicts, enabled corruption, and bolstered support 

for insurgents. 

Third, it was difficult for coalition personnel to recognize these unintended 

consequences in any given community, as the same chronic insecurity that 

inhibited thoughtful project identification and implementation also precluded 

adequate monitoring and evaluation of those projects. 

Fourth, the coalition’s inability to reduce violence in many ISAF-designated key 

terrain districts made it exceptionally difficult to recruit Afghan civil servants 

to help implement and sustain stabilization programs, particularly under the 

timeline provided. As a result, hiring standards were lowered, and the civil 

servants who were recruited were often less experienced and less well-suited 

for the roles. Persistent insecurity meant that even the civil servants who were 

successfully recruited faced significant mobility constraints. An area deemed 

relatively permissive by the military, with its heavily armed convoys and vehicles 

designed to withstand improvised explosive devices, presented a very different 

risk to Afghan government officials and informal leaders, who relied on civilian 

vehicles and did not live on heavily guarded bases. 

DOD implemented stabilization programs that faced similar pressures and 

created similarly perverse incentives as some civilian programs. For example, 

the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) aimed to provide 

“urgent humanitarian or reconstruction projects,” in part, to reduce violence.4

Starting in 2009, the program encouraged military commanders to spend 

money in a way that would benefit the Afghan population through projects 

that could be transferred to the Afghan government and thus help improve the 

government’s legitimacy. CERP generally suffered from poor data collection and 

struggled to develop measures of effectiveness to understand the impact of its 

projects. The limited number of qualified and experienced civil affairs teams 

to oversee the program’s implementation led CERP to focus less on effective 

programming and more on spending. Once DOD deemed money a “weapon 

system” in 2009, commanders were often judged on the amount of CERP money 
x | EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

they disbursed. With insufficient attention to impact and a frequent assumption 

that more money spent would translate into more progress, these projects may 

have exacerbated the very problems commanders hoped to address. 

Taken together, these and other obstacles meant that most Afghans in key 

terrain districts were not convinced of the Afghan government’s benevolence or 

staying power, and their communities had not stabilized when transition began 

in the summer of 2011. The next deadline, transitioning control of the entire 

country to the Afghan government by the end of 2014, proved equally unrealistic. 

“We went from an end state to an end date,” former ISAF commander General 

John Allen observed in a SIGAR interview, adding, “Stabilization requires 

time to measure and adapt, and we lost all that. It was pulled out from under 

us.”5 In Kabul, U.S. civilian agencies tried to shift their focus from the district 

level to the provincial and municipal level to reflect a new orientation toward 

traditional governance support, akin to the support provided in USAID 

governance programming around the world. However, for both DOD and the 

civilian agencies, efforts to transition proved difficult, as insecurity compelled 

DOD to continue stabilizing key terrain (albeit with decreasing force levels), 

and USAID continued to be tethered to military operations and was thus mostly 

unable to realign with the new policy focus on governance until after transition. 

As a result, many of the challenges stabilization efforts faced from 2009–2012 

continued during transition, through 2014. 

A second DOD stabilization program, Village Stability Operations (VSO), 

showed early potential during the surge but deteriorated during transition as the 

program scaled too quickly. U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) implemented 

VSO from 2010 to 2014 to stabilize strategically located villages. The military 

hoped to connect these villages to formal district and provincial government by 

offering communities various services, particularly security, in the form of an 

Afghan Local Police (ALP) force, whose members were drawn from the same 

communities being protected. 

While VSO began on a solid conceptual footing during the surge, once transition 

began in 2011, the program compromised many of its core principles. DOD 

came to believe VSO could compensate for the aggressive transition timelines 

by using the ALP to fill the security void created by the coalition’s withdrawal, 

which compelled the program to focus on ALP development at the expense 

of the political and other nonmilitary aspects of the larger program. The ALP 

grew at an unsustainable rate, from 6,500 ALP across 93 sites in 2011 to 24,000 

ALP in 2013. Some militias that operated outside of government control were 

absorbed into the ALP without the vetting that ALP units had initially received. 

As conventional forces drew down, SOF teams withdrew with them, so there 

were not enough U.S. SOF to staff VSO sites and train the ALP units, forcing 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | xi

the coalition to rely on other SOF with little experience in training indigenous 

security forces or communicating across cultures. VSO sites often transitioned 

to Afghan control before they were ready, and some were overrun, while 

others reverted to the influence of strongmen and the chaos of a predatory or 

absentee government. With little oversight, some militia commanders coopted 

the program and simply continued their predatory practices with the appearance 

of government sanction, ultimately undermining the government’s legitimacy. 

Even programs that were otherwise well-implemented had trouble 

compensating for the effects of the timeline and the continued focus on the most 

insecure districts. Nonetheless, during transition, there were several noticeable 

improvements in how stabilization programs were implemented on the ground. 

For example, the coalition balanced its reliance on small infrastructure activities 

with an increased use of “soft” programming, like training for government 

officials and informal leaders. Projects became smaller, more manageable, more 

consultative, and thus more likely to be implemented in line with community 

wishes. More projects were implemented directly by partners, rather than being 

subcontracted out with less oversight and poor quality control. While working 

through Afghan government officials in the districts had always been explicitly 

viewed as vital to the mission, during transition, the coalition followed through 

on this commitment more often. 

More broadly, our analytical review of stabilization points to a number of 

coalition assumptions that proved problematic: (1) communities were unstable 

because of the government’s absence, rather than its behavior when present; 

(2) communities would only stabilize if the government provided them diverse 

social services, even if the Taliban had stabilized them with only modest 

law and order efforts; and (3) stabilization could succeed despite obstacles 

inherent to the Afghan government’s structure and the divergent interests of its 

political leadership. 

LESSONS

Given the constraints explored at length in this report, Afghanistan was 

likely among the most difficult environments for a large-scale stabilization 

mission. The challenges there make it difficult to discern whether and how the 

problems seen in Afghanistan were specific to the environment or systemic 

to stabilization.

In fact, the poor results of this particular stabilization mission make it tempting 

to conclude that stabilization should not be conducted in the future at all. 

However, in any area that has been cleared, the absence of reliable alternatives 

to stabilization means that rather than discourage the use of stabilization writ 
xii | EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

large, the best course of action may be to help the U.S. government (1) balance 

the importance of any given stabilization mission with a realistic understanding 

of the level of effort required and what is achievable and (2) improve its ability 

to prepare for, design, execute, monitor, and evaluate stabilization missions 

when it elects to undertake them. 

Given the substantial recent increase in investment in stabilization efforts in 

Syria and Iraq, realistic assessments that align the ends, ways, and means of 

prospective and ongoing stabilization efforts are critical.

Moreover, given that stabilization was occasionally effective in Afghanistan, 

we believe it may be more effective in other countries if the lessons below are 

learned and applied in future stabilization missions.

1. Even under the best circumstances, stabilization takes time. Without the 

patience and political will for a planned and prolonged effort, large-scale 

stabilization missions are likely to fail. 

2. Most U.S. government capabilities and institutions necessary in a largescale stabilization mission should be established and maintained between 

contingencies if they are to be effective when they matter most.

3. Having qualified and experienced personnel in the right positions at the right 

times is vital to stabilization’s success.

4. Increased funding alone cannot compensate for stabilization’s inherent 

challenges, and believing that it will can exacerbate those challenges. 

5. Physical security is the bedrock of stabilization.

6. The presence of local governance is a precondition for effective 

stabilization programming.

7. Stabilizing communities requires a tailored approach.

8. Stabilization efforts must be rigorously monitored and evaluated.

9. Successfully conceiving and implementing a stabilization strategy requires 

extensive local knowledge of the host-nation government and population.

10. Winning hearts and minds requires a close examination of what has won and 

lost the hearts and minds of that particular population in the recent past.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The following recommendations drawn from the U.S. stabilization experience in 

Afghanistan may help increase the likelihood of success in future stabilization 

missions. Some of these recommendations require substantial effort. However, 

given the inherent difficulty of stabilization missions, without the political will 

and technical investment necessary to implement the reforms outlined below, in 

our view large-scale stabilization missions should not be conducted. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | xiii

Executive Branch 

1. State should take the lead in laying out a robust whole-of-government 

stabilization strategy, USAID should be the lead implementer, and DOD 

should support their efforts.

2. DOD and USAID should update COIN and stabilization doctrine and best 

practices to stagger stabilization’s various phases, with the provision of 

reliable and continuous physical security serving as the critical foundation. 

SIGAR offers a blueprint to serve as a model. (See page 196.) 

3. DOD should develop measures of effectiveness for any CERP-like program 

in the future.

4. USAID should prioritize the collection of accurate and reliable data for its 

stabilization projects.

5. DOD and USAID should prioritize developing and retaining human terrain 

analytical expertise that would allow a more nuanced understanding of 

local communities.

6. DOD should ensure it has a sufficient number and mix of civil affairs 

personnel with the right training and aptitude for the next 

stabilization mission.

7. State and USAID should designate a new civilian response corps of active 

and standby civilian specialists who can staff stabilization missions.

Legislative Branch 

Congress should consider providing adequate resources to ensure executive 

branch agencies implement the reforms laid out above. Specifically, Congress 

should consider:

1. Funding a modified civilian response corps.

2. Requiring State, the designated lead on stabilization, to develop and 

implement a stabilization strategy within a broader campaign strategy and 

in coordination with USAID and DOD.

3. Requiring USAID, the designated lead on implementation, to develop and 

implement a monitoring and evaluation plan in coordination with State 

and DOD.

4. Focusing its oversight on stabilization outcomes.

MAY 2018 | 1

DOD photo

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION 

This lessons learned report draws important lessons from the U.S. experience 

with stabilization in Afghanistan from 2002–2017, with a special focus 

on the years after 2009, when most of the $4.7 billion in stabilization funds 

was spent. With the rise of the Islamic State and its affiliates, making poorly 

governed spaces inhospitable to transnational terrorist groups remains a vital 

U.S. national security priority. We anticipate U.S. government efforts to stabilize 

these areas by clearing them of terrorist groups and helping generate sufficient 

governance to keep them from returning will continue in fragile and conflictaffected states around the world. With U.S. stabilization efforts nascent in Syria 

and ramping up in Iraq, it is paramount that lessons from stabilizing Afghanistan 

inform these efforts.

In the last two decades, the U.S. government has become increasingly aware of 

the dangers posed by poorly governed spaces around the world. In particular, 

the Taliban’s ability to host al-Qaeda as it prepared and launched the 9/11 

attacks made it clear that unstable or fragile states constituted a key threat to 

U.S. national security interests. As the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy 

noted, “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by 

failing ones. We are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic 

technologies in the hands of the embittered few.”6
2 | INTRODUCTION

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Poor governance, particularly at the subnational level, was viewed as fueling 

the creation and sustainment of transnational terrorist groups. To address the 

problem, foreign governments needed the will and capacity to deny these groups 

safe haven and to provide their populations with sufficient governance and 

development to preclude such groups from taking root. Security, governance, 

and development were thus interlinked in ways that required “whole of 

government” responses that went well beyond the exclusive purview of the 

military.7

 U.S. policymakers came to believe that merely clearing a remote area 

of insurgents or other belligerents to prevent them from hosting transnational 

terrorist groups would be insufficient if the conditions that allowed those 

groups to take local control in the first place were not addressed. In practice, 

this generally required helping host-nation governments become legitimate and 

effective enough that such safe haven was impossible. 

In Afghanistan, the stabilization strategies varied and evolved over time, but they 

usually shared the following chain of logic. In order to defeat al-Qaeda, the group 

had to be denied territory to plan and launch attacks. The territory likely to be 

used by al-Qaeda was controlled by the Taliban, so the Taliban had to be targeted 

and pushed out of the most important areas it controlled. Yet, because the Taliban 

had a history of providing some services to these populations, to keep the Taliban 

(and by extension, al-Qaeda) out, after clearing the area, the coalition needed to 

“stabilize” those communities by extending the reach of the government, building 

Marines speak to an Afghan elder through an interpreter to offer assistance after three days of heavy rain 

at Turah Shah Ghundey, Helmand Province, on February 13, 2011. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Gunnery 

Sergeant Bryce Piper)
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 3

up the capacity of local officials and institutions, and convincing the population 

that legitimate government was preferable to having the Taliban return. U.S. 

policy makers believed that only after such a paradigm shift occurred could the 

coalition withdraw and have the confidence the Taliban would be consistently 

repelled by the population, with its newfound appreciation for the continuous 

services and protection of the Afghan government.

Our analysis identifies seven key findings regarding the stabilization strategy in 

Afghanistan and the programs used to achieve it:

1. The U.S. government greatly overestimated its ability to build and reform 

government institutions in Afghanistan as part of its stabilization strategy.

2. The stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not 

properly tailored to the Afghan context.

3. The large sums of stabilization dollars the United States devoted to 

Afghanistan in search of quick gains often exacerbated conflicts, enabled 

corruption, and bolstered support for insurgents.

4. Because the coalition prioritized the most dangerous districts first, it 

continuously struggled to clear them of insurgents. As a result, the coalition 

couldn’t make sufficient progress to convince Afghans in those or other 

districts that the government could protect them if they openly turned against 

the insurgents. 

5. Efforts by U.S. agencies to monitor and evaluate stabilization programs were 

generally poor.

6. Successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical 

presence of coalition troops and civilians.

7. Stabilization was most successful in areas that were clearly under the 

physical control of government security forces, had a modicum of local 

governance in place prior to programming, were supported by coalition 

forces and civilians who recognized the value of close cooperation, and were 

continuously engaged by their government as programming ramped up. 

Our report is divided into 12 chapters. After the introduction, chapter 2 details 

how stabilization programming took shape between 2002 and 2009. Chapter 3

describes how in 2009, stabilization was nested within counterinsurgency 

and became the overarching strategy for the war. Chapter 4 recounts how the 

stabilization strategy was operationalized and executed between 2009 and 2012. 

Chapter 5 details the coalition’s policy shift from stabilizing Afghan districts 

to transitioning their control to the Afghan government. Chapter 6 separately 

examines the two stabilization programs implemented by the Department of 

Defense (DOD): the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) and 

Village Stability Operations (VSO). Chapter 7 details the difficulty of measuring 

effectiveness in a stabilization context and assesses the effectiveness of such 
4 | INTRODUCTION

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

programming in Afghanistan. Chapter 8 is an analytical review exploring in 

depth the assumptions, implications, and challenges of the stabilization effort 

in Afghanistan. Chapters 9 through 12 contain the report’s findings, lessons, 

conclusions, and recommendations, respectively. As an example of effective 

stabilization, appendix A provides a case study of the remarkable interagency 

stabilization effort in Marawara District, Kunar Province, in 2010 and 2011.

WHAT IS STABILIZATION?

The term “stabilization” is frequently invoked in U.S. foreign policy circles and 

by other donor nations, yet it is not uniformly, precisely defined across relevant 

stakeholders. Definitions have varied by U.S. agency and even changed over 

time within agencies. Properly defining stabilization is particularly difficult 

because it is often used by policymakers in cables, strategic documents, and 

speeches as a vague euphemism to mean “fixing” a country or area mired 

in conflict. Adding to the confusion, stabilization was also the term used to 

describe the overall U.S. strategy during the surge of resources to Afghanistan 

from approximately 2009–2012.

On the ground in Afghanistan, where much of this report will focus, stabilization 

refers to a specific process designed to keep insurgents out of an area after 

they have been initially expelled by security forces.8

 In practice, this process 

was implemented through more than $4.7 billion in efforts and programs of the 

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), DOD, and the Department 

of State between 2002 and 2017, though 75 percent of these stabilization efforts 

took place after 2009, and nearly 60 percent took place between 2009 and 2011.9

Most programs and funding started tapering off as responsibility for governance 

and security shifted to the Afghan government, beginning as early as 2011.

Stabilization projects were intended to be a temporary stopgap measure to 

solidify the military’s gains in territorial control through improvements in local 

governance, better position the Afghan government to assume control and build 

upon the initial gains, and create the necessary conditions to allow a coalition 

drawdown. As the former commander of the International Security Assistance 

Force (ISAF), General John Allen, observed, “Stabilization is the decisive factor 

in putting down government roots and economic activity.”10

“Stabilization is the decisive factor in putting down 

government roots and economic activity.”

—General John Allen
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 5

The United States Institute of Peace’s Guiding Principles for Stabilization and 

Reconstruction defined stabilization as “ending or preventing the recurrence of 

violent conflict and creating the conditions for normal economic activity and 

nonviolent politics.”12 As applied in Afghanistan, USAID defined stabilization as:

Strengthening the reach and legitimacy of the central government in outlying 

regions. . . . Stabilization programs are designed to improve security, 

extend the reach of the Afghan government, and facilitate reconstruction 

in priority provinces. Their core objective is to implement projects that will 

improve stability so that more traditional forms of development assistance 

can resume.13

Joint military doctrine issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in August 2016 

defined stabilization as “the process by which military and nonmilitary actors 

collectively apply various instruments of national power to address drivers 

of conflict, foster host-nation resiliencies, and create conditions that enable 

sustainable peace and security.” It identified five U.S. government stability 

sectors: (1) security, (2) justice and reconciliation, (3) humanitarian assistance 

and social well-being, (4) governance and participation, and (5) economic 

stabilization and infrastructure.14

Stabilization vs. Development 

Put simply, stabilization is designed to be short term and focused on insecure areas, 

while development is often long term and focused on secure areas. However, the more 

important difference between stabilization and development centers on intent. Both 

efforts might result in schools being built, but for different reasons. For example, a 

development program might build a school because education triggers a process that 

leads to greater long-term prosperity and development. Educated children are more likely 

to grow up to be healthier and more qualified to administer government, succeed in 

business, and help grow the economy. 

In contrast, a stabilization program might build a school to trigger a process that leads 

to improved security. The school would demonstrate the government is working on behalf 

of the community, the local population would come to prefer government services over 

the return of insurgents, and insurgents would lose control over territory that could be 

used to host transnational terrorist groups. The stabilization approach recognizes that 

contested communities are not yet suited for long-term development and must first 

be stabilized with catalytic, short-term programs, after which long-term development 

can begin. 

However, like development, stabilization efforts can vary considerably in size and scope. 

Both can be instrumental in a large effort to build a country from scratch, and both can 

be limited to meeting strategic objectives in small patches of territory, even relying on 

the support of foreign militaries and foreign civil servants to do so.11
6 | INTRODUCTION

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

In 2018, State, USAID, and DOD collectively defined stabilization as “a political 

endeavor involving an integrated civilian-military (civ-mil) process to create 

conditions where locally legitimate authorities and systems can peaceably 

manage conflict and prevent a resurgence of violence. Transitional in nature, 

stabilization may include efforts to establish civil security, provide access 

to dispute resolution, and deliver targeted basic services, and establish a 

foundation for the return of displaced people and longer-term development.”15

At various times and with varying resource levels, the war in Afghanistan was 

viewed by U.S. officials as a counterinsurgency (COIN) effort, which, along with 

an increasing emphasis on interagency coordination, helped crystalize thinking 

on stabilization as part of an integrated civ-mil effort. In fact, stabilization was 

often conceptually nested within COIN doctrine’s sequential steps of “clear, 

hold, build.” Specifically, after military forces “cleared” an area of insurgents, the 

area was then stabilized—or “held” and “built”—with USAID and DOD programs 

that attempted to help the government become more legitimate and effective.16

Counterinsurgency

DOD defines an insurgency as “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow 

of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict.”17

Counterinsurgency refers to a collection of “comprehensive civilian and military efforts 

taken to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root causes.”18

More broadly, COIN is designed to “build popular support for a government” and 

undermine the insurgency fighting it.19

Throughout much of the war, the concept of stabilization was often paired 

with “reconstruction,” and the line between the two was sometimes blurred. 

Put simply, reconstruction is “the process of rebuilding degraded, damaged, or 

destroyed political, socioeconomic, and physical infrastructure of a country 

or territory to create the foundation for long-term development.”20 Given that 

stabilization programs created similar infrastructure and for similar reasons, the 

distinction between the two concepts was not always instructive. In practice, 

using both terms together provided agencies the flexibility to implement 

projects that ranged all the way from building culverts to building hospitals, and 

from training carpet weavers to training government ministers.

WHY STABILIZATION MATTERS

Concepts inherent to stabilization remain integral to how the U.S. government 

fights asymmetric conflicts and supports fragile governments struggling with 

internal threats. While USAID said in 2015 that it had “gradually shifted away 

from a focus on stabilization toward long-term capacity building,” since 2008 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 7

the U.S. government has sponsored explicit stabilization programs or local 

development projects with a stated stabilization objective in numerous conflict 

zones, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Libya, and Yemen.21

There has also been significant growth in the number of stabilization-like 

programs across the Middle East and Africa that are characterized by such 

terms as “resilience” and “countering violent extremism,” which in practice bear 

a striking resemblance to stabilization. Ultimately, it may be difficult to move 

away from stabilization; no matter what the solution is called, the problem set 

that originally made stabilization so urgent is still prevalent around the world, 

and it cannot be addressed by the military alone. As the 2015 U.S. National 

Security Strategy noted:

An array of terrorist threats has gained traction in areas of instability, limited 

opportunity, and broken governance. . . . Our military will remain ready to 

defend our enduring national interests while providing essential leverage for 

our diplomacy. The use of force is not, however, the only tool at our disposal, 

and it is not the principal means of U.S. engagement abroad, nor always 

the most effective for the challenges we face. Rather, our first line of action 

is principled and clear-eyed diplomacy, combined with the central role of 

development in the forward defense and promotion of America’s interests.22

The effort to retake Islamic State-held territory in Syria and Iraq highlights 

the enduring importance of stabilization. Echoing comments made by USAID 

Administrator Mark Green and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commander 

General Joseph Votel in Raqqa in 2018, the State Department recently said:

Our efforts in post-ISIS areas will be strictly focused on stabilization and thus 

meeting the immediate needs of civilians in order to enable them to return 

home and to prevent the return of ISIS. . . . The efforts are limited to the 

provision of humanitarian assistance, clearing explosive remnants of war, and 

the restoration of essential services.23

As will be explored in depth in this report, “the restoration of essential services” 

in contested territory is far more difficult than simply turning the lights on. 

To expel an insurgent force indefinitely, stabilization must offer a nuanced 

political toolkit that helps host-nation governments address the expectations 

of battered communities and matches the threat posed by a resilient and 

adaptive insurgency. 

In Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and beyond, stabilization is often regarded as a 

slippery slope to multi-billion dollar nation-building efforts, yet the importance 

of stabilization goes well beyond costly contingency operations and extends 

to smaller-scale and ongoing U.S. stabilization efforts around the world. In 

the 2018 interagency Stabilization Assistance Review (SAR), to which SIGAR 

contributed, State, USAID, and DOD all agreed on the nature of the threat facing 

the United States:

The United States and our allies face an increasingly complex and uncertain 

world in which many of our adversaries sow instability and benefit from 

Nation building—or 

more precisely, state 

building—is the process 

of helping a country 

emerging from conflict 

establish and improve 

its governmental 

functions. In practice, 

it is a broad term 

that can encompass 

everything from 

advising a single 

ministry to building an 

entire government and 

economy from scratch.
8 | INTRODUCTION

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

it. Protracted conflicts provide fertile ground for violent extremists and 

criminals to expand their influence and threaten U.S. interests. These 

conflicts cause mass displacements and divert international resources that 

might otherwise be spent fostering economic growth and trade.24

As the SAR further noted, the U.S. government “must more rigorously define 

stabilization missions based on national security interests and undertake 

institutional reforms based on hard-learned lessons.”25 It is our hope that this 

report addresses a number of these concerns and highlights a way forward with 

its lessons and recommendations. 

SCOPE OF THIS REPORT

For well over a decade, there have been widespread allegations that the 

Taliban received various kinds of strategic and tactical support from factions 

within the Pakistani government. This support almost certainly contributed 

to the resiliency of the Taliban and the coalition’s struggle to stabilize Afghan 

communities. However, as the nature of this support has been explored in depth 

elsewhere, it will not be covered in this report.26

While stabilization was often framed as the civilian component of COIN, the 

military also spent considerable resources on stabilization programming. In 

priority districts, there was significant overlap between the civilian and military 

roles in COIN, as the military could often respond faster and operate in more 

dangerous areas than coalition civilians could. Two programs in particular 

illustrate how DOD attempted to rebuild Afghanistan from the bottom-up: CERP 

and VSO. These programs are discussed in depth in chapter 6 of this report. 

A number of U.S.-sponsored programs and organizations incorporated the 

word stabilization or stability into their names, for example, the Task Force 

for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO). While TFBSO and other 

organizations and programs like it were regarded as part of the broader effort 

to stabilize Afghanistan (and SIGAR has reviewed some of them extensively 

elsewhere), these programs and their staff were not integrated into the clearhold-build process in the way the following programs were, and will therefore 

not be discussed in this report.27
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 9

STABILIZATION PROGRAMS REVIEWED FOR THIS REPORT

USAID Afghan Civilian Assistance Program

Afghan Civilian Assistance Program II

Afghanistan Social Outreach Program

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative

Afghanistan Stabilization Program 

Afghanistan Transition Initiative 

Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Production in Agriculture

Community Cohesion Initiative

Community Development Program, previously called 

Food Insecurity Response for Urban Populations Program 

Community Based Stabilization Grants 

District Delivery Program

Kandahar Food Zone 

Local Governance and Community Development 

Measuring Impact of Stabilization Initiatives 

Provincial Reconstruction Team Quick Impact Projects 

Rule of Law Stabilization–Informal Component 

Stability in Key Areas 

Strategic Provincial Roads–Southern and Eastern Afghanistan 

DOD Commander’s Emergency Response Program 

Village Stability Operations

MAY 2018 | 11

After the initial military successes of late 2001 and 2002, the U.S. government 

attempted to fund and operationalize a strategic vision for Afghanistan.28

In December 2002, Congress passed the Afghanistan Freedom Support Act, 

which authorized federal funding for humanitarian, development, and security 

assistance, and reiterated the U.S. objective of creating a stable society that 

would remain inhospitable to terrorist networks.29 However, the United 

States lacked a comprehensive strategy for effectively applying non-security 

assistance, despite demands from the most senior levels of government.30 In 

April 2002, for example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote to Under 

Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith: 

The fact that Iran and Russia have plans for Afghanistan and we don’t 

concerns me. I keep getting an answer that ‘the Deputies are working on it.’ 

Well, I can’t believe that it takes that many months to figure it out. . . . We are 

never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to 

see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be 

necessary for us to leave.31

The plans for Afghanistan that did exist were outgrowths of the international 

conference held in Bonn, Germany, in December 2001. Particularly as the United 

States prepared for the invasion of Iraq, the deliberate focus in Afghanistan was 

a light military footprint and limited top-down institutional development that 

began and ended in Kabul.32 For years thereafter, the U.S. government and the 

DOD photo

CHAPTER 2

STABILIZATION TAKES SHAPE

(2002–2009)
12 | STABILIZATION TAKES SHAPE (2002–2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

international community mostly hoped that governance would filter down to the 

local level in Afghanistan through the institutions they nurtured in the capital.33

This early stage in the “post-conflict” period saw USAID development efforts 

concentrated in eight sectors: agriculture, economic growth, education, 

governance, healthcare, infrastructure, media, and women’s issues.34 Meanwhile, 

U.S. military operations focused almost exclusively on targeting remnants of the 

Taliban and al-Qaeda.35 The first major foray into localized stabilization efforts 

began on December 31, 2002, with the introduction of the inaugural Afghan 

Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Gardez in Paktiya Province.36

U.S. PRTs were 50- to 100-person interagency teams composed of a security 

force, medical and logistics components, a civil affairs team, command and 

control elements, and representatives from State, USAID, and sometimes the 

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).37 The mission of these joint civ-mil 

interagency teams was to extend and legitimize the central government’s presence 

in the provinces by improving security and facilitating reconstruction and 

development.38 Additional PRTs followed in 2003 in relatively secure and stable 

areas, including the provinces of Bamyan, Balkh, Parwan, Herat, and Kunduz.39

The PRTs were beset with problems from the start.40 Officially, they were 

interagency civ-mil teams, but initially, in practice, they were composed almost 

exclusively of military personnel.41 In addition to a lack of civilian personnel, 

confusion reigned over the PRTs’ primary purpose: Were they meant to improve 

security in conjunction with Afghan forces and thereby create the conditions 

for development, or were they intended to directly implement reconstruction, 

Members of PRT Kunar at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Fatimah Girls’ School outside of Asadabad in 

2005. (Photo by Harold Ingram)
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 13

development, and humanitarian assistance projects?42 By late 2003, Lieutenant 

General David Barno’s command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan brought the first 

efforts to integrate the PRTs into an overarching counterinsurgency strategy in 

insecure areas of the south and east.

EARLY STABILIZATION EFFORTS (2003–2005)

By October 2003, officials within the President George W. Bush administration 

and UN representatives in Kabul were increasingly concerned that poor 

security in the Pashtun-dominated south and east of Afghanistan would hinder 

the 2004 Afghan presidential election, thus undermining the legitimacy of the 

nascent Afghan government.43 Lieutenant General Barno had recently assumed 

command of the two brigades of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, with instructions 

from CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid to integrate and coordinate 

his efforts with civilian officials.44 In summer 2003, the Office of the Secretary 

of Defense for Policy enshrined “stabilizing the south and east” in its policy 

guidelines entitled “Principles for Afghanistan,” calling for a “political-military 

strategy . . . to prevent a Taliban resurgence and to build support for the 

Coalition and the central government.”45

In response to this guidance and the UN’s security concerns, Barno and his staff 

began developing plans to improve security and preserve the legitimacy of the 

elections and the political roadmap laid out in the Bonn Process.46 The result was 

“Security Strategy South and East,” which later grew into a detailed interagency 

campaign plan entitled “Counterinsurgency Strategy for Afghanistan.”47

According to U.S. Army Colonel Tucker Mansager, who served as a politicalmilitary and civil affairs officer under Barno, part of the strategy’s aim was 

to use PRTs to extend the writ of the state via Regional Development Zones, 

the first of which was centered on Kandahar.48 Barno’s implementation plan 

called for a localized surge of security forces around Kandahar, to be followed 

by a new PRT, one of eight PRTs that would be dotted across the south and 

east before the spring of 2004.49 Recognizing he had few forces at his disposal, 

Barno’s use of PRTs to stabilize parts of the country was an experiment he and 

his staff hoped would prove successful and be replicated elsewhere.50

In fact, PRTs did remain the core of U.S. stabilization efforts during Barno’s 

tenure and thereafter. U.S. Embassy Kabul’s Mission Performance Plan for 2007, 

which was completed in March 2005, described not only a planned expansion of 

PRTs, but also foreshadowed more localized stabilization programming:

We will continue with the deployment of [PRTs] throughout Afghanistan. The PRTs 

not only will support reconstruction through quick impact and other projects but 

also will provide platforms to extend the reach of U.S. civilian agencies. The role of 
14 | STABILIZATION TAKES SHAPE (2002–2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

PRTs will evolve as conditions change on the ground, with economic development 

replacing security as the principal focus over time. We will use the PRTs to support 

Afghan efforts to strengthen provincial and district government, with the goal of 

transitioning efforts of PRTs to the Afghan government as soon as feasible.51

One of the principal stabilization programs within the PRTs was a joint endeavor 

between USAID and the military, called Quick Impact Projects (QIP). With an 

overall budget of more than $85 million, the QIP program began in Afghanistan 

in 2003 and continued through the fall of 2007, during which time it funded over 

440 relatively small-scale projects.52 The intent of the program was to provide 

USAID PRT representatives with funds to implement small-scale projects that 

would, in theory, extend the reach of the Afghan government by engendering 

good will among local communities and priming them for more traditional, 

long-term development programs.53 QIPs were intended to “create links and 

increase confidence between communities and the district, provincial, and 

central government” through the process of project conceptualization and 

implementation.54 During the four-year program, QIP funded the construction 

of clinics, schools, bridges, and irrigation canals, among other smallscale projects.55

PRT project funding also came from CERP, a DOD program focused at the time 

on urgent humanitarian and reconstruction needs in the hope these activities 

would help reduce violence.56 Throughout the war, while PRTs sought to extend 

the reach of the government and used CERP to do so, CERP itself would not 

adopt that goal until 2009, as detailed in chapter 6.57

In parallel to PRT QIPs, USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) funded 

other projects reminiscent of later stabilization programming, but without 

the military and security integration. The 

Afghanistan Transition Initiative (ATI), for 

example, was active from 2002 through 2005, 

during which time it sought to build capacity 

in the ministries and implemented 700 projects 

across the country via small grants, including 

schools, clinics, potable water and irrigation 

efforts, and secondary and tertiary roads.58

One objective of the program was to support 

interactions between communities and the 

Afghan government to improve service delivery 

and good governance.59 According to a 2005 ATI 

program evaluation, “The basic methodology 

for mobilizing rural communities and linking 

them with their government at increasingly 

higher levels [was] through infrastructure 

projects.”60 The same document suggests 

Members of PRT Kandahar and Italian troops deliver humanitarian 

aid to residents of Spin Boldak in 2003. (Photo by Harold Ingram)
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 15

there was a tension within OTI between officials who favored developing 

and strengthening the central government in Kabul, which comported with 

the Bonn Agreement, and those who advocated for bottom-up approaches to 

participatory governance.61 Whatever challenges were created by USAID’s intraagency discord, however, were overshadowed by those created by a dearth of 

interagency planning and coordination at the national level.

U.S. AGENCIES AT ODDS (2005–2007)

When Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry assumed command of Combined 

Forces Command-Afghanistan from Lieutenant General Barno on May 4, 2005, 

he continued important aspects of the counterinsurgency program Barno 

initiated.62 According to Brigadier General Martin Schweitzer, who commanded 

U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan at the time, the overarching objective during 

that period was to link local Afghan communities with the Afghan government 

to eliminate “seams” that allowed insurgents to come between them. What 

was lacking, he noted, was an interagency strategy that brought the military, 

USAID, State, and other civilian agencies together to plan and execute an 

integrated strategy.63 As a consequence, uniformed members of the military 

with no governance experience were assigned the difficult task of training and 

mentoring Afghan civilian government officials.64

The disconnect between the agencies and military was evident in the public 

statements of senior civilians. In March 2006, James Kunder, USAID’s Assistant 

Administrator for Asia and the Near East, told the House Committee on 

International Relations that USAID had entered the second stage of the 

“transition strategy” in 2005, focusing on 

“stabilization and building systems.”65 As part 

of that effort, USAID began funding a program 

called Local Governance and Community 

Development (LGCD) through its PRT office 

in Kabul, which oversaw USAID projects 

implemented through PRTs.66 The goal of the 

original three-year initiative was to “extend 

the reach of the Afghan government into 

underserved, insecure, and hard-to-access 

communities.”67 In turn, the program sought to 

“strengthen the legitimacy of the government of 

Afghanistan, increase constituent confidence in 

the government, and promote stability.”68 USAID 

was essentially implementing stabilization 

programming separate from, and in parallel to, 

military operations.69 In fact, Embassy Kabul 

A USAID-funded judicial center in Qarghayi District in July 2005. 

(Photo by U.S. civil affairs officer)
16 | STABILIZATION TAKES SHAPE (2002–2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

was “normalizing” its operations during this period, moving away from a war 

footing and toward the kind of embassy presence State has in most countries.70

Still, the PRTs were a useful vehicle for USAID to monitor projects.71

Throughout this period, the military and civilian bureaucracy continued to adopt 

policies that called for synchronized interagency stabilization programming. 

(See figure 1.) In November 2005, DOD published Directive 3000.5, which 

stipulated that stability operations activities included “encouraging citizen-driven, 

bottom-up economic activity and constructing necessary infrastructure,” as well 

as developing “representative government institutions.”72 Then, in December 2005, 

the White House released National Security Presidential Directive 44, Management 

of Interagency Efforts Concerning Reconstruction and Stabilization, which instructed 

the Secretaries of Defense and State to “integrate stabilization and reconstruction 

contingency plans with military contingency plans” and “develop a general 

framework for fully coordinating stabilization and reconstruction activities 

and military operations at all levels where appropriate.”73 The emphasis on 

interagency efforts continued into 2006 with the U.S. Army’s Field Manual (FM) 

3-24, Counterinsurgency, which devoted its entire second chapter to integrating 

civilian and military activities.74 The 2008 FM 3-07, Stability Operations, likewise 

underscored the importance of a “whole of government” approach.75

The approach that most closely reflected the U.S. government’s evolving 

stabilization framework was that of British General David Richards, who 

served as ISAF commander from May 2006 to February 2007.76 His tenure, 

which overlapped with Eikenberry’s command of U.S. forces, saw a growing 

role for NATO forces and a more concerted push to stabilize the southern 

provinces.77 In Kabul, Richards also tried to address the interagency and 

JULY

Principles for Afghanistan

NOVEMBER

Directive 3000.05: Military Support for Stability, Security, 

Transition, and Reconstruction Operations

DECEMBER

National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD-44

OCTOBER

FM 3-07: Stability Operations

DECEMBER

Afghanistan Strategic Review

DECEMBER 

FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency

MARCH

Reidel Review

WHITE HOUSE

STATE/DOD

EMBASSY KABUL/ISAF

USAID

DOD

STATE

U.S. GOVERNMENT STRATEGIC DOCUMENTS FOR AFGHANISTAN, 2002–2016

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 

FIGURE 1
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 17

international cooperation shortfall that others had identified as a major 

impediment. Richard’s flagship effort was the Policy Action Group (PAG), 

which aimed to improve coordination between the international community 

and the Afghan government through regular meetings and working groups.78

The PAG was a coordinating mechanism that included a number of key Afghan 

ministers and senior advisors to the president, plus ISAF senior officers, 

ambassadors, and members of multilateral organizations, including the UN 

and World Bank.79

One of the early products of the PAG was the concept of Afghan Development 

Zones (ADZ).80 The ADZs were essentially localized, interagency civ-mil efforts 

to foster governance, economic growth, and development at key locations 

in southern Afghanistan where ISAF was taking on a larger role.81 The ADZ 

concept recognized that resources were limited and sought to concentrate those 

resources in a few critical areas to demonstrate to Afghans in adjacent areas 

that they would similarly benefit by rejecting the Taliban and embracing the 

coalition and Afghan government.82 ADZs were established to varying degrees in 

at least seven provincial capitals, most notably by the British in Helmand, by the 

Canadians in Kandahar, and by the Americans in Zabul. According to Richards, 

the goal was to replicate the PAG process on a smaller scale at each ADZ to 

facilitate local coordination and improved governance, much as the concept of 

key terrain districts and the 2009 “Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan” 

would later attempt on a larger scale during the surge.83

In September 2006, ISAF launched Operation Medusa, the alliance’s largest-ever 

ground operation, against an estimated 1,000 Taliban militants in Kandahar’s 

Panjwayi District.84 Before the arrival of 8,000 ISAF forces in Afghanistan’s 

AUGUST

ISAF Commander's Initial Assessment

DECEMBER 

Money as a Weapon 

System-Afghanistan

DECEMBER

Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional Stabilization Strategy

APRIL

Village Stability Operations Handbook

JUNE 

Administrator's Sustainability Guidance

MARCH

Civil-Military Strategic Framework

NOVEMBER

JP 3-24: Counterinsurgency

AUGUST

JP 3-07: Stability

DECEMBER

Rening Our Governance Orientation in Light of Transition

AUGUST

Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
18 | STABILIZATION TAKES SHAPE (2002–2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

four southern provinces that July, all four provinces were covered by a 

solitary U.S. infantry battalion.85 Consequently, insurgents were able to begin 

constructing a well-designed and heavily reinforced defensive position in 

Panjwayi and gained control of a nearby section of the Ring Road.86

General Richards and his ISAF forces aimed to improve security by winning 

over the population through a coordinated effort to clear insurgents and inject 

a large amount of U.S., Canadian, and Afghan development assistance, all 

while militants hunkered down in Pakistan for the winter.87 The Taliban were 

eventually cleared from the area, but the Canadian-led development assistance 

that followed the clearing operation was delayed and underwhelming.88

According to Richards, “The plan for Medusa was a good model for integrated 

COIN and stabilization, but execution faltered. NATO’s ability to assist the 

Canadians and the Canadians’ ability to conduct the operation were severely 

limited by resources. Canadians were knackered after clearing, and they 

didn’t have the capacity to hold Panjwayi and continue protecting Kandahar.”89

Ultimately, Operation Medusa marked the beginning of increased violence in 

Panjwayi, rather than economic development and political stability.90

“The plan for Medusa was a good model for integrated COIN 

and stabilization, but execution faltered. NATO’s ability to assist 

the Canadians and the Canadians’ ability to conduct the 

operation were severely limited by resources. Canadians were 

knackered after clearing, and they didn’t have the capacity 

to hold Panjwayi and continue protecting Kandahar.”

—General David Richards

In February 2007, Richards turned over command of ISAF to General Dan 

McNeill, who was criticized by the media and some NATO partners for 

reportedly eschewing civ-mil coordination in favor of more aggressive 

military operations.91 According to Richards, McNeill disbanded the PAG 

and discontinued the ADZs in support of a more exclusive focus on security.92

However, McNeill’s emphasis on the preeminence of security was shared 

by Richards, who observed, “You have to get security right first . . . for the 

development to follow smoothly and efficiently. . . . You have to put security 

first, but with the aim of the more important development and governance 

component coming right behind it.”93
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 19

ON-BUDGET EFFORTS

From the start of the reconstruction effort, international donors disagreed as to whether 

funds should be provided through the Afghan government’s budget (on-budget assistance) 

or spent by the donor nations themselves on their own projects in Afghanistan (off-budget 

assistance). While most stabilization programming was implemented off budget by third 

parties contracted by the coalition, there were also efforts to stabilize the country through 

on-budget assistance, with funding that went directly to the Afghan government.

One early on-budget effort, the Afghanistan Stabilization Program (ASP), was developed in 

2003 as a collaboration between the ministries of Urban Development, Telecommunications, 

Interior, and Finance.94 The objective of the program was to link governance, development, 

and security by extending governance and service delivery to the local level, thereby 

stabilizing the country from the ground up.95 At this early stage, efforts were often as modest 

as building a district’s first government facility, or district center.

From the start, outside observers and donors criticized ASP. Two years after it was initiated, 

the program was described as having weak projection into the provinces, a lack of overall 

progress, and insufficient transparency and accountability that undercut international 

confidence.96 The root cause of the program’s problems apparently stemmed from 

management failures by Afghan officials, which precipitated the withdrawal of international 

funds and program failure.97

A second effort, the National Solidarity Program (NSP), was a World Bank-administered 

and U.S.-funded program that began in 2003 under the auspices of the Ministry for Rural 

Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD).98 While NSP was not officially on-budget, MRRD 

played an unusually central role in the program. NSP was intended to set conditions for local 

governance by establishing elected local councils and training them to manage small, grantfunded development projects. NSP was designed to combine traditional Afghan practices, 

such as collective decision making and communal labor, with international development 

experience.99 While not designed as a stabilization program, per se, NSP proved to be an 

influential model for future stabilization efforts. 

Although NSP projects were implemented away from combat operations and focused on 

relatively secure areas during this period, security was still a problem. One NSP program 

report from late 2008 said that 16 facilitating partners (contractors or nongovernmental 

organizations [NGO] that executed aid projects) had suspended work in 1,151 communities 

across 29 districts and 16 provinces in the prior month due to poor security.100 Nonetheless, 

NSP was regarded as having been successful enough to be a model for stabilization 

programming as the U.S. strategy evolved to focus more on building from the ground up.101
20 | STABILIZATION TAKES SHAPE (2002–2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

DETERIORATING SECURITY DRIVES A RETURN 

TO STABILIZATION (2008–2009)

USAID expected to enter the third stage of a transition strategy—“the normal 

development process”—in 2008.102 Earlier, in 2005, the embassy had painted an 

overly optimistic picture of the situation in its Mission Performance Plan:

Improving security and stability is our most important strategic goal. The 

successful national election, as well as an improved coalition counterinsurgency 

strategy, has diminished the threat of the Taliban and other extremists. If this 

trend continues and steps are taken to end sanctuaries in neighboring countries 

and to implement a reconciliation and accountability program, the insurgent 

threat could be effectively eliminated in 2005 and 2006.103

Unfortunately, this was not the case. There were just two suicide attacks in 

Afghanistan in 2003 and five in 2004, but that number increased to 17 in 2005 

and 139 in 2006. There was also a dramatic increase in the combined number 

of improvised explosive devices (IED) that were found or detonated during the 

same period, from 81 in 2003 to 1,922 in 2006.104 (See figure 2.) In some cases, 

these numbers were increasing because troops were deliberately exposing 

themselves to more danger in support of a classic COIN mission; however, 

COIN theory suggests these numbers should decline after initially spiking, as 

the increased troop exposure helped solidify the government’s control and 

legitimacy. Yet, in most cases, that decline never came. U.S. casualties continued 

to rise throughout this period, from 17 hostile fatalities in 2003 to 83 hostile 

fatalities in 2007, and the sharpest increases were yet to come.105 When 

Lieutenant General Eikenberry departed Afghanistan in February 2007, the 

security situation was deteriorating rapidly.106

As the situation worsened, it became apparent to policymakers in Washington 

that something had to change. A National Security Council (NSC) strategic 

review in 2006 concluded that the United States needed to adapt the strategy 

to “prosecute a ‘counterinsurgency’ to augment and complement ongoing ‘postconflict stabilization’ activities so that, together, they can succeed.”107 The 

review considered stabilization activities as separate from counterinsurgency, 

noting that “NATO now conducts stability operations throughout Afghanistan 

and is fighting a counterinsurgency campaign in the south.”108

In fact, both civilian and military components of the U.S. government were 

already tilting toward a more heavily resourced, concerted stabilization 

campaign to arrest the deteriorating security in Afghanistan. According 

to a retrospective Embassy Kabul report from 2010, the U.S. government 

recognized the need to “re-introduce” stabilization programming in 2007 and 

subsequently “began implementing programs designed to coordinate closely 

with combined international and Afghan security forces to support and sustain 

security gains.”109
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 21

During this time, the British were explicitly conducting an integrated civ-mil 

stabilization campaign in Helmand Province, where the Brits were in the lead, 

and field-grade U.S. officers—majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels who 

commanded troops across the country at the Brigade Combat Team level and 

below—were also pursuing the “softer,” or non-kinetic, aspects of COIN.110 In 

a 2007 interview, then-Colonel Martin Schweitzer, who was responsible for six 

provinces in the southeast, emphasized that non-kinetic operations, including 

the construction of roads, schools, and clinics, were decisive in extending the 

reach of the Afghan government.111 Still, the White House remained focused on 

Iraq, where security was unraveling quickly.112

By the middle of 2008, violence levels in Iraq had subsided enough for the 

Bush administration to refocus on Afghanistan, where violence was spiking.113

In May 2008, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the Deputy National Security 

Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, traveled to Afghanistan with a team of 

advisors to assess the situation. Their findings alarmed President Bush, who 

asked for a full strategic review, similar to the one that preceded the troop surge 

in Iraq.114 In November, Lute briefed the president on the assessment’s findings, 

which called for additional troops and prioritized counterinsurgency over 

counterterrorism.115 Although President Bush approved the report, the decision 

about whether to pursue a “fully resourced” counterinsurgency strategy would 

be left to the next administration.116

Source: ISAF, “State of the Insurgency: Trends, Intentions, and Objectives,” December 22, 2009.

AFGHANISTAN IEDS—FOUND AND DETONATED, COMBINED, 2003–2009

2003

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

7,000

8,000

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

FIGURE 2

MAY 2018 | 23

White House photo

CHAPTER 3

ORIGINS OF THE STABILIZATION STRATEGY 

(2009)

As early as 2002, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama voiced support for 

the effort to root out al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.117 During his presidential 

campaign years later, he repeatedly called for a renewed focus on what he 

would come to call the “just war”—and almost immediately upon being elected 

president, he committed to stabilizing Afghanistan.118

However, as detailed below, the new administration did not fully grasp the level 

of political, financial, and military commitment the rejuvenated effort would 

require. The administration’s assumptions about resources and timelines were 

out of step with those of some key military and civilian officials. It would take 

months and multiple strategy reviews to develop a common understanding 

of the Obama administration’s desired time frame and willingness to commit 

resources, which exposed differences of opinion and competing priorities. 

The ultimate policy trajectory was a compromise that left many dissatisfied. 

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S FIRST SURGE 

CREATED DIVERSE EXPECTATIONS

Even before he moved into the White House, Obama received three assessments 

of the war in Afghanistan from Lieutenant General Lute, who stayed on to 
24 | ORIGINS OF THE STABILIZATION STRATEGY (2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

become President Obama’s senior NSC coordinator for the wars in Iraq and 

Afghanistan; Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; 

and General David Petraeus, CENTCOM commander.119 With multiple opinions 

and assessments of the Afghan effort on his desk, Obama solicited a fresh 

assessment from Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst who had served as one of 

Obama’s foreign policy advisors during his presidential campaign.120 Obama also 

elevated the focus on Afghanistan and its relationship with Pakistan by creating 

the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) 

within the State Department, naming Richard Holbrooke its first director.121

Riedel, working in conjunction with a team of advisors that included SRAP 

Holbrooke and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, was 

given just 60 days to complete the assessment.122 After making allowances 

for internal reviews and vetting, Riedel determined he would have only about 

three weeks to complete the draft.123 Some members of the working group were 

reportedly concerned that the short timeline would prevent the team from doing 

its due diligence.124 Holbrooke and Lute in particular had reservations about the 

process, saying it reflected the conclusions of Riedel’s recent book on al-Qaeda, 

rather than a thorough policy review.125 Reflecting on the process years later, 

Petraeus told SIGAR, “The Riedel review was very rapid and the idea at the time 

was to get some fingers in the dike and then do an assessment later.”126

The policy trajectory and general consensus within the foreign policy 

establishment—including the senior members of the administration who were wellpositioned to influence the conclusions of Riedel’s report—were already clearly 

oriented toward counterinsurgency.127 Chief among the cohort of counterinsurgency 

advocates was General Petraeus, who was credited with snatching victory from the 

jaws of defeat in Iraq through the application of the COIN doctrine he and a study 

group developed at the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center in 2006.128

In January 2009, even before his review had begun, Riedel had advocated for 

deeper involvement in Afghanistan, including more troops, infrastructure 

assistance, and economic development.129 Thus, the convergence of the review’s 

compressed timeline, the widely held belief that COIN had been effective in Iraq, 

and the credibility and political acumen of COIN advocates like Petraeus and 

Riedel all influenced the outcome of the assessment. 

In fact, the growth of stabilization programming in Afghanistan—from an underresourced, scattershot approach to the constellation of costly programs nested 

within an overarching COIN strategy—was already underway when Riedel and 

his team embarked on their assessment. On February 9, just five days after 

Riedel’s initial meeting with his assessment team, U.S. Ambassador William 

Wood in Kabul sent a cable to senior civilian and military leaders stating, 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 25

“The way forward includes an explicit recognition that USAID is pursuing 

development within the context of a broader U.S. counterinsurgency strategy.” 

The cable then outlined in detail a new, fully formed stabilization strategy for 

USAID that Wood said would “ultimately replace” its 2005–2010 strategy. The 

cable underscored that consensus building for the new approach was underway, 

and that the plans had already been socialized with the civilian leadership in 

Afghanistan and their military counterparts.130

Meanwhile, the new administration was being pressured by the U.S. military 

to authorize the deployment of more forces to Afghanistan. ISAF commander 

General David McKiernan had a longstanding request on the table for more 

than 30,000 additional troops, 9,000 of which had been ordered to deploy by 

President Bush during the presidential transition of late 2008.131 Admiral Mullen 

signaled to the administration that, at a minimum, the president needed to make 

a decision on 17,000 additional troops to provide security during the upcoming 

Afghan presidential election.132 When Riedel agreed an increase was needed, 

even before the strategy review was complete, the president signed off on 

Mullen’s requested 17,000 troop deployment, an increase in U.S. forces of nearly 

50 percent.133

 In a written statement, Obama said: 

General McKiernan’s request for these troops is months old, and the fact 

that we are going to responsibly draw down our forces in Iraq allows us 

the flexibility to increase our presence in Afghanistan. This reinforcement 

will contribute to the security of the Afghan people and to stability in 

Afghanistan. . . . This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating 

situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, 

direction, and resources it urgently requires.134

In March 2009, Riedel’s assessment concluded that “the core goal of the [United 

States] must be to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its safe havens in 

Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.”135 The means 

of achieving that goal, according to the report, were wide-ranging and included 

measures on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. At the top of the 

list was a recommendation for an integrated civ-mil counterinsurgency strategy 

in Afghanistan, which sought to “secure Afghanistan’s south and east against a 

return of al-Qaeda and its allies” and “provide a space for the Afghan government 

to establish effective government control.”136 In the assessment team’s view, the 

strategy should aim first to dry up the supply of Taliban recruits and al-Qaeda 

sympathizers by creating agricultural sector jobs in rural areas that contained 

70 percent of the country’s population and suffered from high unemployment.137

These measures would help stabilize the south and east by giving Afghans more 

reason to support the government and less reason to support or join the insurgency. 

However, a counterinsurgency effort focused on protecting the population 

and implementing village-level projects depended on adequate security forces 

and the Riedel assessment never fully addressed those requirements; Riedel 
26 | ORIGINS OF THE STABILIZATION STRATEGY (2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

left it up to the military and the administration to determine troop numbers.138

There were varying expectations, even within the assessment team, as to 

how many U.S. troops would be needed to implement the group’s policy 

recommendations.139 Months later, Obama would say that subsequent troop 

requests from ISAF commander General Stanley McChrystal exposed how much 

confusion was sown by Riedel’s assessment.140

President Obama and the NSC did not resolve the ambiguity in Riedel’s report 

before announcing the administration’s new policy. Although Obama had 

recently authorized the increase of 17,000 U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan, 

plus 4,000 trainers for Afghan forces, the military wanted to discuss even more 

troops before the 17,000 had even deployed.141 Obama declined, as he wanted to 

wait at least until after the Afghan presidential election—five months away—to 

see whether the injection of U.S. forces had made a difference before making 

additional commitments.142

The ambiguity of Riedel’s report came through in the president’s strategy 

announcement on March 27, 2009. In his speech that day, Obama drew on Riedel’s 

report when he outlined (1) his goal of defeating al-Qaeda in Pakistan and 

Afghanistan and preventing their return; (2) the conditions for success, which 

included a weakened Taliban and stronger more capable Afghan government; 

and (3) the means of accomplishing this, including policies to bring about a 

“dramatic increase in our civilian effort . . . to advance security, opportunity and 

justice . . . not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces.” He went 

on to say that “indispensable investments in our State Department and foreign 

assistance programs . . . contribute directly to security.”143

President Obama was, in essence, endorsing the concept of a civilian 

stabilization component of counterinsurgency, on a large scale. Unfortunately, 

not everyone in the administration fully grasped what they were signing up for; 

many senior staff had different ideas about what counterinsurgency meant for 

future force levels.144 Obama himself reportedly believed this increase in military 

and civilian resources fulfilled his commitment to the war—that this was 

“the surge”—and he was not expecting to revisit the issue for months.145

The ambiguity in the strategy precipitated a months-long period of debate 

within the administration over the way ahead in Afghanistan. A small 

cohort of counterinsurgency skeptics, led by Vice President Joseph Biden, 

advocated for a less ambitious campaign that focused on counterterrorism, 

in direct opposition to counterinsurgency advocates who sought to transform 

Afghanistan from the bottom up. Meanwhile, counterinsurgency advocates tried 

to apply political pressure and strengthen their case by soliciting an on-theground assessment from the new ISAF commander, General McChrystal.146
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 27

NEW COMMANDER HINTS MANY MORE TROOPS NEEDED

President Obama replaced General McKiernan 

with General McChrystal in June 2009.147

Some Pentagon officials felt McKiernan was 

too focused on offensive actions against 

insurgents in the remote border region of 

eastern Afghanistan and not focused enough 

on southern Afghanistan, particularly Kandahar 

City.148 Secretary of Defense Robert Gates 

and Admiral Mullen reportedly believed 

that McKiernan had not fully embraced 

counterinsurgency, as evidenced by his 

relatively modest troop request and inability 

to articulate how he would use additional 

troops if he had them.149 Furthermore, 

McKiernan was not taking steps to mitigate 

civilian casualties (CIVCAS). According to a 

senior U.S. official, “McKiernan’s responses to 

damaging CIVCAS incidents, particularly one in 

Farah, were insufficient. McKiernan continued 

insisting the casualties were combatants, and when it came out they were not, 

Secretary Gates asked him what he would do differently regarding the rules of 

engagement, and McKiernan’s response wasn’t adequate.”150

When asked at his Senate confirmation hearing on June 2, 2009, what success 

would look like in Afghanistan, General McChrystal responded by saying that 

security in contested areas would create opportunities for more active, locally 

based governance, followed by more traditional development and economic 

growth. According to McChrystal, the desired end state was “steady growth 

underpinned by solid governance.”151

McChrystal clearly supported the concepts underlying stabilization and 

counterinsurgency, but his hearing also foreshadowed a request for additional 

troops. He was noncommittal about citing specific numbers for U.S. forces, saying 

that he was “reticent to speculate.” He did, however, reveal his methodology for 

calculating recommended troop numbers based on population size, and his belief 

that 160,000 Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) would be 

insufficient for Afghanistan to manage its own security even in peacetime, let 

alone in the face of a burgeoning insurgency.152 At the time, the United States had 

about 60,000 troops in Afghanistan, in addition to 30,000 from partner nations.153

Troop numbers were only one consideration, however. The civilian and military 

components of the strategy were interdependent. In theory, the troops could 

President Obama meets with General McChrystal in the Oval Office 

on May 19, 2009. (White House photo by Pete Souza)
28 | ORIGINS OF THE STABILIZATION STRATEGY (2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

clear an area, but it was up to the civilian development and governance experts to 

provide stabilization programming. In fact, in June 2009, National Security Advisor 

James Jones pointed out to Obama that additional military personnel were of 

limited utility without the accompanying governance and development efforts.154

Conversely, stabilization programs could not be implemented without security.

A GLIMMER OF HOPE IN THE SOUTH 

SEEMS TO VALIDATE THE STRATEGY

Secretary Gates told General McChrystal to assess and report on the situation 

in Afghanistan within 60 days of arriving in country.155 McChrystal’s initial 

assessment, like the Riedel review, was developed by a team of advisors, who 

were asked to answer two fundamental questions: “Can ISAF achieve the 

mission?” and “If so, how should ISAF go about achieving the mission?”156

Similar to the Riedel review, conclusions were reached early in the assessment 

process. On July 4, 2009, roughly one week after arriving in Afghanistan, the 

assessment team delivered an interim briefing.157 The team painted a gloomy 

picture: ISAF was not operating under any coherent strategic guidance, and the 

troops’ practices—conducting mounted patrols during the day and returning to 

their bases in the evening—were out of step with counterinsurgency doctrine.158

The team concluded that the coalition needed to modify its operations to avert 

an otherwise inevitable defeat.159

During his confirmation hearing, McChrystal had 

said the coalition needed to “start making progress 

within about 18 to 24 months.”160 The tone of his 

initial assessment, completed in August, was 

decidedly more urgent, suggesting that failure to 

turn the momentum of the Taliban insurgency 

within 12 months would “risk an outcome where 

defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”161

The report concluded that it was necessary to 

implement a new strategy based on a “properly 

resourced” civilian-military model that would 

create a secure environment and prioritize areas 

where “the population is threatened.”162

From a force distribution perspective, 

McChrystal and his advisors believed the 

emphasis should be on the Taliban heartland in 

southern Afghanistan, particularly Kandahar.163

But before McChrystal deployed, General 

A civil affairs specialist with Regimental Combat Team 3 interacts 

with a village elder during a patrol in Helmand Province on August 18, 

2009. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 29

McKiernan had already made the decision to send an injection of 9,000 Marines—

part of Obama’s election security surge—to Helmand, despite the province’s 

relatively small population. That decision was based on three key factors: 

(1) Canadian partners in Kandahar were reluctant to relinquish control of their 

area of responsibility; (2) the Marines requested to control a contiguous piece of 

territory with their own logistics infrastructure, rather than rely on Army logistics 

in jointly controlled territory; and (3) the Marines were in the unique position of 

having sufficient forces for the mission, which gave them considerable leverage 

when they requested their own battlespace in Helmand, rather than share 

responsibility in Kandahar.164 Once the decision had been made, McChrystal felt 

the Marines needed to remain in Helmand to demonstrate to the Afghans that the 

United States was committed.165

The Marines’ surge into Nawa District in Helmand, part of Operation Khanjar, 

initially appeared to be successful.166 A declassified August 2009 cable from 

U.S. Embassy Kabul painted an optimistic picture of the situation in the wake of 

the clearing operation, including a successful Afghan government-led shura with 

600–700 attendees and a revitalized bazaar.167 The cable noted, “Several elders 

in the bazaar told a [State Department representative] that the duration of the 

new Marine role in Nawa represented the most important factor for stability, 

alongside a persistent [ANDSF] presence.”168 Within six months of the Marines’ 

arrival, attacks were down 90 percent in the district.169 (See figure 3.) Government 

officials were reportedly meeting with their constituents to address grievances, 

and locals were marginalizing the Taliban and reporting on insurgent activity.170

“The duration of the new Marine role in Nawa 

represented the most important factor for stability, 

alongside a persistent [ANDSF] presence.”

—U.S. Embassy Kabul cable

Overall, the Marines embraced COIN in central Helmand. Marine battalions 

were repeatedly sent to the same areas to ensure they cultivated and retained 

an understanding of the local population over multiple rotations. Marine civil 

affairs teams employed a methodical approach to building relationships in a 

process they first cultivated in Iraq’s Anbar Province.171

In August 2009, another portion of the 17,000 troops Obama authorized in February 

arrived in Kandahar, including a Stryker brigade which took some of the heaviest 

casualties of any too similar U.S. unit.172 The violence in Kandahar stood in stark 

contrast to the apparent success in Nawa, which seemed to be a function, in part, 

of the number of forces available. Within a few weeks of the Stryker brigade’s 

arrival, McChrystal decided that he needed more forces to secure Kandahar.173

Shuras (Arabic) and 

jirgas (Pashto) are 

gatherings of informal 

leaders to confer, make 

decisions on behalf 

of constituents, and 

resolve disputes. As 

evolving institutions 

with varying purposes, 

formats, and structures 

across the country, the 

terms are sometimes 

used interchangeably.
30 | ORIGINS OF THE STABILIZATION STRATEGY (2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

The ratio of U.S. forces to Afghan civilians in Nawa was thought to be about 

1:50, precisely the minimum recommended by counterinsurgency doctrine.174

Still, to reach even that recommended minimum force ratio in other areas, 

including parts of Kandahar, the United States would need to commit more 

forces. McChrystal used that information, combined with the apparent success 

in Nawa, to justify his request for more troops.175

A LONG-TERM STRATEGY COMPRESSED INTO 18 MONTHS

In early September 2009, Obama and the NSC held the first of what would come 

to be nine official Afghanistan strategy review sessions.176 The attendees typically 

included National Security Advisor Jones, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State 

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Gates, White House Chief of Staff Rahm 

Emanuel, the intelligence chiefs, and senior military personnel and diplomats.177

The legacy of the Iraq conflict loomed large over the policy discussions. According 

to one senior U.S. official, the dramatic improvement in the security situation 

in Iraq following the U.S. troop surge there gave many in the deliberations the 

impression that counterinsurgency was a winning strategy, which bolstered the 

military’s credibility with its civilian counterparts.178

0

2

4

6

8

10

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

MONTHLY COMBAT EVENTS IN NAWA DISTRICT, HELMAND PROVINCE, 2005–2014 (PER 10,000 POPULATION)

Source: Empirical Studies of Conict Project (ESOC) analysis, data from Andrew C. Shaver and Austin L. Wright, “Data on Combatant Activity During Afghanistan War Advance Scientic 

Investigation of Insurgency,” Technical Report, 2017.

FIGURE 3
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 31

Over the next few months, the military was joined by senior members of the NSC 

Principals Committee, including Secretary Clinton, in urging the president to 

take more dramatic steps to salvage the situation in Afghanistan.179 Still, despite 

the crystallizing consensus that the administration should make a deeper 

commitment to Afghanistan, the particular form of that commitment remained a 

point of contention. Vice President Biden remained the most outspoken opponent 

of committing to McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy.180 In a letter to the 

president, Biden warned: 

I do not see how anyone who took part in our discussions could emerge 

without profound questions about the viability of counterinsurgency. Our 

military will do its part: They will clear anything we ask them to clear. 

They will hold anything we ask them to hold. But no one can tell you with 

conviction when, and even if, we can produce the flip sides of COIN that are 

required to build and transfer responsibility to the Afghans: an effective and 

sustainable civilian surge, a credible partner in Kabul, basic governance and 

services, and competent Afghan security forces. We simply can’t control these 

variables, yet they’re essential to the success of COIN.181

Notably, most of those variables were given far less attention during the fall 2009 

strategy review than the numbers of troops and their geographic priorities.182 As 

NSC senior coordinator Lute reflected, “If you over-rely on the military, there 

tends to be a fixation on troop numbers. It’s as if the only dial in the engine room 

is troop numbers.”183

“If you over-rely on the military, there tends to be a 

fixation on troop numbers. It’s as if the only dial in 

the engine room is troop numbers.”

—Lieutenant General Doug Lute, NSC senior coordinator

On September 30, 2009, Obama met with his advisors to discuss troop 

numbers.184 If he did decide on a troop surge, the president reportedly did 

not want to blindly pick a number; he wanted the number to be derived from 

an overarching strategy.185 But fundamental questions remained about what 

conditions would prevent al-Qaeda from returning in force to Afghanistan, with 

Biden advocating for counterterrorism and Petraeus and McChrystal arguing for 

counterinsurgency.186 The discord persisted, with at least eight more meetings 

over the course of the next two months.187 As late as October, the Principals 

Committee was still debating whether the Taliban or al-Qaeda should be the 

focus of security operations, while Obama and the Joint Chiefs were parsing the 

implications of a strategy to disrupt, as opposed to defeat, the Taliban.188

The Pentagon was convinced there was only one path to follow—a 

counterinsurgency strategy supported by a large troop surge—and they steered 

the policy options in that direction in two ways.189 First, there were interviews, 

speeches, and leaks to the media, which served to essentially end-run the 
32 | ORIGINS OF THE STABILIZATION STRATEGY (2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

COMPARISONS TO IRAQ 

In 2009, when President Obama’s first strategy reviews were taking place, the contrast 

between Afghanistan and Iraq was stark, particularly in terms of government capacity, levels 

of education, and functioning infrastructure.190 If helping the government deliver services 

and improving human development was the metric of success in building a government’s 

legitimacy, repeating Iraq’s success would be far harder in Afghanistan, as the difference 

between the baselines in each country was enormous. 

In Iraq, 67 percent of the population lived in urban areas, compared to 24 percent in 

Afghanistan.191 Eighty-five percent of Iraqis had access to an improved water source, while 

less than half of Afghans (and only 39 percent of rural ones) did.192 Infant mortality in 

Afghanistan was more than double that in Iraq, and maternal mortality was nearly 13 times 

higher.193 At 40 percent, unemployment was rampant in Afghanistan and more than double 

the rate in Iraq (18 percent).194 Only 28 percent of the Afghan population over the age 

of 15 was literate; in rural areas, only 10 percent of women and 40 percent of men were 

literate.195 Iraq, in contrast, had a literacy rate of 74 percent before the 2003 war.196

In particular, a largely illiterate population has wide-ranging significance for reconstruction 

efforts. Examples include soldiers who cannot read an artillery manual, police officers who 

cannot read a map, and administrators who cannot draft a rudimentary budget or document 

constituent grievances.197 Illiteracy presents profound challenges for any underdeveloped 

society undergoing a prolonged transformation, to say nothing of the speed and volume of 

reform that was under consideration during the Afghan strategy reviews. 

As a 2009 CSIS analysis noted:

The challenge in Iraq is essentially one of rebuilding, whereas in Afghanistan it is one 

of building from scratch. . . . [In Iraq,] there was some tradition of central authority and 

organization on which a new, more reasonable order might take root and grow. In addition, 

Iraq boasted an educated population and professional business and government classes. 

None of these factors exist in Afghanistan.198

Further, despite the prevailing narrative of the success of COIN in Iraq, it was not entirely 

clear that COIN and the surge were the decisive factors in deescalating the conflict in Iraq.199

The differences between the two countries were at least briefly discussed during the fall 2009 

strategy review and were well-known among the COIN advocates involved in the deliberations; 

yet, it appears none of these differences constituted red flags sizable enough to deter or alter 

the strategy.200
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 33

administration by broadcasting the military’s opinions and assessments before 

they could be filtered by the White House.201 The Pentagon’s public framing 

of the Afghanistan narrative as a choice between a troop surge and defeat 

constrained the administration’s policy options, as going against the military’s 

best advice could seem imprudent, especially if the outcome was unfavorable. 

Second, the Pentagon also limited the policy options by providing only three 

strategy proposals to the president. On September 24, 2009, General McChrystal 

submitted a request for more troops as a follow-on to his initial assessment. 

The request included three surge options: 10,000 troops to ramp up training 

efforts, 40,000 troops to prioritize counterinsurgency in the south, or 85,000 

troops to conduct a more robust COIN campaign in the south and east.202

 The 

first and third options were considered essentially untenable, and the second 

was not palatable to the president. The surge of 40,000 troops was simply too 

big and too slow, and it did not get the United States closer to Obama’s ultimate 

objective of extracting the last U.S. combat forces from Afghanistan before 

leaving office.203 On the other hand, while the military never recommended 

or estimated a specific timeline for the surge, in the eyes of some principals, 

McChrystal’s recommended strategy hinted at a 10-year commitment.204

In contrast, Obama was overtly searching for a short-term exit strategy.205 He 

told the Pentagon to develop a fourth policy option, but the Pentagon either 

would not or could not conceive of viable alternatives that met the president’s 

requirements.206 As General Petraeus later explained, “An ‘option’ in the military 

President Obama attends a briefing on Afghanistan in the White House Situation Room on October 9, 

2009. (White House photo by Pete Souza)
34 | ORIGINS OF THE STABILIZATION STRATEGY (2009)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

needs to accomplish the mission. There’s no sense in providing an option that 

will not be viable and will not accomplish the mission. Our view was that 40,000 

additional U.S. forces was the minimum needed to do the mission.”207 Moreover, 

when Obama constrained the time frame of the surge from an estimated 10 years 

to 18 months during the deliberations, the military leadership and the civilian 

principals who supported them did not revise their existing options to reflect 

the new time frame, suggesting to the president that the same missions could 

be fulfilled on a compressed timeline.208 Ultimately, Obama personally involved 

himself in the development of not only a new strategy, but also a new and 

definitive timeline for the new approach.209

In a meeting with his key advisors, Obama reiterated that the core goal of the 

war remained to defeat al-Qaeda and deny them safe haven in Afghanistan and 

Pakistan. The goal with regard to the Taliban—who could topple the Afghan 

government and provide safe haven to al-Qaeda—was to deny them access 

to key population centers, disrupt their operations outside those population 

centers, and degrade their forces to the point where they could be managed by 

Afghan forces.210 The path to achieving those interrelated goals was described 

as a hybrid of COIN and counterterrorism, and Obama resourced it with a surge 

force of 30,000 U.S. troops (along with hundreds of civilian specialists), rather 

than the 40,000 in the Pentagon’s “middle option.”211 When the president asked 

his civilian and military advisors in late November whether they agreed with 

the plan, all endorsed it.212

Obama’s decision to impose a deadline of July 2011 to begin the drawdown of 

surge forces was reportedly inspired by Secretary Gates’ idea that success or 

failure could be revealed during an assessment conducted 12–18 months into 

the surge, an idea which Obama apparently hardened into a time-based surge 

of similar length.213 The president reportedly believed, with good reason, that 

an open-ended surge would divert critical resources away from mitigating the 

damage from the 2008 financial crisis; it could give the military more room to 

pressure the White House into future extensions or escalations; and it could 

further cultivate Afghan dependency on U.S. aid.214 As Obama noted in his 

announcement of the policy shift at West Point in December 2009, “Our troop 

commitment cannot be open-ended. . . . It must be clear that Afghans will have 

to take responsibility for their security.”215

Still, the mission had all of the ambitions and expectations of a long-term 

counterinsurgency effort, but without the recommended, prolonged timeline.216

Regarding the timeline restrictions, there are inconsistencies between media 

accounts and senior U.S. civilian and military officials, some of whom claim 

the president first mentioned a time-constrained surge only two days before 

announcing the strategy at West Point.217 For example, according to Petraeus:
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 35

The timeline was just sprung on us. We had no discussion of that during the 

process. Two days before the president made the speech, on a Sunday, we all 

got called and were told to be in the Oval Office that night for the president to 

lay out what he would announce two evenings later. And he laid it out, there 

it is. Take it or leave it. He said, we’re going to begin the drawdown in the 

summer of 2011. None of us had heard that before. And we were then asked, 

are you all okay with that? He went around the room and everyone said yes. 

And it was take it or leave it. . . . Until that point in the review, nobody ever 

thought this was going to last forever, but nobody presumed we would begin 

drawing down in July 2011.218

Despite agreeing, Petraeus also calculated the military could buy more time 

later if they made enough progress by the time the July 2011 deadline arrived. 

“Obviously, that’s in the back of your mind,” Petraeus recalled. “We hoped for 

an extended surge, and we also had not discussed the speed of the drawdown, 

so I hoped for a slow one.”219

Regardless of how much time the president’s advisors were given to react to 

a time-constrained surge, they all chose to support it rather than highlight the 

gaps between the evolving strategy’s scope, resources, and timeline. As former 

SRAP senior advisor Barnett Rubin noted, without the will for a prolonged 

campaign, the strategy should have been scoped down to something more 

suitable and realistic for the timeline.220

Afghanistan-Pakistan Regional Stabilization Strategy

Although stabilization was loosely viewed as a component of counterinsurgency prior 

to 2009, during the 2009 strategy reviews the White House and NSC principals more 

often used the term counterinsurgency as a catch-all to include the kind of civilian and 

governance improvements inherent to stabilization. When the review was complete, 

however, DOD and State together used the president’s December 2009 guidance to draft 

the Afghanistan and Pakistan (Af-Pak) Regional Stabilization Strategy, putting the idea 

of stabilization front and center in the effort to build the Afghan government’s capacity 

and legitimacy. 

While the president was insistent during the fall strategy review that he was not 

authorizing a fully resourced counterinsurgency, by the winter his administration appears 

to have changed the strategic emphasis from COIN to stabilization, at least on paper. 

The Regional Stabilization Strategy stated, “Improving the Afghan people’s confidence 

in their government requires improved service delivery, greater accountability, and 

more protection from predatory government practices, particularly at the district and 

community level, where the Taliban is providing its own brand of brutal but efficient 

governance.” The strategy further noted, “We are also broadening our support and 

engagement at the provincial and district levels, where our most consequential programs 

will be delivered.”221

Thus, while military efforts to protect the population were intended to create the space 

for these developments, stabilization became the new emphasis across the board.

MAY 2018 | 37

CONCEIVING STABILIZATION

While policymakers in Washington were refining the strategy throughout 

2009, State, USAID, and DOD pushed ahead with the guidance they 

had. By the time the interagency Af-Pak Regional Stabilization Strategy was 

published in December 2009, the Obama administration’s initial vision of COIN 

and stabilization had already been solidifying for nearly a year.222

COIN theory presumes that significant investments will be made in 

development-like activities to increase the legitimacy of the government. State 

and USAID had to operationalize this theory, even as the strategy was evolving, 

and devise a framework for those civilian-led activities that supported COIN. 

As with earlier efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, State and USAID recognized 

that their traditional development programming would be ineffective in the 

clear-hold-build process because communities that continued to be physically 

contested even after clearing were not ready for long-term development.223

Instead, activities that resembled development were to be used more narrowly 

to achieve explicit security outcomes, such as expelling the Taliban and 

reducing violence. In the near term, the theory was that programming would 

U.S. Marine Corps photo

CHAPTER 4

STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE 

(2009–2012)
38 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

win the support of rural Afghans so they would report insurgent activity as they 

increasingly allied with the government.224 Meanwhile, stabilization programs 

were also intended to create the space for rudimentary governance so that 

proper long-term development could eventually take place and maintain the 

population’s trust indefinitely. Using Iraq as a guide, State and USAID came to 

believe that connecting Afghans to their government and building its capacity 

to meet Afghan demands for service delivery at the local level would give the 

government the legitimacy prescribed by counterinsurgency doctrine and 

decrease support for the Taliban accordingly.225

While the overall intent was to reduce violence and keep the Taliban out of 

contested territory, to get to that point, COIN was designed to be temporarily 

destabilizing. Many areas that were cleared were not previously wracked 

by violence; many were quite stable by most metrics.226 They were simply 

controlled by the Taliban and thus had to be cleared, held, and built in order 

to reverse the Taliban’s momentum. Through a series of local interventions, 

counterinsurgents had to expel the Taliban from select districts they had ruled, 

install or shore up government rule, and ensure the district’s communities and 

officials had the means and motivation to repel Taliban attempts to return. 

Thus, reading between the lines, the point of COIN and stabilization was not 

to stabilize communities already wracked by violence, but rather to instigate a 

destabilizing revolution in local control and then stabilize the fallout.227

Operationalizing Stabilization: 

Civ-Mil Integration and Key Terrain Districts

Prior to 2009, the integration of U.S. military forces and civilian personnel 

in Afghanistan varied considerably. The two were particularly disconnected 

between 2006 and 2008, as Embassy Kabul normalized its operations and ISAF 

prioritized targeting insurgents. Beginning in 2008, however, additional senior 

U.S. civilian and military officials in Kabul came to recognize the merits of 

civ-mil integration, sometimes at the urging of officials deployed by State’s 

Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS).228 Efforts to promote 

regional civ-mil planning began in Regional Command (RC)-East, quickly spread 

to the south, and filtered down to the PRT level.229 At the same time, civilians 

on PRTs began to slowly shift from reporting to program implementation as the 

role of civilians in plans and operations was elevated.230 The political advisor 

role that was traditionally subordinate to military commanders in southern and 

eastern Afghanistan was refashioned as the Senior Civilian Representative, on 

par with the regional commanders.231

By the spring of 2009, civ-mil planning and integration were gaining momentum. 

Using documents like the Riedel review and guidance from SRAP Holbrooke 

and newly appointed Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Embassy Kabul hosted the 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 39

Integrated Civil-Military Affairs Group, which included officials from State, 

USAID, and DOD, to develop the Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan 

(ICMCP).232 The August 2009 ICMCP operationalized the concept of stabilization 

and described how civilian and military organizations would work side-by-side 

in Afghanistan to stabilize priority areas from the bottom up. There were three 

primary lines of effort—security, governance, and development—with the 

assumption that State and USAID would do the heavy lifting on governance 

and development. This plan also laid out the rationale for the civilian surge 

in personnel accompanying the troop surge.233 While there had been only 

15 Chief of Mission civilians in Afghanistan in early 2004, that number had 

risen to 320 in January 2009, 470 in August 2009, 1,004 in June 2010, and 

1,124 in December 2011.234 These numbers did not include the many civilian 

representatives of other coalition partners, such as the UK and Denmark, whose 

numbers also rose gradually over the course of the war.235

The ICMCP established 14 thematic working groups, including agriculture and 

counternarcotics, at the headquarters level, many of which were replicated all the 

way down to the district level.236 These civ-mil working groups up and down the 

chain met regularly and tracked progress in their sector under the guidance of the 

military commander and ranking civilian representative at every command level, 

including PRTs, battalions, brigades, divisions, and ISAF headquarters.237 Regional 

U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. William McCollough, second from right, commander of the 1st Battalion, 

5th Marine Regiment, talks with members of the USAID team at Patrol Base Jaker in Nawa District, 

Helmand Province, on August 16, 2009. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. William Greeson)
40 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

platforms were created to serve as civilian equivalents to military divisions in 

the regional commands, and greater funding authority was pushed out to these 

platforms in an attempt to make them more nimble and decentralized.238 The 

core leaders of each Regional Command/Platform combination were a military 

commander, a senior civilian representative from State, and a senior aid officer 

from USAID, each of whom was of equal rank. This structure attempted to 

enhance coordination and centralize lines of reporting that had previously run 

separately through each agency’s chain of command.239

While the provincial level had been the lowest level at which coalition civilians 

had previously focused, the new unit of organization was to be the district. 

However, there was confusion and disagreement about which of the nearly 400 

districts should be prioritized. According to a State retrospective, “Between 

2007 and 2010, ISAF, U.S. forces, the UN, and the embassy identified four rounds 

of ‘priority districts’ based on four different theories of what would ‘win’ the 

COIN and stabilization campaign.”240 According to Embassy Kabul reporting, 

this planning took place in coordination with the Afghan government, whose 

officials generally agreed that the initial focus would be on the south and 

east. Meanwhile, the same reporting noted that the UN Assistance Mission in 

Afghanistan (UNAMA) used an “integrated approach” to prioritize “tipping point 

districts” where combined security, development, and governance interventions 

were thought to be able to turn a deteriorating situation around.241

Perhaps taking a cue from UNAMA, by the late summer of 2009, some U.S. 

officials were using “20 priority districts” that were “seen as tipping points” as 

the basis for aligning their efforts.242 The Afghan government agreed to support 

this pilot district strategy by staffing the districts with competent governors and 

ministry officials.243

The U.S. strategy soon moved away from focusing on districts seen as tipping 

points to those districts that had long since tipped toward the Taliban. Rather 

than preventing particular districts from deteriorating further, the military 

prioritized “clearing” the Taliban from heavily contested districts, which became 

known as key terrain districts (KTD).244 The next step would be to help the 

Afghan government hold those areas with projects and essential services that 

demonstrated the benefits of a strong relationship between the population and 

legitimate local government.245

 Whereas the previous focus had been primarily 

on areas that were contiguous to already stable regions, the priority was now 

often on “critical high-population areas” that included “key infrastructure” and 

were controlled or contested by insurgents.246

Afghan government representatives expressed concern about this approach 

from the outset. They pointed out the primacy of enduring security and 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 41

argued that only districts that Afghan and international security forces could 

hold over the long term should be targeted with ministerial support. Ministry 

representatives also cautioned that their existing level of capacity for service 

delivery was quite limited.247

By December 2009, some of the most insecure districts in the country were 

identified as the focus of coalition efforts, primarily in the south and east.248

What began as six pilot districts eventually expanded to 83 KTDs, along with 

41 second-tier “area of interest” districts.249 (See figure 4.) Soon after, dozens of 

civ-mil District Support Teams (DST) were staffed with personnel from State, 

USAID, and USDA, and deployed to many of these KTDs. Once on site, DST 

personnel were tasked with integrating all stabilization activities and planning at 

the district level to build local governance capacity.250

FIGURE 4
42 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

IMPLEMENTING STABILIZATION: PROGRAMS AND TOOLS

Even as the campaign plan was being developed in the spring and early summer 

of 2009, USAID had to push forward and design a new wave of stabilization 

programs, while at the same time adapting existing programs to the new 

strategy. (See figure 5.) Programs like the Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased 

Production in Agriculture (AVIPA), Local Governance and Community 

Development (LGCD), and Food Insecurity Response to Urban Populations 

were refocused both geographically and conceptually to align with stabilization 

priorities.251 For example, AVIPA was originally designed to help droughtaffected wheat farmers increase production across 18 provinces, but was 

overhauled in spring 2009 to target contested districts in Kandahar and Helmand 

with cash-for-work activities after clearing operations were finished.252

Likewise, new stabilization programs ramped up as military operations did, 

justifying the redesignation of USAID’s PRT office as the Stabilization Unit 

(Stab-U) in February 2010 to oversee programming that was closely integrated 

with the military and distinct from USAID’s traditional development portfolios.253

State and USAID recognized that a different kind of programming would be 

needed as a stopgap measure, particularly in the most dangerous districts.254

Stabilization programs were intended to create a degree of stability that would, 

in turn, create the conditions necessary for long-term development programs 

to commence.255

Note: Date ranges are approximate. 

Source: USAID, response to SIGAR data call, June 22, 2017, and January 17, 2018; DOD, response to SIGAR data call, January 17, 2018; 

USAID, Timeline of USAID-U.S. Military Cooperation in Afghanistan (2002-2013), March 3, 2015; Kenneth Katzman, Afghanistan: Post-Taliban 

Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy, Congressional Research Service, October 9, 2014, p. 35; DOD, NSOCC-A Response to SIGAR, April 7, 

2014; Donald Bolduc, “The Future of Afghanistan,” Special Warfare, vol. 24, no. 4 (2011), p. 24.

AFGHANISTAN STABILIZATION PROGRAMMING FROM 2002–2017

 ACAP: Afghan Civilian Assistance Program

 ASI: Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative 

 (Ofce of Transition Initiatives)

 ASOP: Afghanistan Social Outreach Program

 ASP: Afghanistan Stabilization Program 

 ATI: Afghanistan Transition Initiative 

 (Ofce of Transition Initiatives)

 AVIPA: Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased 

 Production in Agriculture

 CBSG: Community Based Stabilization Grants 

 CCI: Community Cohesion Initiative 

 (Ofce of Transition Initiatives)

 CDP: Community Development Program, 

 previously called Food Insecurity Response 

 for Urban Populations (FIRUP)

 CERP: Commander's Emergency Response Program 

 DDP: District Delivery Program 

 DST: District Support Teams 

 KFZ: Kandahar Food Zone 

 LGCD: Local Governance and Community Development

 MISTI: Measuring Impact of Stabilization Initiatives

 PRT: Provincial Reconstruction Teams

 PRT QIP: PRT Quick Impact Projects

 RLS-I: Rule of Law Stabilization - Informal Component

 SIKA: Stability in Key Areas

 SPR-SEA: Strategic Provincial Roads-Southern 

 and Eastern Afghanistan

 VSO: Village Stability Operations 

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

CERP

PRTs

VSO

ASP

ACAP ACAP II

ASOP

CDP/FIRUP

DSTs

AVIPA AVIPA Plus

DDP

CBSG

MISTI

LGCD SIKA

ASI CCI

KFZ

 DOD USAID

 USAID-Funded USAID, Covered by MISTI

KEY & ABBREVIATIONS

PRT QIP

RLS-I

ATI





SPR-SEA

FIGURE 5
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 43

The Stabilization Unit’s Performance Management Plan (PMP), finalized a few 

months after the creation of Stab-U, defined stabilization in more detail as 

“help[ing] to reduce key [sources of instability] by engaging and supporting 

at-risk populations, extending the reach of [the government of Afghanistan] 

to unstable areas, providing income generation opportunities, building trust 

between citizens and their government, and encouraging local populations to 

take an active role in their development.”256

In practice, USAID’s stabilization program objectives generally aimed to 

improve either government-society relations or community cohesion.257 The 

theory was that these improved relationships would, over the course of a 

multi-step process, lead to a decrease in violence and lessen the appeal of antigovernment elements, resulting in an increase in stability. Ultimately, the steps 

that would lead to stability were not well articulated during this period, leaving 

each program (or even each region within each program) to devise its own and 

preventing any overarching “theory of change” from emerging.258 For an in-depth 

discussion of the theories of change underlying USAID’s stabilization approach, 

see chapter 8 of this report.

With “extending the reach of the government” as stabilization’s overriding 

principle, Stab-U programs created and funded the following, among 

other initiatives: 

1. Local shuras, to resolve problems and represent constituent interests259

2. Cash-for-work jobs for thousands of Afghans, many of whom were otherwise 

anticipated to fight for the Taliban260

3. Financial compensation for civilians killed, injured, or who suffered property 

damage, to stave off the possibility that new grievances might drive them into 

the arms of the Taliban261

4. Training for formal and informal local government officials262

5. Development-like projects, ranging from seed distribution and agricultural 

classes to repairing irrigation canals and building roads263

Implementing Partners

Often called contractors or grantees depending on the award type, implementing partners 

are for-profit companies or not-for-profit NGOs that governments hire to implement aid 

programs on their behalf.264 Most of the larger USAID awards went to U.S. companies 

or NGOs that would often issue sub-awards to other companies and NGOs.265 While 

typical of USAID and most other coalition development agencies, this model meant that 

coalition civilians oversaw the work of implementing partners, but had less of a role in 

the day-to-day implementation of stabilization programs.
44 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Coalition military, diplomatic, and development professionals saw the need for 

a uniform methodology to help Afghans identify and target local “sources of 

instability” (SOI), or grievances the Taliban could exploit to make their presence 

in the community more valuable and desirable.266 Borrowing heavily from its 

Tactical Conflict Assessment and Planning Framework,267 USAID created the 

District Stability Framework (DSF) to walk coalition members and Afghans 

through the process of:

1. Forming “stability working groups” at the local level to bring together varying 

combinations of representatives from the U.S. military, USAID, implementing 

partners, local communities, and local governments.268

2. Mapping out local SOIs that allow the Taliban to drive a wedge between 

the people and the government, for example, the Taliban resolution of 

local disputes.269

3. Identifying “resiliencies,” or strengths the community could leverage to drive 

the Taliban out, for example, a highly respected shura or council of elders 

that could mobilize the community.

270

4. Prioritizing projects or interventions that would show the community the 

value of being connected with the government and then strengthen that 

connection, for example, constructing small-scale infrastructure, such as a 

school boundary walls, through an interactive process in which a shura of 

local government officials and community members jointly identified projects 

and oversaw their implementation.271

A SIKA-East stabilization workshop in Ahmadabad District, Paktiya Province, on February 22, 2014. 

(USAID photo by Ahmad Salarzai)
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 45

Tailoring Stabilization by Program and Region

The District Stability Framework was unevenly applied and more prominent in 

the eastern part of the country. In the south, the government’s lack of reach was 

seen by coalition civilians as the main driver of instability, so even identifying 

local sources of instability was not emphasized.272 There, simply ensuring the 

people and government were communicating—and that they had plenty of 

projects to communicate about—was often assumed to eventually build trust.

In the south, where violence levels were substantially higher than in the east, 

the challenges of working in such insecure areas led senior USAID officials in 

2010 to create an alternative to DSF called the Regional South Stabilization 

Approach (RSSA). This new tool set preconditions for different types of 

programming to ensure security in an area was determined to be sufficient for 

effective implementation, monitoring, and evaluation before USAID programs 

were launched there.273

Varying theories of stabilization were used for different programs, which led to a 

diverse collection of projects and programming tools that were used in different 

ways. For example, cash-for-work was used broadly during this period, both 

as a means of achieving other goals, such as building infrastructure that would 

allow the government to better serve the community, and as a justification 

for programming in and of itself. Programs like the Afghanistan Stabilization 

Initiative (ASI) and LGCD used community labor as part of programming 

designed through assessment tools, such as DSF, in close consultation with 

local leaders and the community, to connect populations to their government 

and address sources of instability.274 LGCD evolved so that, by 2009, it would not 

accept project requests directly from communities, but required communities 

to petition their local government representatives.275 In contrast, programs 

such as the Community Development Program (CDP) and AVIPA embraced the 

philosophy that “if you give a man a shovel, he won’t pick up a rifle.”276 In those 

programs, cash-for-work was its own goal: Every day that someone was working 

was a day that he was not emplacing IEDs or fighting. This was quite different 

from hiring local laborers as part of a broader consultative approach of bringing 

together local leaders and residents to solve community problems and build 

trust. The theory was that short-term employment (usually 30–90 days) would 

reduce the pool of fighting-age men available to support the insurgency.277

Much like the projects themselves, cash-for-work was intended to build 

community relationships with government officials. These officials would, in 

theory, facilitate local procurement and labor for the project, help identify and 

draw laborers proportionally from competing local groups, and mediate disputes 

that arose among laborers or between the implementer and the community. In 

turn, it was hoped that Afghans would attribute the opportunity (and the labor 
46 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

it generated) to their increased engagement with the Afghan government, and 

conclude the relationship was worth cultivating further.278

Cash-for-work was seen as an approach that could be used in less secure areas 

because of its relative simplicity and quick implementation.279 Unlike stabilization 

methods that relied heavily on consultations with communities and government 

representatives or larger-scale infrastructure projects that required a more 

sustained presence in a contested area, cash-for-work projects were often 

implemented with minimal consultation and tackled simple, low-skill projects, 

enabling implementing partners to get in and out of an area quickly. Because cashfor-work projects were often focused on the least secure parts of the country, they 

were more closely coordinated with ISAF clearing operations than other types 

of programming. At the beginning of the program, CDP even operated prior to or 

during clearing operations, and, starting in 2009, LGCD did the same.280

In addition, cash-for-work programs spent indiscriminately because the number 

of laborers hired and person-days of employment were the primary measure 

of success.281 The AVIPA Plus program spent so heavily on cash-for-work 

programming in Nawa District in Helmand in 2010 that it was estimated to have 

tripled or quadrupled the local economy.282 As an unintended consequence, 

these programs sometimes paid such high daily wages that teachers quit their 

jobs because their government salaries could not compete with those offered 

through stabilization programs.283

Afghans work on a road construction project in Spin Zurat village, Dand District, Kandahar Province, on 

June 22, 2010. (U.S. Air Force photo by Technical Sgt. Joselito Aribuabo)
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 47

Civ-Mil Tensions

Among the 17,000 additional troops approved by President Obama in February 

2009 was a brigade of Marines that began clearing Taliban-controlled territory 

in July of that year, allowing a test case for stabilization in districts like Nawa in 

central Helmand.284 In Nawa and other pilot districts, it became clear to civilian 

officials that the military would be in the lead, both in recognition of the war’s 

heavy emphasis on physical security and the complete civilian reliance on the 

military for life support, including food, housing, transportation, and protection. 

Therefore, across the KTDs, the military chose which areas to clear and worked 

with their civilian counterparts to plan and execute the holding and building 

of those areas.285 At the operational level, it took time for the military to begin 

incorporating State and USAID into the clear-hold-build planning process and, to 

some practitioners, the consultations seemed superficial.286

In addition, while the KTDs were diverse, the fact that the most insecure areas 

of the country were prioritized for the intensive resources of clear-hold-build 

had significant implications for civ-mil cooperation. In a 2009 letter to his staff, 

Ambassador Eikenberry confirmed this dynamic, stating the State Department 

would take the lead in Kabul, but would follow the military’s lead at the 

provincial and district levels.287 In practice, the strategy of rapid stabilization 

in KTDs forced USAID to lower the level of security it had previously required 

before it would initiate projects in an area.288

There was often significant tension between USAID and the military over 

USAID’s reluctance or inability to work in the most contested and insecure 

districts—the same areas the military believed to be the most important to 

reversing the Taliban’s momentum.289 The military would often claim a district 

was cleared and thus ready for USAID to start stabilization programming. Yet 

“clear” meant something very different to the expeditionary military than it did 

to the Afghan contractors tasked with, for example, paving a road in an insecure 

area. According to a senior USAID official, when it came to programming, 

“soldiers defined ‘secure enough’ on behalf of the community.”290

Some senior USAID officials said ISAF bulldozed the agency into going along 

with clear-hold-build and demanded that it implement cash-for-work programs 

on a large scale despite USAID’s protest, while other officials said ISAF only 

needed to cite President Obama’s words and ask USAID, “How else are we 

going to do this if not quickly and in the most dangerous areas?”291

 Few at State 

or USAID in country felt they had the ability to push back.292 The dynamic was 

very unequal, in that even when a disagreement involved a military officer and 

a civilian who were theoretically of the same rank, the military representative 

often had the upper hand because of the overwhelming difference in size 

between the military and civilian contingents.293 U.S. PRTs, for example, 
48 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

typically had one to three civilians and 80 to 100 military members.294 It was 

also difficult to argue against the belief that stabilization projects would buy the 

support of the population, convince them to share information about IEDs, and 

thus save coalition lives.295 “The military expected us to be bags of cash,” said 

one USAID official.296 British civilians experienced similar tensions with their 

military in Helmand over the military’s expectation that civilian programming 

would follow behind front line troops and immediately begin highly visible 

infrastructure projects, regardless of security conditions, which often reduced 

project effectiveness.297

“The military expected us to be bags of cash.”

—USAID official

Prior to the surge, USAID advisors were often able to exercise veto power about 

where and how military commanders used CERP funds. Later, USAID’s influence 

over CERP expenditures was significantly diminished, and the military leveraged 

CERP to pressure USAID to expand the latter’s programming.298 As one official 

noted, when USAID tried to stop implementing projects in areas where they 

could not be monitored or evaluated, the military set aside the civ-mil model 

and used CERP unilaterally to fill the void.299 The military was also able to put 

pressure on reluctant USAID officials and implementing partners to increase 

spending and expand other stabilization programs into new areas by pointing 

to the flexibility of AVIPA and complaining to their superiors in Kabul.300

Their relationship was at times so fraught that influential civilian advisors 

to the military were asking whether civilian agencies should be involved in 

stabilization programming at all.301 As one senior USAID official observed:

We had to get in line. The military was in charge. We were always chasing 

the dragon—always behind, never good enough in the military’s eyes. Then 

ambassadors were yelling at USAID because they were receiving complaints 

from General Petraeus or the battle space owner that USAID was not being 

cooperative. It was the battle space owner who told us to move to another 

location, and if we didn’t, word got to the ambassador, who yelled at the 

[USAID] Mission Director, who yelled at me.302

As a result of this inability to push back, all types of stabilization programming 

were often implemented during all stages of clear-hold-build. This occurred 

even when USAID knew the sequencing was inappropriate and programs 

would be ineffective.303 Under pressure from the military, USAID built schools 

in inappropriate places where they could not be monitored, the government 

could not maintain and staff them, and students attended only sporadically 

(if at all) due to insecurity.304 CERP likewise concentrated its larger projects 

on less secure areas, where they were less likely to succeed.305 Because the 

military determined where programs were implemented, USAID sometimes 

did not even develop guidelines for establishing when an area was too insecure 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 49

to accomplish anything. A USAID stabilization contractor recalled that the 

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative “formally articulated ‘entry criteria’ for 

initiating programming in a district and ‘exit criteria’ for when stability was 

achieved (that it never used), but it had no ‘exit criteria’ for when a district 

became too dangerous to effectively work in.”306

ASOP in Service of VSO

The military directed the work of USAID’s Afghanistan 

Social Outreach Program (ASOP) and determined 

the program’s district priorities, even more directly 

than it did other stabilization programs. ASOP was 

designed to help the Afghan government create 

district councils to “strengthen” security and peace, 

as well as “revive” traditional governance practices 

and cooperation between communities and 

government.307 Yet starting in 2010, U.S. Special 

Forces instructed ASOP which districts to include, 

based on the districts the military had already 

selected for its own program, Village Stability 

Operations (VSO), compelling ASOP to operate in 

some of the most remote and dangerous parts of 

the country.308

ASOP-created councils were tasked with endorsing the creation of VSO’s Afghan Local Police (ALP) units, 

nominating participants, vetting their senior commanders, and providing oversight to the units.309 Toward the end 

of the program, creating new ASOP councils explicitly to support VSO/ALP sites required the program to forego 

opportunities to work in safer areas, where the chances of success were higher.310

In fact, ASOP worked in areas that were often so remote and insecure that Special Forces teams had to provide 

helicopter transport to enable the implementing partners to access them. As the program grew, the teams were 

unable to provide transport to all of these difficult-to-reach areas, and ASOP had to scale back its activities in 

response to limited access.311

Inaccessibility of Key Terrain Districts

Implementing partners faced significant movement constraints because of 

insecurity.312 As a result, they came to rely heavily on private security companies 

(PSC), in the same way that the military relied on these companies for base 

protection.313 Many of these PSCs contributed to instability through ties to 

predatory power brokers and payments to antigovernment elements to buy safe 

passage through contested areas.314

 They have also been accused of staging 

attacks on their own convoys to justify the continued need for their services.315

Similarly, the civilian surge was almost entirely reliant on the military for 

logistical support, and supporting civilian stabilization programming was 

Local district council members of the Afghan Social Outreach 

Program pose for a photograph with ASOP trainers at the Oshay 

School, Shahid-e Hassas District, Uruzgan Province, on April 25, 

2011. (DOD photo)
50 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

frequently a lower priority for military forces than targeting insurgents. The 

resulting limitations on civilian movement significantly impeded their ability to 

meet with their Afghan government counterparts and to monitor the work of 

their implementing partners.316

The highly insecure nature of some of the areas in which stabilization program 

personnel worked also led to other problems. USAID’s Office of the Inspector 

General documented an instance in which a local LGCD program subcontractor 

inflated projected costs by up to 20 percent, obfuscated its intent by attributing 

the expense to “mobilization costs,” and then used these funds to pay insurgents 

not to attack the project sites.317

CIVILIAN PERSONNEL ISSUES

In contrast to DOD, the two agencies that provided the majority of personnel 

for the civilian surge, State and USAID, did not have built-in staff redundancy 

to enable rapid mobilization to the field.318 To meet the demands of the civilian 

surge, the two agencies pulled staff from other assignments and hired outside 

staff through congressionally approved temporary hiring authorities.319 According 

to State, the number of civilian personnel under the embassy’s control more than 

tripled from 320 to 1,142 civilians between January 2009 and December 2011.320 By 

2011, more than 20 percent of all USAID worldwide staff were in Afghanistan.321

“At the height of the civilian surge, our existing numbers 

were so limited we were forced to bring on roughly 250–350 people 

per year to do the work of USAID across Afghanistan, many 

with little to no practical USAID experience.”

—USAID official

Moreover, the staff hired under these temporary hiring authorities had varied 

levels of experience.322

 A USAID official told SIGAR, “At the height of the civilian 

surge, our existing numbers were so limited we were forced to bring on roughly 

250–350 people per year to do the work of USAID across Afghanistan, many with 

little to no practical USAID experience.”323 One of those temporary stabilization 

hires agreed that USAID was desperate for personnel, noting, “I got this job 

because I had a pulse and a master’s degree.”324 By 2011, the demand for 

personnel had so exceeded the supply, State and USAID were unable to hire 

enough people to fill all of the civilian personnel slots identified by ISAF.325

Limited Influence of Field Staff

State and USAID’s temporary hires were concentrated at the District Support 

Team level.326 Even the temporary hires who had significant experience in 
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MAY 2018 | 51

development often had little to no experience working within the bureaucracy 

of the U.S. government.327 Because they lacked both an understanding of how to 

work the system and key connections in positions of power, they were unable 

to influence U.S. policy on, for example, whether stabilization priorities and 

programming needed to be changed to reflect realities on the ground.328

The feedback loop from field staff to policymakers in Kabul and Washington was 

also weak for other reasons. For example, the manner in which the bureaucracy 

was focused in and on matters in Kabul is demonstrated by the fact that civilians 

in Kabul significantly outnumbered those in the field.329

 According to a report by 

the Center for American Progress, even State and USAID direct hires, seasoned 

in the art of bureaucracy, reported that their opportunities to provide feedback 

were limited and the feedback they did offer seemed to fall on deaf ears in 

Kabul.330 The fact that voices from the field rarely influenced policies formulated 

in Kabul undermined the achievement of the coalition’s policy objectives.331 As 

a result, the ostensibly bottom-up stabilization strategy had few voices at the 

bottom pushing best practices up to the national level to be disseminated. 

“Only halfway into my tour did I know the lay of the land 

and what projects were going on where.”

—USAID stabilization official

The temporary hiring mechanisms did have the advantage, however, that staff 

were not limited to the one-year tours typical of Foreign Service officers, and 

thus temporary hires tended to remain in country for longer periods of time.332

This advantage was significant, as the short tour length of both civilian and 

military personnel undermined the counterinsurgency effort through the loss 

of critical understanding of local power dynamics. Short-term, high-pressure 

tours also actively disincentivized personnel to learn and change so that they 

could adjust programming to more adequately tackle the complex context 

and long-term problems they were faced with.333 There was an overwhelming 

consensus among civilian personnel that one-year tours were insufficient.334

In areas flooded with programming, it often took months for new personnel 

to understand all of the activity in their area of operations. National-level 

programming run from Kabul was particularly challenging to track.335 One 

USAID stabilization official admitted, “Only halfway into my tour did I know 

the lay of the land and what projects were going on where.”336

Program Oversight was Limited

The relative lack of experience of many temporary staff also reduced the 

oversight capabilities of stabilization programs. The authority to oversee 

programming required training and certification to ensure taxpayer dollars 
52 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

were not wasted or misallocated, yet few of those working at the PRT or 

DST level had such authority. Therefore, many temporary hires were reduced 

to making recommendations and writing reports for the decision makers 

in Kabul, who were quite removed from the action. At one point, USAID’s 

Regional Representatives—the agency’s most senior civilian officials at each 

regional command—had no oversight authority over programs in their area of 

operations.337 USAID Contracting Officer’s Representatives (COR), the officials 

responsible for providing direction and oversight to implementing partners, 

as well as other officials with authority to approve expenditures, were often 

based in Kabul, which meant every spending decision had to go through the 

capital. Beginning as early as 2009, there was a push at USAID to delegate COR 

authority to the regional platform level, but this delegation and decentralization 

of authority was not properly addressed until the Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

programs during the post-surge period of 2012–2017.338

There also were just not enough personnel dedicated to contract oversight 

at the USAID Afghanistan Mission. At one point, USAID’s Director of the 

Office of Acquisition and Assistance determined that, in order to meet the 

U.S. government’s average ratio of dollars to contracting officers, USAID would 

have to send nearly its entire overseas workforce to work only in Afghanistan.339

The number of contractor personnel overseen by direct-hire State and USAID 

personnel was similarly large. In 2011, there were approximately 18 contractors 

to one direct hire at State and 100 to one at USAID.340

This imbalance occurred, in part, because increasing spending levels on 

programs was politically easier than increasing the number of oversight 

personnel, especially those posted at high-risk missions like Afghanistan. In 

addition, it was not until 2011 that training in USAID’s contract management 

system and regulations was provided to all agency representatives.341 USAID 

contracts, cooperative agreements, and grants are managed through a highly 

complex regulatory regime that differs both in mechanism type and individual 

awards of the same type.342 Without this training, the thousands of temporary 

USAID employees hired without prior USAID experience did not have the tools 

to monitor projects. The legal authority to provide oversight of USAID contracts 

was not delegated to most field staff, either.343 Nor were most USAID staff 

assigned to field positions; most were in Kabul, far from where programming 

actually took place. By 2010, the USAID mission had a goal of sending just 

60 percent of its staff to the field.344

Ultimately, lacking local spending authority, oversight mechanisms, and 

awareness of national-level programming often meant that the main role of 

many civilians in the field was to advise the military, which in turn dictated 

civilian staffing patterns.345 Because the military was organized into regional 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 53

commands, its civilian counterparts were organized the same way through the 

civilian regional platforms, and senior civilian leadership was concentrated at 

this level.346

 Although the military regional commands and the civilian regional 

platforms were theoretically co-equal, in reality there was a striking disparity in 

terms of resources and power in favor of the military commands, often causing 

the senior civilian representatives to defer to their military counterparts.347

In turn, because civilian PRT officials who mentored provincial government 

officials were outranked and often overruled by their bosses at the regional 

level who deferred to military priorities, this organizational structure and the 

relationships that drove it undermined civilian considerations.348 For example, 

the Afghan government had no equivalent to the regional headquarters level. As 

a result, by concentrating so much power over provincial affairs at the militarycentric regional level, capacity building of civilian institutions at the provincial 

level—where attention and capacity was most needed—was undermined 

and unsustainable. 

USAID Viewed Stabilization as a Distraction

Stabilization’s personnel issues extended to operations in Kabul, as well. There 

were significant cultural, physical, and intellectual gaps between stabilization 

efforts and those of USAID’s other more traditional portfolios, leaving the 

USAID Stabilization Unit poorly integrated into the USAID mission. In fact, there 

was a perception by some within the mission that stabilization was a distraction 

from USAID’s true priority of creating regional economic growth through the 

construction of the Ring Road and development of major economic centers. 

According to a senior USAID official, “USAID had to be dragged kicking and 

screaming into COIN because it saw development as its mission.”349

“USAID had to be dragged kicking and screaming into COIN 

because it saw development as its mission.”

—Senior USAID official

Subsequently, as the military’s plan to wind down its physical presence in the PRTs 

and DSTs was implemented, the USAID mission perceived its role in stabilization as 

even less of a priority. As though to emphasize its role as an aberration, Stab-U was 

physically housed adjacent to the rest of the USAID mission in a temporary trailer 

on the embassy compound. Furthermore, given its poorly integrated role in the 

USAID mission, the stabilization effort in Kabul was often resourced accordingly. 

Unlike the mission’s other sections, Stab-U was staffed almost exclusively by 

short-term hires, many of whom lacked a full understanding of USAID systems, 

which further hampered their ability to articulate and coordinate their role in the 

broader interagency development effort.350
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SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

THE CIVILIAN RESPONSE CORPS

The personnel problems seen during the surge were neither new nor unanticipated. In 2004, 

based on initial experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration recognized 

a need to improve coordination between civilian agencies and the U.S. military before, 

during, and after armed conflict, and to properly mobilize the right personnel to staff 

such “stabilization and reconstruction” (S&R) missions abroad. The White House issued 

National Security Presidential Directive 44 (NSPD 44), Management of Interagency Efforts 

Concerning Reconstruction and Stabilization, requiring State to develop “a strong civilian 

response capability including necessary surge capabilities, [and to] analyze, formulate, and 

recommend additional authorities, mechanisms, and resources needed to ensure that the 

United States has the civilian reserve and response capabilities necessary for stabilization 

and reconstruction activities to respond quickly and effectively.”351

State’s new Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization established a Civilian Response 

Corps (CRC) to mobilize “federal employees and volunteers from the private sector [and] 

state and local governments,” with an active, standby, and reserve component.352 By design, 

State would lead the interagency efforts of eight agencies, including USAID, USDA, and the 

Department of Justice.353 The active response corps would have 250 federal employees, 

spread across the eight agencies but funded by State, who were hired specifically to be 

ready to deploy in as few as two days, if asked. They would take on other assignments within 

their agency as they waited to deploy. The standby response corps would have 2000 current 

federal employees, who would have jobs spread across the eight agencies but could deploy 

within 30–45 days. The reserve response corps would have 2000 civilians from the private 

sector, as well as state and local governments, who would temporarily leave their jobs to 

deploy for S&R missions.354

Problems developed with the CRC almost immediately. According to Michael Miklaucic, who 

helped establish the corps, there was no appetite in Congress to fund the civilian reserve 

component, as it would require the same kind of legislative framework as the reserve 

component of the armed forces to ensure jobs would be available when personnel returned 

from active duty.355 After years of military reserve deployments, Congress was already under 

pressure from employers who were required to provide job protections for deployed military 

reserves. Traditionally, businesses that hired “citizen soldiers” only had to fear losing them for 

the rarest of deployments; however, the operational tempo of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars 

meant that year after year, many businesses were losing employees they could not legally 

replace. For this and other reasons, Congress refused to create another reserve corps for 

civilians, and the reserve concept was postponed indefinitely.356

The standby component faced a different set of challenges. According to a senior State 

Department official: 

The standby component assumed that the government has the slack to give for the effort, 

but where there is slack to give, those are often not the people with the skills you need. 

Those people are already doing other important work. They all had jobs that were deemed 

to be a higher priority. So we only managed to get a handful of State employees out of their 

day jobs as part of the standby.357
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 55

The active component also faced challenges. All eight agencies had their own ideas about 

what types of personnel should be in their respective active pools, often based on how they 

could use them when not deployed, rather than their suitability for S&R missions.358 State 

was ultimately unable to corral the other agencies; while NSPD 44 gave it the authority to 

oversee the other agencies on this specific endeavor, in practice the agencies had their own 

equities to protect. Out of 250 personnel in the active component, only 36 were allotted to 

S/CRS, whose active pool was best suited to the lion’s share of civilian stabilization work 

in Afghanistan, primarily on PRTs and DSTs. These 36 active members, as well as USAID’s 

contingent, had utilization rates as high as 60 percent, but with so few members of the 

overall active component suited to challenging deployments to places like Afghanistan, much 

of the rest never rose above 20 percent utilization.359

The endeavor became difficult to justify with so few active component members being 

used. After S/CRS became the Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations in 2011, 

it defunded the active component and adopted a bullpen model instead, where dozens of 

international affairs and development professionals would be available on call, but not paid 

unless deployed, and not necessarily willing to deploy if asked.360

Matthew Flynn, USAID field program officer and head of the Kandahar City stabilization cell, and other 

members of PRT Kandahar visit the Shur Andam Industrial Park in Kandahar City on June 11, 2011. 

(U.S. Air Force photo by Chief Master Sgt. Richard Simonsen)
56 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

SPENDING TOO MUCH, TOO FAST

From 2009 through 2014, USAID stabilization programming resources increased 

nearly 800 percent compared to the six years prior to 2009.361 (See figure 6.) With 

exceptional pressure to show progress over the 18–24 months of the surge, not 

only did available funding seem abundant, but because it was the only variable 

exclusively in the coalition’s control, the rate of expenditure, or “burn rate,” 

skyrocketed and became the easiest measuring stick for success.362 The lack 

of emphasis on achieved impact stemmed, in part, from the assumption that 

the greater the expenditure of money, the more coalition lives were saved from 

enemy attacks.363 According to a USAID stabilization official, “No one talked about 

sustainable development because we knew the mission. In this environment, 

there was no motive to question a project’s viability.”364 A senior USAID official in 

RC-South told SIGAR there was also an implicit belief that greater expenditures 

could somehow speed up the slow and messy process of stabilization to fit the 

compressed timeframe.365 According to another senior USAID official, “The 

military asked USAID to spend money faster than USAID could get it, so when you 

got your money, you spent it and immediately asked for more.”366

“No one talked about sustainable development because we 

knew the mission. In this environment, there was no motive 

to question a project’s viability.”

—USAID stabilization official

0

200

400

600

800

1,000

1,200

1,400

1,600

1,800

$2,000

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 *

Total USAID Expenditures USAID Stabilization Expenditures

5.82

64.30 63.25

1,429.33

1,629.41

1,836.63

808.00

992.03

1,938.30

1,740.53

970.04

1,163.72

967.09

USAID IN AFGHANISTAN: TOTAL EXPENDITURES VS. STABILIZATION EXPENDITURES, 2002–2017 ($ MILLIONS)

2.02 6.58 53.73 44.71 43.18

395.10

83.33 121.30 163.17 165.96

18.74

824.98

9.82

493.31

664.88

133.75

Note: *USAID did not disburse any funds for stabilization in 2002.

According to USAID, historical funding levels may not be comprehensive prior to 2006. For example, the Afghanistan Transition Initiative ran from 2002 to 2005, but USAID reporting does not 

include any disbursements for ATI until 2003. USAID spent nearly $2.4 billion on stabilization programs in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2017, $1.5 billion of which was spent between 

2009–2011.

Source: SIGAR analysis of USAID response to SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018.

1,116.05

1,047.89

FIGURE 6
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 57

USAID’s spending far outpaced the capacity of its personnel tasked with 

managing programming under what were extremely challenging conditions for 

oversight. As a result, U.S. spending fueled corruption and resulted in power 

brokers exporting excess funds to Dubai and beyond.367

 The USAID/Afghanistan 

Mission’s total proposed 2010 budget, almost $4 billion, was the largest in 

agency history.368 According to one senior USAID official, the budget for each of 

the four SIKA programs, which were under development at the time, was larger 

than most USAID mission budgets around the world.369 Yet, ever more funds 

were thought to yield more results. When USAID briefed SRAP Holbrooke on its 

plans to spend a staggering $150 million on AVIPA in Kandahar and Helmand in 

a single year, he instructed them to “double it.”370 As a result, AVIPA’s budget was 

dramatically expanded, from $150 million to $300 million, over objections from 

USAID leadership, who argued that such large sums would prove ineffective 

and wasteful.371

“The Hill was always asking, ‘Did you spend the money? 

What’s your burn rate?’ I didn’t hear many questions 

about what the effects were.”

—USAID official

Despite the Riedel review’s claim that “assistance will be limited without the 

achievement of results,” the urgency to show quick results on such a compressed 

timeline led to unrestricted and often unaccountable spending.372 As a USAID 

official explained, “The Hill was always asking, ‘Did you spend the money? What’s 

your burn rate?’ I didn’t hear many questions about what the effects were.”373

Afghan contractors unload bags of fertilizer at the Nawa District government building compound in Helmand 

Province on October 13, 2009. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Jeremy Harris)
58 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Money changed the culture of governing in Afghanistan, particularly in the 

south. Money became the primary method for influencing local government 

officials and processes, and only certain groups had access.374

 As one senior 

USAID official noted: 

We had no legitimacy if we weren’t flooding the area with cash. How can you 

get the attention of a district governor in Arghandab if you’re not spending 

money like everyone else is? Why would he care about a $5,000 training or 

shura process when he’s trying to negotiate a huge infrastructure project or 

cash-for-work for hundreds of his people?375

Because the primary goals of stabilization programming were to reduce 

insecurity and improve support for the government (rather than to build schools 

or retaining walls), process was more important than product.376 The degree 

to which implementing partners substantively engaged communities and local 

leaders in project identification and execution was one key determinant of 

whether they achieved their desired outcomes of increasing trust between 

communities and their government, and addressing sources of instability.377

The process of project implementation, and securing popular participation and 

ownership, was critical to its success.378

Process-focused community engagement was, by its very nature, slow. Yet, 

USAID was expected to implement stabilization projects in weeks, making it 

impossible for them to spend time on lengthy consultative processes, such as 

those that formed the backbone of the influential National Solidarity Program 

(NSP).379 For perspective, NSP’s ideal timeline was approximately two to 

two and one-half years from the implementing partner’s first contact with the 

community to the completion of one project.380

LOCAL GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS: TOO FEW AND TOO UNQUALIFIED

After COIN and stabilization were piloted in Helmand’s Nawa District, a 

handful of key terrain districts in Helmand and Kandahar became central to the 

coalition’s effort to prove the merits of population-centric counterinsurgency 

and the stabilization model nested within the clear-hold-build cycle.381 The 

highest-profile example was the campaign for Marjah, which was a sub-district 

of Nad Ali in Helmand in 2009.382

 (See figure 7.)

The campaign began in February 2010, when the coalition attempted to install 

a “government-in-a-box” after clearing the area.383 The Taliban had controlled 

Marjah for so long that the sub-district had seen little formal government 

in years.384 From the coalition’s perspective, it needed exactly the kind of 

improvements in service delivery that stabilization programming was meant to 

provide. In theory, these services would convince the population of the merits of 

formal government and help repel the Taliban if they tried to return. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 59

The military’s expectation that government would be set up as soon as an area 

was cleared proved to be unrealistic, despite the fact that this was precisely 

what had been outlined in clear-hold-build strategy.385 In descriptions of the 

Marjah operation, General McChrystal reportedly envisioned an enormous team 

of Afghans showing up as soon as the shooting was over to set up a variety of 

institutions, including schools and a hospital complete with adequate supplies 

and trained personnel.386

In reality, however, the Afghan government’s contribution to the operation 

in Marjah was minimal; despite six months of planning, the Independent 

Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG) only sent one official, an ex-convict, to 

serve as district governor.387 More generally, a lack of experience and knowledge 

was a problem. According to a former USAID official, “Some of these local 

FIGURE 7
60 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

officials didn’t even know how their own government’s budget worked.”388

Facing a dearth of Afghan civil servants—both in Marjah and elsewhere—State 

and USAID officials who were supposed to “advise” those civil servants, and 

the Civil Affairs officers they worked with, were often compelled to essentially 

administer district governments themselves.389 One senior USAID official was 

given the impression by a superior senior civilian official that “if Afghans don’t 

show up, then Americans will show up.”390

“Some of these local officials didn’t even know how 

their own government’s budget worked.”

—Former USAID official

District Delivery Program

Marjah publicly demonstrated that the Afghan government was either unwilling 

or unable to support the stabilization effort by standing up competent 

government officials in the areas deemed vital to success. By early 2010, it had 

become clear to Ambassador Eikenberry that President Karzai did not believe 

in counterinsurgency and would obstruct assistance that flowed from Kabul 

to the districts. Therefore, Eikenberry reasoned, the only way to work at the 

subnational level was to steer money and programming directly to that level.391

Another reason USAID chose to focus at the district level was that the agency 

believed its role was technocratic and sought to avoid political entanglements.392

According to a senior USAID official, “Once you got to the provincial level, 

things got too political because of ties to Kabul, so we worked at the district 

Marjah District Governor Haji Zahir speaks to elders gathered in the Shorshorak area of Marjah on January 8, 

2010, shortly before the U.S. Marines push into the district in Helmand Province. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 61

level.”393 Thus, the intent was to influence service delivery at the end of the 

chain, in a place the coalition could reasonably have an influence, rather than 

further up the chain where service delivery was historically log-jammed or 

obstructed, and where reform was far more difficult. 

In order to address the dearth of Afghan government officials in the districts, 

USAID and IDLG developed the District Delivery Program (DDP), which was 

designed to fund and help IDLG recruit, train, and deploy hundreds of officials to 

key terrain districts. DDP was regarded as the stabilization program that would 

properly enable all other stabilization programs by staffing districts with officials 

who could sustain stabilization, and service delivery more generally.394 The 

program was intended to ensure Afghans would have access to local officials and 

come to appreciate the services legitimate government could provide.395

Stabilization vs. Governance

While programs like DDP and ASOP were technically USAID governance programs, they 

were also very much stabilization programs, focused on addressing insecurity in priority 

areas. In order to stabilize, communities implicitly needed governance structures with 

which they could connect, thereby extending the government’s reach.396

A series of cables from U.S. Embassy Kabul revealed the extent and seriousness 

of violence against Afghan civil servants. According to a 2009 cable, Afghan 

officials took great risks by working in areas that were actively contested by 

the insurgency. Even high troop concentrations were not sufficient to protect 

government officials from assassination, as demonstrated by killings of officials 

in central Kandahar and Helmand.397 The Taliban recognized that government 

officials, local leaders, and implementing partners’ local staff were key to the 

counterinsurgency strategy and ramped up their assassination campaign against 

these “soft” targets in 2010, killing an average of one Afghan official every day, 

according to one account.398 Local power brokers also seized the opportunity to 

kill their rivals under the cover of the chaos of the war and the pervasiveness of 

the assassination campaign.399

The Taliban recognized that government officials, local leaders, 

and implementing partners’ local staff were key to the 

counterinsurgency strategy and ramped up their assassination 

campaign against these “soft” targets in 2010, killing an 

average of one Afghan official every day.

The assassination campaign made recruiting and retaining officials to work 

for local governments in these districts exceptionally difficult. A 2010 cable, 
62 | STABILIZATION RAMPS UP FOR THE SURGE (2009–2012)

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

recently declassified at SIGAR’s request, demonstrates the degree of difficulty 

DDP faced in identifying Afghan officials who were both capable and willing to 

work in some of the most dangerous areas of the country, like Marjah, where 

DDP was piloted.400 According to Dr. Sibghatullah, the director of DDP:

After several Kandahar districts were cleared in the summer of 2010, the 

civil service announced more than 100 new positions spread across district 

governments in Panjwayi, Arghandab, Daman, and Zhari. We received only 

18 applications. Then the civil service tried job fairs, which helped get 

people in, but only after we lowered standards even further and dropped 

the requirement that district governors had to have bachelor’s degrees. We 

also had to drop informal requirements and ended up with district governors 

who were not from [anti-Soviet] mujahedeen groups or not local, and both 

presented problems for legitimacy and credibility.401

Furthermore, for the civil servants who were hired, the assassinations had 

a chilling effect on their willingness to show up to work, particularly those 

whose assignment to a district office required them to leave the safety of highly 

guarded provincial capitals.402 As Barna Karimi, the Deputy Minister of IDLG 

during the surge, recounted:

When I had disagreements with the Americans about Helmand, it was 

because before going to stabilize a district close to Lashkar Gah, for example, 

Nawa, they used to go to a further district like Garmsir and start operations 

there. After the military operation in Garmsir was finished, they started 

shouting, ‘We cleared Garmsir so come here and establish the government 

administration.’ I used to tell them that I am not coming, because I cannot 

travel there by the road. ‘You are going there by helicopters,’ I would say. ‘I 

cannot take all my staff there by plane. How is my clerk able to go through 

Nawa to get there? He will be kidnapped on his way in Nawa. How are you 

going to prevent this?’403

An area deemed relatively permissive by the military, with its heavily armed 

convoys and vehicles designed to withstand IEDs, presented a very different 

risk to Afghan government officials and informal leaders, who relied on civilian 

vehicles and did not live on heavily guarded bases.404 As a result, the coalition 

often provided transportation and security for these officials, without which 

they would not have been able to access many parts of their territories. This 

limited their interactions with their constituents and highlighted the coalition’s 

role in propping up the Afghan government.405 The fact that many of the districts 

prioritized for DDP were too insecure to properly host Afghan government 

officials suggested that these areas were not yet ripe for stabilization efforts, in 

general. It also called into question the sustainability of focusing on these areas, 

as Afghan leaders were unlikely to be able to reach these populations after the 

surge ended and coalition troops withdrew. 

Despite DDP’s hiring challenges and security constraints, pressure to make fast 

progress meant USAID and IDLG moved on from one district to another before 

the first was properly staffed. As with so many other stabilization programs, 

the pressure to produce resulted in an emphasis on numbers rather than 

programming effectiveness: in this case, the number of district offices staffed, 
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rather than whether these new staff were effective and services were improving 

as a result.406 There was a perception that the quicker the local government 

positions were filled, the fewer coalition forces would be killed, a rationale that 

was used to push the program to grow too quickly.407

While DDP faced a number of problems, it included far more coordination and 

cooperation with the Afghan government than other stabilization programs, 

which often operated without meaningful government collaboration. Governors 

reported that filling vacant civil service positions contributed directly to 

security in their districts and that the numbers of people visiting district centers 

increased in DDP districts.408

ISAF WAS OFTEN A SOURCE OF INSTABILITY

Uneven Adoption of Counterinsurgency

COIN was a significant departure for military forces accustomed to prioritizing 

the enemy’s destruction, rather than protecting the population. As a result, the 

impact of stabilization programming was frequently nullified by the heavy hand 

of some military units that refused to see the population as the prize. 

While the Marines were making progress clearing and holding less populous 

terrain in Helmand, a U.S. Army Stryker brigade was sent to clear and hold the 

much more densely inhabited outskirts of Kandahar City as part of President 

Obama’s March 2009 surge.409 While some parts of the brigade implemented 

governance initiatives and collaborated with USAID stabilization programs, the 

Stryker brigade’s aggressive approach made it difficult to win hearts and minds 

even when the fighting stopped, which it seldom did.410 The unit’s actions were 

generally so counterproductive that its members were reportedly removed from 

all sensitive responsibilities, including interacting with Afghans, and instead 

tasked with security on the Ring Road.411

 As a result, according to one account, 

it wasn’t until the brigade left in summer 2010 that proper COIN operations 

began in Kandahar.412

Across the country, the variable degree to which each unit subscribed to 

and implemented COIN, in combination with one-year tours, meant that any 

headway a unit made could be and often was erased if its successor had a more 

aggressive approach.413

Creating Enemies

The ISAF effort was itself a major source of instability in Afghanistan for a 

number of reasons. First, the degree to which ISAF and its Afghan government 

partners created “winners” and “losers” fundamentally reworked the power 
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SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

structures and political economy of many parts of the country.414 The elite 

capture of relationships with, and aid and contracts from, the coalition created 

new grievances and exacerbated old ones as some tribes and other groups 

benefited from the war, while others were alienated and driven toward the 

insurgency.415 Access to the coalition was a key avenue, in many ways the avenue, 

for consolidating wealth and political power, so coalition officials often became 

kingmakers.416 Some of the coalition’s key partners were the same unsavory 

individuals who had been previously swept out of power, to widespread applause, 

by the Taliban.417 These “winners” not only reaped economic benefits and ran 

the government for personal gain, but many also committed major crimes with 

impunity, including murder, creating a kind of mafia rule.418

Second, pervasive corruption, driven by the flood of money from coalition 

contracts and assistance, reinforced patronage systems through which the 

Afghan government served elites at the expense of other citizens. By fueling 

corruption and the population’s disillusionment with its government, the coalition 

undermined the very government it sought to legitimize and drove support for 

the insurgency.419 A wide variety of studies surveyed by the Empirical Studies 

of Conflict (ESOC) project found corruption was a key—and often the most 

important—issue undermining support for the Afghan government and driving 

support for insurgents.420 The coalition’s inattentiveness to the destabilizing 

ramifications of its interventions and massive inflows of money “turned lowgrade corruption into high-stakes corruption” and escalated grievances about 

elite capture of government to a new level.421 Further, corruption was not seen 

as a strategic threat to the stabilization effort; instead, it was seen as a problem 

specific to individual Afghan officials.422 By failing to acknowledge and understand 

Political economy is 

the underlying political 

context within which 

reform processes 

supported by donors, 

including through 

stabilization programs, 

are conducted. 

Political economy 

analysis (PEA) seeks to 

determine how power 

is used to manage 

resources and how 

political will enables 

or undermines reform. 

PEA arose out of 

the realization that 

technically focused 

efforts to effect change 

have often failed in 

the absence of an 

understanding of 

competing interests 

opposed to the 

proposed change.

Elite capture is 

the usurpation—

by economic and 

political elites—of 

resources meant for 

the population.

U.S. soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade destroy an abandoned compound near Highway 1 in Hutal, Maiwand 

District, Kandahar Province on February 18, 2010. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Dayton Mitchell)
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MAY 2018 | 65

the wide-ranging impact of corruption and its own role in it, the coalition may 

have won a series of pyrrhic victories, as decisions made in the pursuit of a shortterm security agenda undermined longer-term political and governance goals.

By fueling corruption and the population’s disillusionment with 

its government, the coalition undermined the very government 

it sought to legitimize and drove support for the insurgency.

Finally, DOD and USAID reliance on private security contractors led to a 

substantial percentage of expenditures being diverted to insurgent groups.423

While there has been widespread congressional and media reporting on 

Pentagon logistics contractors who paid millions of dollars to insurgents for 

safe passage through territory they controlled, the role of USAID implementing 

partners, or their private security contractors, in paying “taxes” in exchange for 

the ability to access project sites and implement projects without facing attacks 

has been less well publicized, but equally problematic.424

CLEAR-HOLD-HOLD: STABILIZATION STALLS

By late 2010, a year after President Obama’s first surge forces had arrived in 

country, it became clear that it was taking far longer to clear, hold, and build 

key terrain districts than had been anticipated. Even where the military was 

successful in clearing and holding, the capacity of Afghan officials and security 

forces to take the baton was limited. It became increasingly evident that 

governance took far longer to build than territory took to clear.425 According to 

journalist Bob Woodward, as the White House was conducting its 2010 annual 

review of the strategy, the running joke was that ISAF was doing “clear, hold, 

hold, hold, hold, and hold.”426

As a result, revised timetables for handing security and governance off to the 

Afghans began to create significant tension between ISAF and the Obama 

administration, which was reported to have felt misled into thinking tangible 

progress could be made within 18 months.427 The timeline from “clear” to 

“transfer” was simply longer than the compressed surge timeline, especially as 

building governance required building trust, a difficult task in a country that 

had experienced 30 years of war. As one senior USAID official noted, “Even 

successful clearing operations will not be recognized by locals for six to nine 

months.”428 Civilian institutions, like a competent and legitimate civil service 

and judiciary, would take years longer to build than security took to achieve, 

and even protecting the population from insurgents and predatory government 

officials was significantly more difficult than the military, which was driving the 

strategy, expected.429
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IN WASHINGTON, A DETERMINATION TO SHOW PROGRESS 

Measuring progress in the war proved daunting, particularly in 2010, when 

the new strategy’s annual White House review made it tempting to report 

progress however and whenever the agencies could. Echoing a number of 

other senior officials who spoke off the record, one senior U.S. official in 

Washington recounted:

It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers 

trained, violence levels, and control of territory, and none of it painted an 

accurate picture. At the end of the day, there was nothing for us to latch on to 

except for number of attacks, against civilians, ANDSF, and ISAF. 

Still, metrics never had an impact on policy because the metrics were always 

manipulated for the duration of the war, especially in the 2010 review. When 

the metrics started, it was normal for everyone to depict low baselines to give 

themselves room to grow. But then the games started. We’d get the metrics 

from the agencies, compile them, prepare to brief the president on them, then 

the members of the Interagency Policy Committee would step in and edit the 

metrics to paint a more optimistic picture. Senior NSC officials would often 

try to overrule them and present the original assessment to the principals, 

but the principals would refuse to sign without their subordinates’ edits. 

Then, the principals would win and the edits would be made, and then it was 

resubmitted to the president with bells and whistles. 

But it wasn’t the data the deputies and principals tried to manipulate; it was 

their explanations. For example, attacks are getting worse? ‘That’s because 

there are more targets for the insurgents to fire at, so more attacks are a false 

indicator of instability.’ Then, three months later, attacks are still getting 

worse? ‘It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s actually an 

indicator that we’re winning.’ 

And this went on and on for two reasons: to make everyone involved look 

good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind 

of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.430

Beyond the 2010 review, the difficulty of measuring progress also had larger 

implications, which are discussed in depth in chapter 7 of this report. 

DRAWDOWN ANNOUNCED

At a NATO conference in Lisbon in November 2010, the Obama administration 

announced after months of deliberations with allies that most U.S. combat forces 

would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by December 31, 2014.431 “We went from 

an end-state to an end-date,” former ISAF commander General Allen observed 

in a SIGAR interview.432 Overnight, Embassy Kabul began pushing transition and 

filtering every decision through the prism of preparing for the drawdown. At the 

center of that effort was a shift away from district-level assistance and toward 

what the embassy determined to be the most important Afghan government 

capabilities: “effective and realistic planning and budgeting” at the national, 

provincial, and municipal levels.433 It had become clear that district capacity was 

not sustainable, particularly because even provincial governments did not have 

the capacity or authority to properly plan or manage budgets, and the drawdown 

created an opportune moment to rescope stabilization.434
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An embassy cable from late 2010 announcing the new strategy required civilian 

officials and programs to move away from merely consulting the Afghan 

government about project priorities through “wish list” exercises and toward 

actually working through existing government structures.435 In London earlier 

that year, international donors had pledged to increase to 50 percent the 

proportion of development aid provided on-budget and spent through Afghan 

government processes.436 The former director of DDP at IDLG explained how 

difficult it was to execute on-budget funding through government coffers, even 

for routine tasks, noting, “We had to get 17 different signatures from across 

IDLG, the Ministry of Finance, and the finance office in the province each time 

we needed to do simple things, like purchase equipment for a district or make 

a personnel change.”437

 Aware that civilian assistance would begin tapering off 

immediately, State and USAID began laying the groundwork for helping the 

Afghan government make do with far less civilian support than they had in the 

recent past by focusing more on capacity building and budget reform.438

At the same time, USAID recognized that the work stabilization had intended to 

accomplish had only just begun. The agency was starting to address a number 

of systemic problems with stabilization programming and outlined them in the 

“Administrator’s Stabilization Guidance” of January 2011. This document sought 

to strategically focus what had been undisciplined spending over the previous 

two years, calling for (1) connecting interventions to sources of instability; 

(2) creating enduring ink spots, rather than moving prematurely from place to 

place; and (3) connecting stabilization to long-term development in preparation 

for the end of the surge.439

Only six months later, in June 2011, USAID issued its “Administrator’s Sustainability 

Guidance” in recognition of the coalition-wide reorientation to drawing down 

and the need to leave behind a government that could sustain itself. In addition to 

emphasizing the importance of achieving “basic levels of security and stability,” this 

new guidance talked more explicitly about “assisting the Afghan people to build 

more capable, inclusive, and pluralistic governance and society” and “enabling 

sustainable economic growth and human development,” hallmarks of long-term 

development and departures from the civ-mil integration of stabilization.440

In June 2011, President Obama announced that all surge troops would be 

withdrawn by the summer of 2012, the same troops that had enabled DOD and 

USAID to deliver stabilization programming in many of Afghanistan’s key terrain 

districts.441 Thus, the withdrawal effectively ended the coalition’s ability to 

conduct intensive, bottom-up stabilization in Afghanistan’s periphery. The next 

day, Secretary Clinton confirmed that the civilian surge had reached its apex and 

that the U.S. government would “shift . . . efforts from short-term stabilization 

projects to longer-term sustainable development.”442

Ink spots refer to 

a concept in COIN 

theory that says the 

best way to stabilize a 

large area is to focus 

on a strategically 

located portion of it, 

stabilize that smaller 

area with military and 

civilian resources, 

and gradually expand 

that ink spot into 

neighboring areas, as 

conditions permit.

MAY 2018 | 69

USAID photo

CHAPTER 5

FROM STABILIZATION TO TRANSITION 

(2012–2017)

When transition was announced, USAID’s stabilization budget in Kabul was 

slashed as the agency began its slow return to long-term development.443

While USAID Afghanistan’s stabilization budget had been slated for nearly a 

50 percent increase between 2010 and 2011, USAID informed the mission in 

October 2010 that the budget for many portfolios, including stabilization, would 

soon be slashed by at least 65 percent. Thus, between FY 2010 and FY 2011, 

USAID’s stabilization budget in Afghanistan was reduced from $720 million to 

$256 million, a cut totaling nearly as much as the entire FY 2010 Stab-U budget 

of $490 million.444

In practice, however, there was so much stabilization programming in the 

pipeline that it took several years to dry up, even though, according to a senior 

USAID official, stabilization had become a “dirty word” at the agency, associated 

with excessive and ineffective spending at the military’s behest.445 Concurrently, 

State stopped emphasizing stabilization’s counterpart, reconstruction, in 2010. 

A senior State official explained that there was no appetite for future large-scale 

reconstruction missions like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and “we could find 

no empirical reason to believe they would work well elsewhere.”446
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SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

This shift in terminology translated into a shift from the coalition delivering 

services directly to trying to build the capacity of Afghan government ministries 

and provincial administrations so they could do so. According to one civilian 

official, “We finally started to get it right toward the end: focusing on budgeting, 

linking the Afghan government to do its own projects as the drawdown 

approached.”447 This shift was enshrined in the March 2012 “Civil-Military 

Strategic Framework,” which stated, “The goal is for [the Afghan government] to 

use its own programs and institutions to provide essential services to the Afghan 

people.”448 A similar shift occurred in counterinsurgency doctrine between 

the release of FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, in 2006 and the release of Joint 

Publication (JP) 3-24, Counterinsurgency, in November 2013. JP 3-24 added 

guidance that governance and service delivery capacity must align with local 

expectations, warning against attempts to institute Western-style government.449

Likewise, the embassy’s February 2011 governance strategy emphasized 

building Afghan capacity for budget execution and public financial management 

through on-budget funding and a focus on the ministerial, provincial, and 

municipal levels.450

As State and USAID were beginning to draw down in 2012, many officials at 

the embassy were surprised to find a handful of large and costly stabilization 

programs just ramping up, including Stability in Key Areas.451 The Community 

Cohesion Initiative (CCI) and the Kandahar Food Zone (KFZ) were launched in 

2012 and 2013, respectively.452 The design of these new stabilization programs 

marked a shift, albeit incomplete, from trying to make the Afghan government 

seem more “visible, effective, and honest,” to actually working to increase 

its capacity.453

The design of these new stabilization programs marked 

a shift, albeit incomplete, from trying to make the Afghan 

government seem more “visible, effective, and honest,” 

to actually working to increase its capacity.

The four SIKA programs, whose delays in coming on line had frustrated the 

military, finally started throughout the winter of 2011 and spring of 2012, up 

to a year after they had been scheduled to begin.454 The long delay meant they 

had to be reworked to de-emphasize stabilization in favor of transition.455

While LGCD, the predecessor to the SIKAs, involved the government in project 

identification in a token fashion by directing grassroots community requests 

to local government officials for their blessing, the central goal of the SIKAs 

was to build sustainable governance capacity at the district level.456 The four 

SIKAs each covered a different geographic area and worked through different 

types of community and district-level bodies, but all four programs had a 
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common goal of creating inclusive, Afghan-led project identification and 

prioritization processes.457

RESCOPING STABILIZATION AS SUBNATIONAL GOVERNANCE

During this transition period, State and USAID attempted to overhaul 

stabilization by making it more effective and targeted, tailored to a transition 

context, and responsive to previously identified problems. In some cases, new 

problems emerged and old ones proved resilient. Whereas agencies had trouble 

working together during the surge, during transition they sometimes worked 

explicitly at cross-purposes. 

Whereas U.S. agencies had trouble working together 

during the surge, during transition they sometimes 

worked explicitly at cross-purposes.

The overhaul began with a re-imagining of stabilization when USAID and its 

Stab-U changed the definition of stability to be equivalent to effective subnational 

governance. In 2010, the District Stability Framework defined stability as “a 

reduction in the means and motivations for violent conflict, increased capacity 

to resist sudden change or deterioration, and socioeconomic predictability.”458

By June 2013, the Stab-U Performance Management Plan changed the definition 

to “the prevailing belief in and support for the decisions and actions of local 

leaders and government that affect the lives of people in a given community.”459

Notably, Stab-U’s definition focused on local governance, contradicting the clear 

withdrawal to the ministerial and provincial levels dictated by the embassy 

and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan’s (USFOR-A) March 2012 “Civil-Military Strategic 

Framework” and the embassy’s governance strategy.460 Thus, as soon as transition 

began, Stab-U programs worked against the post-2012 strategy shift toward onbudget capacity building at higher levels of government. 

Continued Focus at the District Level

Despite the new policy emphasis on working at the ministerial, provincial, and 

municipal levels, stabilization programming continued to focus on improving 

capacity at, or even below, the district level. For example, CCI continued 

to work to link communities to their governments and informal governance 

structures at the local level or sub-district level, while each of the SIKAs 

engaged through different mechanisms with Afghan interlocutors at the subdistrict, district, and provincial levels.461

Stabilization programs were designed with the assumption that government 

officials would eventually assume responsibility for delivering the services these 
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SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

programs were providing. However, under the existing Afghan government 

structure, the districts lacked even the most basic building blocks for service 

delivery, and therefore, stabilization programs were mostly building from 

scratch.462 Neither district governors nor various district councils had any 

meaningful budget or authority with which to continue constructing small-scale 

infrastructure, to maintain the infrastructure that had been built with donor 

funds, or even to pay for basic office expenses, such as firewood for heating.463

According to Barna Karimi, former Deputy Minister at IDLG, the operating 

budget of a district governor was between $15–20 per month.464

 As a result, 

providing district governments a role in directing an implementing partner’s 

service delivery increased the population’s confidence in these entities in the 

short-run, but when the money dried up, this confidence was undermined.465

As a senior stabilization contractor observed, “The district level was not the 

appropriate level for these types of interventions.”466

Even Provinces Lacked the Capabilities that 

Programs Sought to Build in Districts

The intent for districts to take over service provision was built on another 

assumption: District-level officials would be empowered to “reach up” for 

funding to provincial-level line ministry representatives, who would, in turn, 

connect to services through the ministries in Kabul. However, this assumption 

belied a fundamental lack of understanding of the Afghan budgetary process. 

In reality, not only did the districts lack the budgets or authority to deliver 

services, but this capacity and authority did not even exist at the provincial 

level, which meant stabilization programs operating at the district level often 

built a bridge to nowhere.467 Afghan budgetary priorities (even down to the 

choice of specific projects) are set at the central ministerial level, so pushing 

that authority down to the districts, or even the provinces, would necessitate a 

wholesale restructuring of the Afghan government—a longer-term project than 

the stabilization experiment allowed, if it was even possible.468

Likewise, according to a former USAID official, the main accomplishment 

of DDP, which was designed to build district-level budgeting and public 

administration capacity, was that it helped USAID understand that building 

financial capacity at the provincial level was a prerequisite to similar efforts at 

the district level.469 In fact, shortly before the program was canceled, DDP was 

in the midst of being refocused on the provincial level, the level at which the 

British in Helmand had focused their version of the program from the outset.470

Even after State and USAID recognized that targeting the district level had been 

premature, withdrawing those programs to the provincial level proved difficult. 

The coalition continued to expect stabilization programs to deliver services 

at the district level in order to produce tangible benefits to the population as 
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part of the counterinsurgency strategy. Despite the policy shift to governance, 

in practice the coalition continued to expect stabilization programs to deliver 

services and quick impact in key terrain districts. As a senior USAID official 

observed, “There was some shift toward governance and toward the provincial 

level, but the efforts at the district level were deemed essential because of the 

necessity to support military operations.”471

“There was some shift toward governance and toward the 

provincial level, but the efforts at the district level were deemed 

essential because of the necessity to support military operations.”

—Senior USAID official

Continued Focus on Key Terrain Districts

During this time, not only did the geographic focus of programming stay at 

the district level, but programs remained bound to key terrain districts, which 

meant USAID was still forced to work in insecure areas. Stabilization programs 

continued to be tied to the military’s counterinsurgency strategy and the same 

districts—many of which were actively contested—that had been prioritized by 

that strategy, rather than in safer areas where they likely could have accomplished 

more.472 According to a senior USAID official who started working in Afghanistan 

in 2012, “The military defined KTDs and where stabilization programs went. 

Programs were not necessarily determined by a development perspective, but 

rather, in large part, by military planning.”473 In an interview with SIGAR, a senior 

Afghan government official lamented that he and his colleagues had not been 

allowed to have input into district selection. He noted that their pleas that the 

SIKA program not focus exclusively on insecure areas were ignored.474

KTDs were often too insecure for stabilization programming to succeed, 

according to the USAID Mission’s own 2011–2015 Performance Management 

Plan. The plan listed six critical assumptions about stabilization activities, three 

of which were routinely violated by the way KTDs were selected during this 

period: (1) Projects would take place in “areas with sufficient security forces to 

allow for effective assessment, project implementation, and space for the public 

to appreciate the impact of projects,” (2) “legitimate governance presence is 

sufficient to engage in project delivery,” and (3) “communities and stakeholders 

are able to report safely and accurately on the conditions of stability in 

their districts.”475

The KTDs were also often too insecure according to USAID’s own program 

designs, which called for the agency to work in more secure areas, where it 

projected it would have more success.476 As both the SIKAs and CCI found, their 
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SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

plans to focus on more secure areas where their interventions had a greater 

chance of success were overruled by USAID, which remained tethered to the 

military’s KTDs, even when those districts were too insecure or contained no 

local government entities with whom to partner.477 Similarly, the Community 

Development Program was working in areas that may have been too insecure for 

success.478 The final evaluation of the program found that project locations were 

usually places where the Afghan government had little to no presence, which was 

counterproductive given the program’s focus on government engagement in 2012 

and 2013.479 As during the surge, the KTDs where stabilization programs were 

focused remained too insecure for the coalition’s Afghan government partners, as 

well. General Allen recounted to SIGAR how a proposal to insert “tiger teams” of 

Afghan entrepreneurs and government officials into recently cleared areas was 

rejected by the Afghan cabinet on the grounds that these areas were too unsafe.480

Continuing to follow the military’s geographic focus areas meant that 

programming had to mold to the military’s quickly shifting priorities. While 

improving perceptions of local governance and addressing sources of instability 

were goals that required a sustained effort, programs were expected to enter 

and exit districts and communities rapidly, as military priorities shifted. Analysis 

by State’s Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations found the constantly 

shifting designation of priority districts undermined the effectiveness of 

stabilization programming. Districts were deemed critical and then deprioritized 

and military forces withdrawn in periods as short as six months, raising 

expectations and then undermining the confidence of local populations.481

This problem only worsened as the military drew down. Because the military 

clearing effort was often incomplete and local forces were incapable of 

sustaining any security gains, those gains were often reversed after coalition 

forces pulled out. Often stabilization programs that were being implemented in 

areas dictated by military priorities were left to complete implementation amid 

rapidly deteriorating security, and lost access to target communities as a result. 

The SIKAs sometimes found themselves working in districts where not only was 

there no district government to work with, but as the military surge ended, the 

area returned to total insurgent control.482

All of the DSTs and PRTs closed by the end of 2014, forcing programs that were 

focused at the district level, such as the SIKAs, to be managed remotely by 

U.S. officials and implementing partner staff in Kabul and directly run by local 

Afghans in the provinces.483 While USAID was limited in its ability to oversee 

programming previously, the drawdown only exacerbated these challenges by 

reducing access to project sites and the ability of USAID employees to conduct 

meetings to verify performance monitoring data.484 The fewer staff with access 

to a project site, the more likely it was that project monitoring data would be 
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manipulated, particularly in an environment where pressure to produce results 

and risk of corruption were high. According to SIKA evaluators, the limitations 

in accessing project sites seriously hampered monitoring and evaluation 

efforts because programs were reliant on a single, unverified source of 

information: local staff reporting.485 In addition, as security constraints limited 

the movements of U.S. staff, there were concerns about local staff capacity to 

effectively perform the expanded roles they were forced to assume.486 In short, 

the SIKAs were operating in such unstable areas that managers were unable to 

verify what their program was accomplishing.

Difficulty of Shifting to Afghan Lead

Contradicting the 2012 “Civil-Military Strategic Framework” and the 2011 

governance strategy, USAID continued to implement projects on its own, 

rather than supporting the Afghan government in doing so.487 There was little 

political will to confine these programs to the slow, messy, and uncertain onbudget processes that were just being pioneered at the national and provincial 

levels. This violated the classic COIN mantra: “The host nation doing something 

tolerably is better than us doing it well.”488 However, it was impossible to do 

much, even tolerably, in the timeframes these programs had been allotted. Even 

attempting to do so often meant pioneering new governance structures at the 

district and local levels.489

While CCI and the SIKAs worked through the Afghan government to a greater 

extent than their predecessor programs, they still took shortcuts as pressure 

to quickly demonstrate progress superseded their mandate to work through 

their Afghan partners. In this way, the impetus for coalition personnel doing 

it themselves was an enduring sense that doing something was better than 

doing nothing.490

While burn rate pressure had subsided somewhat, personnel were still being 

evaluated by the amount of money they supervised or implemented. For 

example, one program evaluation from this period used a euphemism about “the 

pace” of implementation to express concern that the program was not spending 

enough money, while a SIKA implementing partner staff member confirmed that 

burn rate pressure was still a factor.491 In fact, implementing partners continued 

to face so much pressure that they felt compelled to end run governance 

processes to speed up spending. 

Ironically, the SIKAs, programs that were designed to foster stronger governance, 

sometimes minimized the role of their government partners in project design, 

implementation, and monitoring because these slower, capacity-building 

processes were dragging down the burn rate. Program managers sometimes 

strong-armed the government into signing documents as quickly as possible or 
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simply went around them when they disagreed with programming approaches.492

Unsurprisingly, when SIKA implementing partners marginalized their government 

counterparts, it caused tension with them. One program evaluation documented 

a number of cases in which SIKA managers even threatened to cancel projects if 

the government did not comply with their demands to sign off on documentation 

before the officials had time to perform adequate due diligence.493

The fact that USAID did not shift completely from what it had done during the 

surge to what doctrine now called for it to do was, perhaps, unsurprising, given 

reports of a fundamental disconnect between the military’s retention of the 

COIN and stabilization framework, and State and USAID’s insistence that all 

programming be reframed through the lens of transition. A senior USAID official 

recalled a briefing he gave in early 2011 during which State’s Assistant Chief 

of Mission declared stabilization to be over and forbade any references to it, 

while the briefer’s military counterpart in southern Afghanistan refused to even 

recognize the term transition.494

Differing Approaches to Stabilization Continued

During this time, different programs within USAID used different theories 

of change, terminologies, and approaches, just as they had during the surge. 

According to a senior stabilization contractor, “We couldn’t agree on a definition 

of stabilization.”495

 The SIKAs retained a focus on sources of instability, using 

a revised version of the District Stability Framework approach called the SAM, 

which in various documents stood for either the Stability Assessment Methods 

or the Stability Analysis Methodology.496 The Kandahar Food Zone used a 

modified version of SAM that focused both on stability and on the drivers of 

poppy cultivation.497 SAM was an attempt to address many of the challenges 

associated with DSF, including the fact that DSF was too onerous to complete. 

A senior USAID official explained, “If you go through all the required steps 

in the DSF and don’t skip anything, it would 

take a year to complete one cycle from start 

to finish.”498 In light of the imminent end of 

support to local and district governments, 

euphemistically called “transition to Afghan 

leadership,” SAM brought Afghan government 

officials into the process in a way that DSF had 

claimed to do, but had rarely actually done.499

There was a tension, however, between the 

mandate that the SIKAs support Afghan 

government processes, with their focus on a 

community’s needs, and their use of the SAM 

tool, which maintained the DSF’s emphasis on 

A trainer explains the Stability Analysis Methodology to participants 

of various community development councils in Dasht-e Archi 

District, Kunduz Province, in January 2014. (USAID photo)
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addressing sources of instability. Indeed, toward the mid-point of the program, 

a senior stabilization contractor described a pattern where a community 

would complete the SAM process, only to select projects from wish lists it had 

previously compiled.500

In contrast to the SIKAs’ focus on the district level, the Community Cohesion 

Initiative, managed by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, remained focused 

at the community level.501 In addition, with resources and geographic access 

shrinking, CCI made the concepts of “cohesion” and “resilience” central to 

its effort.502 This shift stemmed from a recognition that stabilizing a district 

by reducing violence was so difficult that merely making the community 

more resilient to attacks was a more realistic objective and would reduce the 

possibility the Taliban could draw support from the population.503 This meant, 

while the program still sought to strengthen the legitimacy of local government 

officials, it had an increased focus on improving relations within and between 

communities and their informal leaders.504

 OTI also de-emphasized its reliance 

on the District Stability Framework. According to a senior official from OTI, 

“CCI worked on needs-based issues. . . . If these projects are a mechanism to 

improve trust between people and their government, that’s all that matters.”505

(For a deeper exploration of programming according to needs-based vs. 

stability-based criteria, see chapter 8 of this report.)

Less Infrastructure, More “Soft” Programming Like Dispute Resolution

The immense pressure to spend more and faster during the surge had pushed 

implementers toward infrastructure and away from other types of programming, 

because only by building costly infrastructure could burn rate demands be met. 

However, periodically during both the surge and the 2012–2017 period, there was 

a move to balance the continuing focus on small infrastructure with an increased 

amount of “soft” programming. Soft programming is a broad category that 

includes community meetings, traditional dispute 

resolution training, and sporting events, among 

other types of activities. This attempt to diversify 

was only successful when programs could escape 

intense burn rate pressure, however. According 

to a senior USAID official, the Afghanistan 

Stabilization Initiative “was trying to model 

a new approach [in 2009], focusing on soft 

programming, but it was impossible to do that in 

the south” because the pressure to spend money 

was so great there.506 ASI’s successor program, 

CCI, underwent its own shift toward a greater 

emphasis on soft programming in 2014.507 Afghan trainees at work during a CCI-funded carpet weaving training 

in Panjwayi District, Kandahar Province, on December 26, 2013. 

(USAID photo)
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One prevalent type of soft programming aimed to help Afghans resolve disputes. 

Traditional justice was one of the few services the Taliban provided, albeit 

in limited areas of the country after 2001, and Taliban courts benefited from 

a reputation of being more efficient and less corrupt than their governmentrun alternatives.508 In a 2010 meta-evaluation of the agency’s historic role in 

counterinsurgency, USAID found that one of its key lessons learned was not to 

neglect the justice sector, and it recommended alternative dispute resolution, 

mobile courts, and other ways of speeding up legitimate grievance resolution 

mechanisms to compete with insurgent-provided justice.509 Programs like 

CCI supported traditional dispute resolution (TDR) processes and sought to 

establish linkages between official legal structures and traditional mechanisms. 

According to the final CCI report, sample activities included “providing training 

to TDR leaders, establishing legal resource centers, training justice support 

workers, and supporting case referral activities.”510

The Afghanistan Social Outreach Program was entirely composed of soft 

programming, with significant justice and security provision components. ASOP 

had no infrastructure component and was instead focused on creating and 

building the capacity of District Community Councils (DCC). (See figure 8.) 

The program sponsored DCC-nominated candidates to serve as Afghan Local 

Police and vetted recruits for the program. (See page 49.) In addition, DCC 

MINISTRY

PROVINCE

DISTRICT

COMMUNITY

Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD)

- administered the National Solidarity Program (NSP)

Independent Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG)

District Development Assemblies (DDA)

- helped organize development priorities at district level

- members were often CDC chairs

District Community Councils (DCC)

- funded by USAID’s Afghanistan Social Outreach 

Program (ASOP)

- also known as “ASOP Shuras”

Provincial Councils

- constitutionally required

- elections overseen at the national level

Community Development Councils (CDC)

- deliberated on and expended NSP funding at 

the village level

AFGHAN LOCAL GOVERNANCE: SHURAS AND COUNCILS LEVELS

Source: AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program (ASOP): Final Report, pp. 3, 6; Independent Directorate of Local Governance, Subnational Governance Policy, Spring 2010, pp. 17, 166; 

SIGAR, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Programs: After 16 Months and $47 Million Spent, USAID Has Not Met Essential Program Objectives, SIGAR 13-16-AR, July 2013, pp. 3–4.

FIGURE 8
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Security Committees submitted more than 400 reports on insurgent incidents 

and activities, including IED placement and illegal checkpoints run by antigovernment elements, to security forces operating in their districts.511 Among 

its multi-faceted efforts, ASOP facilitated the quick adjudication of small 

disputes in a transparent and participatory manner.512 While it is unknown how 

many disputes DCC members were resolving on their own before joining these 

councils, DCC Judiciary Subcommittees adjudicated 2,179 cases over the course 

of the program, including land and property disputes, violent conflicts, family 

and household disputes, kidnappings, and conflicts over water rights.513

Finally, subcommittees of the community shuras formed by two of the SIKA 

programs also provided conflict resolution services.514 Program evaluators found 

that SIKA-North’s reconciliation jirgas were particularly effective at addressing 

sources of instability, including ethnic, land, and security disputes, and at 

working through traditional Afghan structures and incorporating those norms 

into government-sponsored conflict resolution processes.515

Cash-for-Work Methods Contradicted State Department Guidance

Stab-U continued to march to the beat of its own drum regarding cash-for-work 

initiatives. In contravention of 2011 State Department guidance that cash-forwork was not, in and of itself, a rationale for programming, the 2013 Stab-U 

Performance Management Plan listed as one of its core goals “providing shortterm employment for large numbers of people.”516 State Department guidance 

had instructed that cash-for-work should only be used as a tool for more 

strategic ends because it “will not prevent young men from working for the 

insurgency.” Instead, State recommended that cash-for-work be used as a tool in 

a community-development approach to build connections between populations 

and their local government officials.517

 The Community Development Program, 

whose organizing rationale was to provide 

short-term employment to combat-age men to 

prevent them from joining the insurgency, was 

extended several times after launching in 2009 

and provided more than 13 million person-days 

of employment across Afghanistan by the time it 

ended in August 2013.518

Some programs were using cash-for-work 

in more strategic ways. The majority of the 

SIKA programs’ activities involved a shortterm employment component, but it was used 

to support a community engagement and 

governance strategy. While program evaluators 

did criticize the use of cash-for-work for its own 

Afghan laborers on a CCI-funded project clean an irrigation canal in 

Kajaki District, Helmand Province, on March 29, 2014. (USAID photo)
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sake, the SIKAs also used local labor to implement small-scale infrastructure 

projects, identified through transparent, consultative processes whose purpose 

was to build trust within communities, and between communities and the 

government.519 In 2015, USAID announced its intention to provide $50 million 

in funding for the Jobs for Peace program, described as “an immediate jobs 

initiative” to create “short-term interventions that will create economic 

opportunities.” However, like the SIKAs, Jobs for Peace routes most of this 

financing through the consultative CDC process.520

GOING SMALL AND LOCAL: 

INSPIRED BY THE NATIONAL SOLIDARITY PROGRAM 

During the 2012–2017 period, the scope of stabilization programming narrowed 

considerably for a number of reasons. There was a growing emphasis on 

ensuring Afghans took the lead in implementing projects, a shift toward smallerscale projects identified through more consultative, bottom-up community 

development processes, and a move away from subcontracting work toward 

direct implementation. These changes were all inspired, in part, by the 

National Solidarity Program, a widely hailed World Bank program that seemed 

to demonstrate the efficacy of a small, direct implementation, community 

development model.521 The changes were also driven by growing concern that 

basic monitoring and quality assurance often proved impossible in the insecure 

areas in which stabilization programs were working. There was a recognition 

that these oversight concerns could be mitigated by focusing on smaller, directly 

implemented projects that were easier to monitor.

Afghanization

One factor in the move toward smaller, simpler projects was the move toward 

Afghan-led development. This approach, which has been referred to as 

Afghanization, was intended to increase the capacity of the Afghan government 

through on-budget support.522 The 2012 “Civil-Military Strategic Framework” 

explained that, as “security transition proceeds, [U.S. government] assistance 

programs will increasingly shift from directly delivering services to providing 

technical assistance and building the capacity of [Afghan government] ministries 

and provincial governments.”523 As such, the SIKAs were required to use the 

MRRD-developed Kandahar Model for routing donor support through District 

Development Assemblies (DDA).524

 DDAs were composed of the chairmen of 

the Community Development Councils created through the National Solidarity 

Program.525 (See figure 8.) The Kandahar Model emphasized (1) community 

participation and the use of local labor, (2) avoidance of red tape, and (3) less 

reliance on subcontractors to enable the quick delivery of services.526 An effort 

was made to ensure that USAID programming reinforced existing Afghan 

government systems, rather than creating parallel structures. For example, 
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the SIKA base awards explained that Afghan formal and informal government 

officials “will have substantial decision making authority over the activities in 

this contract by taking the lead with the contractor’s oversight and advice on 

planning, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.”527 This approach 

was designed to help these bodies gain experience with project conception and 

implementation, as well as financial management.528

The emphasis on hiring Afghan labor dovetailed with a push to hire laborers 

from the area immediately surrounding each project, particularly for unskilled 

jobs. Afghan officials had long objected to programs working through firms 

based outside the local area, and grievances had arisen in the past when 

projects were subcontracted to these firms. ASI also found that using local 

labor reduced attacks on project sites, expanded the areas in which they could 

work, and increased opportunities for legitimizing local leaders.529 In contrast, 

hiring outside contractors played into the hands of the insurgents by providing 

opportunities for them to extract payments for not disrupting projects, fueling 

insurgent propaganda that government leaders were skimming off the top of the 

contract, and ignoring an obvious opportunity to address local grievances about 

unemployment by ensuring laborers were hired locally.530

Bottom-Up Community Development

In addition to the move toward local labor, there was a move toward small-scale, 

community development projects. This shift began slowly during the surge, but 

solidified during this period. Community-driven development supports holding 

local elections and then providing the newly formed representative bodies 

with decision-making power over development funds.531

 In theory, these bodies 

better understand the needs and interests of the local population and ensure 

funds are better spent than a central government or NGO staff could. Indeed, 

an Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative monitoring and evaluation report found 

that the degree to which an activity contributed to stabilization objectives was 

directly correlated with the quality of the community engagement process on a 

given activity.532 The Measuring Impact of Stabilization Initiatives (MISTI) final 

evaluation of CCI and a report by Tufts University came to the same conclusion: 

For successful stabilization, the community engagement process is at least as 

important as the final product or output.533

An Emphasis on Small-Scale Projects

One theory driving the move to smaller projects was that the smaller the scale, 

the easier it was to achieve community buy-in and ensure transparency during 

project identification and implementation.534 Programs also moved to smallerscale projects because they took less time to implement and freed up programs 

to move from area to area, following the military around. Without this flexibility, 

the time it took to complete a project might be longer than the military could 
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provide the necessary security.535 In addition, 

there is evidence that larger activities were less 

likely to be successfully completed, especially 

in insecure areas. With SIKA-South, the failure 

rate for projects of above-average size was high. 

According to an evaluation of the program, 

49 percent of these projects were “not executed” 

or “executed with conditions.”536

Quality control was also easier when projects 

were smaller. While the ultimate goal of 

stabilization programs was not to build 

infrastructure per se, if promised infrastructure 

was delayed or built poorly or not at all, it 

undermined the goal of improving perceptions 

of local governance.537 Even while local leaders 

often wished for larger projects with greater 

benefits to their communities, former Helmand 

Governor Gulab Mangal told SIGAR that smaller, 

more consultative projects were more effective 

at helping him establish the desired connection 

with the population.538

It is important to note, however, that the general 

trend toward smaller, simpler projects created 

tension between implementing partners and the communities and government 

officials with whom they worked because these smaller projects benefited fewer 

people.539 Implementing partners created cost ceilings for projects to keep them 

small. These restrictions forced implementers to unilaterally select projects 

from lists that had been identified through community consultation processes, 

rather than deferring to the community’s own prioritization. Communities grew 

frustrated when they spent significant time and effort on these processes, only to 

find that implementing partners would only follow through on projects that were 

under a certain dollar amount.540

Direct Implementation: Eliminating Subcontractors

One of the most significant factors driving the trend toward smaller and simpler 

projects was the move from subcontracting to direct implementation. This 

was in response to recognition that a pervasive reliance on subcontracting 

fed corruption, reworked power structures in areas receiving the largest aid 

flows, and created grievances that had pushed some communities toward the 

Taliban.541 For example, an implementing partner would contract a project 

to an Afghan company, which would subcontract it to another company or 

Before and after photographs of a flood protection wall built by 

USAID in Ahmadabad District, Paktiya Province. (USAID photo)
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NGO, which would subcontract it to another; each subcontractor would take a 

substantial cut—up to 20 percent—for little or no work, according to one former 

senior USAID official.542

Multiple layers of contractors ate up a lot of funding, leaving little money left to 

actually do something to benefit the community.543 Subcontractor overhead, in 

combination with sky-high security costs and standard implementing partner 

costs, could eat up as much as 75 percent of the budget for some stabilization 

programs, according to a senior USAID official and a senior MRRD official.544

In addition, prices were driven up when different bidders on subcontracted 

projects conspired to fix them at above-market rates and when well-connected 

companies captured the market.545 For example, a former translator for the 

Kandahar PRT used his inside knowledge of the contracting process to create a 

series of shell companies that competed against one another for work, crowding 

out the competition and then artificially inflating prices.546 Likewise, quality was 

undermined as contract funding was skimmed off to pay various stakeholders, 

reducing funding for actual implementation.547 Academic research identified 

similar practices in Helmand and documented the practice of “flipping” PRT 

contracts, or selling to another contractor, with money skimmed off each “flip.”548

Direct implementation reduced opportunities for insurgents to highlight real or 

perceived corruption by increasing financial transparency, improving the quality 

of work, and reducing cost inflation.549 USAID documented that subcontracting 

provided such reliable opportunities for corruption that certain corrupt officials 

objected to direct implementation on the grounds it would cut off the flow of 

their ill-gotten gains.550 The impact of corruption in contracting was especially 

pronounced in Kandahar, where the Karzai and Sherzai families secured a 

duopoly on major contracts from the international community.551 In this way, 

these contracts reshaped the political economy of the province and displaced 

other tribal and mujahedeen leadership of the region.552

Under the direct implementation model, instead of hiring an Afghan company to 

oversee a project, the USAID implementing partner’s own staff would directly 

oversee the work. Like the move toward smaller projects, direct implementation 

was, in part, an attempt to improve program performance, both in terms of the 

quality of outputs and impact achieved. For example, direct implementation 

allowed implementing partners to have sufficient control over labor recruitment 

to ensure local labor was used, increasing impact by ensuring communities 

reaped the financial benefits of work in their areas.553

Direct implementation also tended to increase financial transparency on a 

project.554 By removing the subcontractor layer, direct implementation had 

the potential to bolster the impact of projects designed to increase interaction 
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(and eventually trust) between communities and their Afghan government 

representatives.555 Implementing partner staff, who understood that the point 

of the project was to build ties between communities and their governments, 

were able to use projects more directly as leverage to create connections 

between legitimate local authorities and the Afghan government, as opposed to 

subcontractors, who had no incentive to do so.556 As one USAID official noted, a 

subcontracted construction firm is incentivized to build as quickly and cheaply 

as possible and then move on to the next project.557

Implementing partners found their situational awareness was better when 

they adopted direct implementation than when they used subcontractors.558

Implementers working on a program with political goals required a nuanced 

understanding of local dynamics to determine whether and how their program 

was contributing to or ameliorating sources of instability. Direct implementation 

enabled implementing partners to learn more about their operating 

environments, which in turn, better equipped them to pursue their inherently 

political goal of improving perceptions of local governance. The Community 

Cohesion Initiative even commissioned third-party research to learn more about 

the political context of the areas in which it operated.559

Direct implementation enabled implementing partners to learn 

more about their operating environments, which in turn, better 

equipped them to pursue their inherently political goal of 

improving perceptions of local governance.

There were limitations as to what could be achieved through direct 

implementation, however. Each directly implemented project required much 

more implementing partner staff time than subcontracting, which necessarily 

limited how much a program could accomplish.560 Direct implementation also 

limited the complexity of the projects that could be undertaken.561 These factors 

meant that although direct implementation might improve project performance, 

it might also increase the cost of programming.

Increased Vetting Requirements Led to Smaller Projects

The move to smaller projects also stemmed from the creation of a new 

requirement that all subcontracts that met a certain dollar threshold be reviewed 

by USAID’s Vetting Support Unit (VSU) before they could be awarded. When the 

vetting requirement was created in 2011, it was relatively easy to execute as it 

only applied to contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, and their sub-awards 

of $150,000 or more, as well as all private security contracts.562 However, in 

January 2013, USAID reduced this threshold to $25,000, dramatically expanding 

the number of projects affected.563
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The months-long wait for the VSU to clear potential grantees and subcontractors 

incentivized programs to reduce the size of activities to avoid triggering the 

vetting requirement, and to award grants to government officials, who were 

more easily vetted than other recipients.564

 Programs reported having to reject 

projects prioritized by community councils in favor of smaller projects that 

sometimes did not adequately address the identified source of instability.565 For 

example, flood protection walls were reduced in size until they were too short 

to protect the village that had asked for them.566 Vetting delays also negatively 

affected program responsiveness by significantly increasing the time between 

activity identification and completion.567 In this way, vetting requirements 

undermined programs’ abilities to achieve their desired impact of improving 

perceptions of service delivery, and thus governance more broadly.568

USAID vetting was initially designed to check contracts for connections to a 

variety of malign actors, from insurgent groups to corrupt power brokers.569

However, as SIGAR has previously reported, the VSU stopped vetting for ties 

to corruption in its first year of operation, focusing instead on identifying 

possible contractor ties to insurgents. This decision came at a time when the 

U.S. government had chosen to focus on mid-to-low level corruption, rather 

than trying to tackle high-level corruption. The belief was that tackling highlevel corruption would either require more political capital than available or be 

largely futile in the absence of Afghan political will.570

NSP was a Problematic Model for Stabilization

The move toward smaller-scale community development projects was also 

an effort to emulate what was considered to be a proven model: the National 

Solidarity Program, a World Bank-administered program that started in 2003. 

The program, which was funded by the United States and other countries, was 

implemented by MRRD. NSP issued grants of $200 per family (up to $60,000 

per village) to communities to allocate toward projects that were identified 

by local CDCs.571 As with a number of stabilization programs, NSP beneficiary 

communities were required to contribute labor, materials, or other services 

valued at more than 10 percent of the total cost of each project.572 Much of 

NSP’s influence stemmed from the fact that some promising initial results of 

the World Bank’s impact evaluation of the program came out just as the first 

wave of stabilization programs was being designed.573 By 2012, later results of 

the World Bank study found that NSP was successful, at least temporarily, in 

improving perceptions of Afghan government officials at both the central and 

subnational levels.574

NSP was hailed by the Afghan government as the gold standard all other 

programs should emulate. In an interview with SIGAR, Ehsan Zia, former 

Minister of Rural Reconstruction and Development, observed: 
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ON-BUDGET EFFORTS STRUGGLED, TOO

The challenges of managing off-budget programs through implementing partners 

made the idea of implementing stabilization programs on budget, directly through the 

government, seem compelling. However, on-budget stabilization programs proved slow and 

cumbersome.575 The Afghan government lacked the capacity to effectively process onbudget funding, and corrupt officials created further challenges.576 As described below, two 

prominent stabilization programs that used on-budget funding (DDP and ASP) were canceled 

when government performance did not live up to donor expectations.

USAID provided on-budget assistance to the Afghan government to administer the District 

Delivery Program, which was overseen by IDLG.577 DDP had two goals that were difficult to 

reconcile: rapidly deploy Afghan civil servants to recently cleared districts and do so using 

on-budget processes. Other programs operated under the assumption that the only way 

to do something quickly was to bypass the government, and the only way to do something 

effectively through the government was to proceed slowly. DDP tried and failed to push 

through this tension.578 This conflict illustrates the disconnect between the overarching goals 

of the Afghan government and those of the United States and its coalition partners generally. 

While some Afghan officials were interested in improving long-term governance capacity, the 

United States and its coalition partners were focused on the shorter-term goal of stabilizing 

the country’s most contested areas through quick-impact programming. 

DDP was ultimately canceled after USAID interpreted the Afghan government’s slow and 

nebulous financial accounting procedures as corruption. A senior governance advisor to 

USAID told SIGAR the agency withdrew its support for DDP after the program spent only 

$2.3 million of its $40 million budget, and in response to allegations that funds were 

misallocated. However, both the advisor and a USAID third-party evaluation attributed 

this discrepancy to the government’s slower process of using hard-copy receipts to report 

expenditures, and concluded that no fraud or abuse of funds had taken place.579

Years earlier, the Afghanistan Stabilization Program, one of the few other programs to attempt 

to support subnational governance through on-budget assistance, also saw donors withdraw 

funds when progress proved too slow and poor management and political infighting within 

the government too problematic.580 The purpose of the program was to (1) extend the 

reach of the government of Afghanistan into the districts and provinces by building physical 

infrastructure, (2) enhance the capacity of local governance through the personnel reform 

and restructuring and staff training for provincial and district-level officials, (3) increase the 

legitimacy of the government through the delivery of reconstruction projects reconstruction 

projects, and (4) conduct administrative and financial reforms to ensure funding flowed to 

the subnational levels.581 However, the United States, UK, and Canada reduced or completely 

withdrew funding from the program after a 2005 management change at the lead Afghan 

agency, the Ministry of Interior. Subsequently, many of ASP’s functions were duplicated by 

new, off-budget programs, including ASOP.582
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Because NSP was implemented by the government and it delegated authority 

to the people, it decreased the distance between the people and the 

government. Through this program, people were trusted and technical and 

financial support was handed to them. It created stability by bringing people 

together around issues at the village level. NSP was the first program of its 

kind in the history of Afghanistan.583

The U.S. government also publicly praised the program and allocated resources 

accordingly. According to a 2011 Senate Foreign Relations Committee Majority 

report on assistance to Afghanistan, NSP was the best example of a national 

program that strengthened local governance and the social contract between 

the state and citizens.584 However, by 2014 the U.S. government position on NSP 

had become more nuanced. In a response to a SIGAR inquiry, while continuing 

to argue that the program supported community-level engagement in decision 

making, USAID cited a lack of evidence that NSP increased stability in insecure 

parts of Afghanistan and stated it had ended its practice of preferencing 

contributions to the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), 

which financed NSP.585 By 2015, however, the agency had once again begun 

preferencing funding to NSP.586

NSP embodied many of the characteristics that stabilization programs were 

moving toward: It used a consultative community development approach on 

relatively small projects.587 Because of its extensive community engagement 

process, NSP was transparent to communities and less vulnerable (though 

not invulnerable) to elite capture. The small dollar values involved reduced 

the temptation among power brokers to co-opt community development 

processes.588 Because NSP was directly implemented by facilitating partners 

contracted by the Afghan government, it was more cost effective to implement 

than programs that relied on subcontractors: 72 percent of NSP funding went 

to community block grants and just 28 percent to implementing partner and 

administrative costs.589 In contrast, as much as 75 percent of funding for other 

stabilization programs went toward administrative costs.590

NSP was also integrated into the Afghan government, supporting the formation 

of CDCs at the community level and linking them to higher-level government 

structures through DDAs at the district level.591 In addition, studies of the 

impact of NSP projects showed the program built its credibility with beneficiary 

communities as a local governance process when projects were implemented in 

a timely fashion.592 This finding affirmed the post-surge emphasis on smaller and 

simpler, which, in turn, made it possible to implement projects faster. According 

to Eshan Zia, former MRRD minister, “Project delivery should take place before 

people forget what was promised to them by a minister, a director, or the 

president in their meeting with him.”593
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The success of this model, and its endorsement by Secretary of State Clinton in 

December 2009, led USAID to try to incorporate that approach into its project 

design.594 However, in their rush to adopt the NSP model, the United States and 

other donors glossed over a few critical points. First, the initial two phases of 

NSP, which operated prior to 2013, were largely focused on more secure parts of 

the country.595 The influential World Bank study, whose promising early results 

helped shape the surge-era round of stabilization programs, excluded highly 

insecure southern districts “due to ongoing violent conflict.” Unsurprisingly, 

project impact was significantly weaker in the less-secure eastern districts 

covered by the NSP evaluation, so it was a problematic model for stabilization 

programs, which were concentrated in the country’s most-contested districts.596

Project impact was significantly weaker in the less-secure

 eastern districts covered by the NSP evaluation, so it was a 

problematic model for stabilization programs, which were 

concentrated in the country’s most-contested districts.

Second, part of NSP’s success was that it had a high level of Afghan ownership 

at the central level, unlike other stabilization programs. For example, the SIKAs 

were undermined by fighting between MRRD and IDLG.597 The clear advantage 

of this strong partnership with the Afghan government was that it was easier to 

make the government look effective when it was playing a more substantive role 

and demonstrating its own effectiveness, than when the role of the government 

was merely to provide a rubber stamp of approval.598

Third, the in-depth community engagement process used by NSP required 

significantly more time to implement than USAID had been allotted for its 

stabilization programs, which faced demands to demonstrate progress in 

months, if not weeks.599 NSP’s ideal process included between two and five 

community meetings over the course of up to six months before CDCs were 

formed, and its ideal timeframe was two and a half years between when 

the implementing partner made initial contact with a community and the 

implementation of a project.600 This lengthy process, and the buy-in it achieved, 

was more important in establishing the program’s legitimacy with communities 

than the single, small-scale infrastructure project that resulted from it.601

Fourth, NSP funding was based on population and intended to be distributed 

equally.602 The program operated in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan, reaching 

an estimated two-thirds of rural Afghans.603 In contrast, stabilization programs 

were focused on the most contested communities in the country. The fact that 

the benefits of stabilization programs were not distributed equitably undermined 
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their attempts to bolster local government legitimacy. Such legitimacy is 

conditioned, in part, on the perception of a fair allocation of resources.604

* * * * * * * * * * *

While traditional U.S. stabilization programming has been discontinued in 

Afghanistan, the transition process and new emphasis on governance (rather 

than stabilization) has led USAID to focus its subnational programming at 

the provincial and municipal levels. The only USAID program covered in 

this report that continued programming well into 2017 is the Kandahar Food 

Zone, which is currently scheduled to end in August 2018. KFZ’s primary focus 

remains on promoting alternatives to poppy cultivation through the provision of 

infrastructure improvements, among other activities, in the districts of Panjwayi 

and Zhari, not stabilization, per se.605

The Afghan government, meanwhile, has ended its National Solidarity Program. 

NSP’s successor program, the Citizens’ Charter Afghanistan Project, continues 

NSP’s mission of extending basic service delivery to communities through the 

same governance mechanisms and processes created by NSP, issuing small 

grants to communities that identify projects through a deliberative process led 

by informal community representatives. As with NSP, USAID funds the Citizens’ 

Charter through contributions to the ARTF.606 Recognizing the limitations of 

Afghan security forces in protecting the program’s beneficiaries in the country’s 

most dangerous areas, the Citizens’ Charter has declined to program in a third of 

Afghanistan’s districts, which were deemed too insecure to cover.607

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U.S. Army photo

CHAPTER 6

DOD STABILIZATION PROGRAMS

While stabilization was often framed as the civilian component of COIN, the 

military also spent considerable resources on stabilization programming. 

Especially in key terrain districts, the civilian and military roles in the hold 

phase of COIN overlapped, as the military could often respond faster and 

operate in more dangerous areas than coalition civilians could. Two programs, 

in particular, illustrate how the military attempted to rebuild Afghanistan from 

the bottom up: the Commander’s Emergency Response Program and Village 

Stability Operations.

COMMANDER’S EMERGENCY RESPONSE PROGRAM

CERP was a funding mechanism designed to enable military commanders in 

Iraq to “respond to urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction requirements 

within their areas of responsibility, by carrying out programs that will 

immediately assist the Iraqi people and support the reconstruction of Iraq.”608 It 

also was intended to support force protection by creating jobs, winning hearts 

and minds, and improving security.609 In November 2003, Congress authorized 

a similar program in Afghanistan.610 DOD created project categories for the 

expenditure of funds, but gave commanders wide latitude to identify and 

select projects based on conditions in their area of responsibility.611 The broad 
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goal of CERP’s humanitarian assistance projects before 2009 was to help ease 

the burden of a heavy military footprint in communities and reduce violent 

resistance to the coalition presence. CERP was not designed or intended as a 

tool to extend the reach of the government, though some of its implementers, 

particularly PRTs, had that explicit mission and used CERP to achieve it.612

The initial guidance on the appropriate use of CERP funds was refined and 

codified in the 2005 Financial Management Regulation (FMR) for CERP, which 

outlined seven prohibited project types, such as entertainment and reward 

programs, and a broad list of 15 authorized categories, including irrigation, 

agriculture, electricity, transportation, and “other urgent humanitarian or 

reconstruction projects.”613 A September 2005 update to the FMR provided more 

specific guidance on the intended application of CERP funds for small-scale, 

urgent-need projects.614

The 2005 FMR guidance divided the responsibility for CERP program oversight 

between the Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller), who was responsible for 

program policies, procedures, and reporting to Congress; the Secretary of the 

Army, who was responsible for developing “detailed procedures . . . to ensure 

that unit commanders carry out CERP in a manner consistent with applicable 

laws” and regulations, including “rules for expending CERP funds through 

contracts and grants;” and the CENTCOM commander, who was responsible 

for allocating and requesting funds across commands.615 Per FMR guidance, the 

authority for determining which projects would “immediately assist” the Afghan 

people was delegated to commanders at the brigade level and below.616

Guidance on the use of CERP funds evolved in subsequent years as the amount 

of funds obligated to the program swelled. When CERP arrived in Afghanistan 

in 2004, its budget was $40 million; by 2009, it was nearly 14 times larger, at over 

$550 million.617 The growth in CERP funding coincided with an increase in troop 

numbers and operations.

CERP activity in Afghanistan during the 2004–2009 timeframe was concentrated 

in the eastern and southeastern provinces that bordered Pakistan, the focus 

for U.S. efforts during that stage of the conflict.618 The funds were used by 

PRTs, conventional military units, and special operations forces (SOF) for a 

wide range of projects, including transportation, education, agriculture, water, 

and sanitation.619

CERP Becomes an Instrument of Counterinsurgency

The increase in U.S. forces during the 2009–2012 period and the advent of 

a modified counterinsurgency strategy affected most aspects of coalition 

activity in Afghanistan, and CERP was no exception. In the case of CERP, the 
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emphasis on engaging the Afghan population manifested itself in changes to 

the number, character, and location of new projects.620 While CERP had often 

been used by PRTs and other commanders for emergency humanitarian aid 

and reconstruction, in 2009 CERP became an instrument of the USFOR-A COIN 

mission to improve government legitimacy and displace Taliban influence. 

USFOR-A, which assumed responsibility for CERP in May 2009, sought to 

empower and encourage military commanders to implement CERP projects 

after clearing operations to demonstrate the services and benefits that would 

accompany a robust Afghan government presence.621 In this way, the military 

came to regard the spending of money itself as a “weapon system.”622 In turn, 

the hope was the Taliban would not be welcome to return to these targeted 

communities, and the government would come to be seen as legitimate and 

capable enough to sustain the infrastructure and services seeded by CERP.623

After 2009, the focus of CERP spending began to shift toward agriculture 

projects and others designed to improve local economic conditions, both of 

which saw an increase in the share of total obligation and project numbers.624

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate was expressing concern that CERP was being used 

for large-scale reconstruction projects, rather than the smaller projects that it 

was originally designed to support. In 2011, Congress created the Afghanistan 

Infrastructure Fund (AIF) as a programmatic corollary to implement the larger 

infrastructure projects for COIN that CERP had been taking on in the absence of 

an alternative funding mechanism.625 Thus, as the AIF came online, there was a 

concomitant reduction in DOD’s CERP funding requests.626

Afghans sit on food donations in the back of a pick-up before distributing to needy families in Nawa District, 

Helmand Province, in September 2010. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Mark Fayloga)
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During this period there was a decrease in the average cost of projects, which 

could be attributed to a combination of factors, including the surge in troop 

levels, the emphasis on counterinsurgency activities, congressional scrutiny, 

establishment of the AIF, and new restrictions on projects over $500,000.627 The 

majority of CERP projects initiated in Afghanistan throughout the course of the 

conflict were initiated between FY 2010 and FY 2012. At the apex of the surge 

in 2011, small projects of less than $5,000 accounted for 95 percent of all CERP 

projects.628 Thus, while overall CERP disbursements declined as the surge took 

shape, the number of initiated projects increased. 

Strategic decisions about where and how to concentrate the surge effort also 

drove a geographic redistribution of CERP. For example, there was a shift from 

areas adjacent to the border with Pakistan during the 2004–2009 period to the 

Taliban heartland in Kandahar and Helmand after 2009.629 Spending was also 

concentrated in areas of those districts that had larger populations, higher levels 

of economic development, and higher agricultural productivity.630 The pivot to 

southern Afghanistan was most dramatic in 2010 and 2011.631

 The upshot of the 

simultaneous shift to the south and increase in project funding was that nearly 

60 percent of CERP funds obligated in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2011 were 

obligated for projects in Kandahar and Helmand.632

CERP ultimately supported projects in all 34 of Afghanistan’s provinces; more 

than 90 percent of these projects cost less than $50,000 each. The number 

Members of Khost PRT meet with engineers and beneficiaries on May 2, 2010, to discuss an upcoming 

infrastructure project. (DOD photo)
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of new CERP projects began to decline in 2012, as USFOR-A transitioned 

security responsibilities to the ANDSF.633 In the summer of 2013, NATO began to 

transition security responsibilities for the fifth and final tranche of districts to 

Afghan security forces, and in December 2014, the ISAF mission in Afghanistan 

concluded.634 Throughout the 2012 to 2014 period, as U.S. forces withdrew from 

the south and east, CERP pivoted toward Kabul and the neighboring provinces 

of Parwan, Logar, and Wardak, where nearly 90 percent of CERP spending took 

place in 2014.635 CERP funding continued to decrease sharply, from $10 million 

in appropriations in 2015, to $5 million in both 2016 and 2017.636 From 

2004–2017, CERP disbursed $2.3 billion in Afghanistan. (See figure 9.)

Implementation

Our analysis of the implementation of CERP suggests senior policymakers 

devoted money to a program with no overarching strategy, and without effective 

systems for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data. The result was a 

program that spent $2.3 billion in a profoundly underdeveloped economy with 

unknown effects.

Monitoring and Evaluation Were Poor

Within DOD, there were important distinctions between the concepts of 

measuring performance and measuring effectiveness. Measures of performance 

looked at task accomplishment, such as the physical quality of a newly 

constructed training facility for security forces, while measures of effectiveness 

(also called measures of effect) might look at the impact of the training facility 

on security. The latter was clearly more difficult to define and measure.637

Source: DOD, response to SIGAR data call, January 17, 2018.

AFGHANISTAN CERP DISBURSEMENTS FROM FY 2004–FY 2017 ($ MILLIONS)

0

100

200

300

400

500

$600

FY 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

2.97

2017

6.44 1.60 3.61

37.51

103.54

328.81

500.70

408.38

130.74

35.22

381.30

178.41

159.40

FIGURE 9
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Twice during 2009, official CERP guidance emphasized the need for improved 

performance metrics. In May 2009, for example, USFOR-A published Money as a 

Weapon System–Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), which provided guidance on CERP 

processes and made performance metrics a requirement for all projects over 

$50,000. The December 2009 update to MAAWS-A made performance metrics 

a requirement for all projects, regardless of dollar value.638 MAAWS-A put the 

USFOR-A J9—the civil affairs directorate—in charge of ensuring subordinate 

commanders and program managers developed “tangible performance metrics 

to measure effectiveness of projects.”639 The December 2009 update went one 

step further and made measures of effectiveness a requirement for all CERP 

projects, regardless of dollar value. However, the relevant section in the update 

did not actually provide guidance as to how to measure a project’s impact 

after implementation, but instead listed required considerations to justify 

initiating a project. For example, beforehand, implementers were required to 

think about and document a project’s anticipated sustainability and how it was 

hoped to benefit the local population, but MAAWS-A did not require or provide 

any guidance to implementers as to how to determine whether a project was 

effective after it was complete.640

A former senior USFOR-A official in charge of CERP implementation confirmed 

to SIGAR that reporting on project impact, as described in MAAWS-A, was 

not formalized: 

There was no formal way of reporting CERP impact. When you request a 

project, you include the expected impact you think the project will have, but 

if we built a school, we never went back to do a nose count of the students 

at the school. MAAWS-A requires that we identify performance metrics up 

front—for example, when we are proposing a project, we have to outline 

what success will look like, the number of students educated per year, and 

other things—but it doesn’t require anything about evaluating the impact 

after the project is complete. Commanders at the battalion and brigade level 

would be the ones to ask questions about project effectiveness, especially 

after arriving in country when everything was unknown to them, but we at 

USFOR-A would never ask those questions.641

Delegating impact evaluation to subordinate units with little guidance proved 

to be a recurring problem, which is discussed further below. However, this 

former official’s framing of the recurring problem highlights another important 

point. Counting the number of students educated during the school year is 

not measuring effectiveness, but rather something between performance and 

effectiveness, or what development professionals call outcome: the immediate 

effects of a project or intervention. However, USFOR-A did not build that school 

because education was its end goal. According to an unsigned ISAF CERP 

strategy draft from 2010, which provides insight into senior leaders’ thinking at 

the time, the goal of CERP was to “protect the population, neutralize insurgent 

networks, and promote effective governance that is acceptable to the Afghan 

people.”642 In other words, while CERP built schools to educate children, the end 
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goal was winning hearts and minds; therefore, 

counting the number of students in school could 

not measure the effectiveness of CERP. A far 

more complex measuring stick was required, one 

based on, perhaps, levels of violence or Afghan 

perceptions of their government. The military’s 

struggle to measure CERP’s effectiveness became 

clear as the subject of evaluating impact received 

increasing attention from outside observers and 

even some senior commanders. 

In September 2009, following congressional 

scrutiny of CERP, the CENTCOM commander sent 

a memorandum to the commanders of USFOR-A 

and Multi-National Force-Iraq instructing 

them to establish and use more refined project 

evaluation and validation criteria for CERP in 

order to “preserve the program as a key nonkinetic COIN tool.”643

 By August 2010, ISAF 

Joint Command (IJC) was developing CERP 

guidance that emphasized, “CERP is a weapon 

and will be treated as one. Personnel will train 

and practice in its use and will conduct ‘battle 

damage assessments’ to determine the effects 

of CERP expenditures.”644 A few months later, 

the U.S. Army Audit Agency called for USFOR-A 

to develop CERP “baselines” before completing 

projects to enable units to clearly compare 

conditions before and after a project was implemented.645 The February 2011 

update to MAAWS-A appears to be the first time USFOR-A documented the need to 

measure CERP projects’ impacts on their area of operations, which is distinct from 

performance metrics.646

Interviews with personnel who attempted to develop metrics revealed 

they struggled to devise methods to measure a project’s impact on the 

counterinsurgency fight.647 Often, the metrics that were developed were meant 

to prevent fraud, not to understand a project’s impact on COIN. For example, a 

former senior USFOR-A official in charge of CERP finances said: 

On the larger projects, we made sure our measures of performance were good, 

for example, was the hospital built properly, did it have X number of doctors 

working in it, and other factors—but we had no idea how to measure if the 

hospital’s existence was reducing support for the Taliban. That was always the 

last 10 yards that we couldn’t run. . . . We never broke the code on impact.648

Afghan laborers move dirt and gravel up a series of platforms to the 

roof of a new prison in Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan Province, on February 1, 

2011. (U.S. Air Force photo by 1st Lt. Matt Schroff)
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Civil affairs personnel also encountered significant conceptual and practical 

problems when they tried to improve impact evaluation methods. A stabilization 

operations planner in RC-East said: 

I wanted to develop metrics for measuring impact for each project, but it was 

so hard to know what was causing security in any particular area to improve 

or worsen, and we could only get about 10 percent of the data we wanted to 

evaluate anything. So, we decided it was too hard to focus on impact at the 

project level. The only metrics we ever developed were anchored in financial 

management: making sure people got paid and making sure things were built.649

The former senior USFOR-A official in charge of CERP implementation cited 

similar metrics derived from the process of implementation rather than results, 

such as the number of occasions when CERP implementers left their bases 

or the number of contacts they had with Afghan officials.650

 He attributed the 

inadequate evaluations to staffing decisions and an institutional emphasis on 

checking boxes and following bureaucratic processes: 

[Civil affairs] didn’t have the staff to review project effectiveness because it 

was never a priority. We did a good job of vetting projects and making sure 

all the boxes were checked, but we had no infrastructure in place to assess 

the effectiveness of projects. We only cared about questions like, ‘Does the 

project meet legal/ethical requirements? Did the Army Corps of Engineers 

and other required entities sign off on it?’651

Others echoed these concerns, saying that evaluating impact was not part of 

the workflow, and if it had been, it would have required additional time and 

personnel that no one had.652 Spending more time measuring one project’s 

impact would have meant less time requesting and implementing new projects, 

which was an important criteria against which commanders and civil affairs 

Members of Khost PRT check the quality of the work done on the Hassan Khot school roof on July 3, 2010. 

(U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Julianne M. Showalter)
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(CA) units were judged, as related to CERP.653 USFOR-A’s struggle to create 

measures of effectiveness and implementers’ lack of time to develop (much less 

implement) them meant that, in practice, tracking and reporting on effectiveness 

was often not a requirement. As one civil affairs officer noted about assessing 

impact, “If it’s not a due-out, it won’t happen. The bureaucracy has to be set up 

so that we are both motivated and able to evaluate impact.”654

The metrics that were developed for CERP were meant to prevent 

fraud, not to understand a project’s impact on COIN.

The March 2012 version of MAAWS-A placed more emphasis on the need to 

collect data and measure performance and effectiveness, both in terms of 

COIN effects and economic effects.655 However, it is not clear that emphasizing 

and staffing for improved impact evaluation would have translated into a 

clearer picture of project impact. Policy researchers and academics who have 

attempted to evaluate the impact of CERP have often returned inconclusive or 

conflicting results. A prime example is the body of work that uses violence as a 

proxy for instability. That body of research variously found:

1. There was no relationship between CERP spending and violence 

in Afghanistan.656

2. Small CERP projects might more effectively reduce violence than large 

CERP projects.657

3. CERP reduced violence in Iraq. In a later study, the same team found that aid was

more likely to reduce violence when projects were small, security force presence 

was high, and development professionals contributed their expertise.658

4. CERP activity for projects costing less than $50,000 was associated with 

reduced violence; for projects above $50,000, CERP activity may have been 

associated with increased levels of violence.659

5. CERP construction activity failed to decrease levels of violence regardless of 

project cost.660

6. CERP increased violence in contested districts, but it tamped down violence 

against security forces in areas under their control. Even in governmentcontrolled areas, more than a million dollars in CERP spending was 

estimated to be required for every attack prevented.661

7. CERP was associated with improved security, increased intelligence 

collection, and decreased enemy engagements.662

In summary, the evidence is conflicting and inconclusive. One study noted in 

2012, “In an environment with little reliable quantitative data, with numerous 

independent variables that make determining correlation (not to mention causality) 

virtually impossible, and where Western-style public opinion polling methodologies 
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may not be reliable, the determination of impact may have to be more art than 

science.”663 As one senior civil affairs officer said, his division staff “would 

regularly tell COMISAF [Commander, ISAF], ‘CERP is a terrible development tool, 

but it’s a great stabilization tool,’ but we never knew if it was true.”664

Data Limitations

Even if universally applicable metrics had existed, it seems likely that poor 

record keeping and knowledge management processes would have limited their 

utility. The extant data on CERP in Afghanistan is spotty, with significant gaps, 

omissions, and duplicates. In 2009, SIGAR found that more than half of the 

CERP project files it reviewed from the 2007–2009 period were incomplete.665

A 2010 review of CERP project files by the U.S. Army Audit Agency found that 

92.6 percent of the records reviewed—212 of 229—were not complete, and the 

gaps were often important documents.666

One former senior USFOR-A official in charge of CERP finances described the 

state of the CERP data in the Combined Information Data Network Exchange 

(CIDNE) database when he arrived in Afghanistan: 

Getting projects into CIDNE was a big deal and a big problem. There were 

3000 incomplete projects when I came into theater, and we had no idea if they 

were actually completed but never closed out, or simply abandoned midway. 

Many were open for six months, which usually meant they were finished 

but never closed out, but we couldn’t know unless we put eyes on them. So, 

we sent taskings down for civil affairs to check every single project to get 

CIDNE up to date. . . . Our two teams spent most of their time cleaning and 

reconciling CIDNE reports. So many of the reports had been mismanaged. 

You’d see the same picture of a clinic posted to a hundred different 

clinic project reports around the country, and you’d see the same project 

justification word for word on a hundred different CERP reports.667

Poor documentation practices by implementers may have been caused by 

ignorance of appropriate data management requirements, entrenched local 

administrative practices, or passive resistance to red tape. PRTs, which 

managed a large share of CERP funds, sometimes inherited documentation 

procedures from their predecessors, rather than following official requirements, 

which created a legacy of unique data management practices.668

“You’d see the same picture of a clinic posted to a hundred 

different clinic project reports around the country, and you’d

 see the same project justification word for word on a 

hundred different CERP reports.”

—Former senior USFOR-A official

The Institutional Drive to “Do Something”
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Many civilian and military personnel at all levels continued to believe CERP was 

a useful program that supported U.S. policy objectives in Afghanistan, despite 

a lack of formal program evaluations and a preponderance of poor quality 

program data. A recent account of senior civilian and military leaders’ views on 

CERP observed that most continue to believe CERP was a valuable tool at the 

tactical level, particularly when used to implement small projects.669 The faith 

that senior leaders had in CERP was on display in their internal deliberations. In 

2010, ISAF drafted CERP strategy guidance that stated, “CERP is helping to win 

trust, promote civil infrastructure development, and meet emergency needs of 

the people in Afghanistan.”670

“At one point, I told my brigade that if we are going to ignore 

impact, then the smartest thing to do is nothing. I got crickets. 

‘We can’t build nothing,’ they said.”

—Senior civil affairs officer

But senior leaders’ expressions of confidence in CERP were out of step with 

the warnings that were coming from watchdog groups like the Government 

Accountability Office (GAO), SIGAR, the DOD Inspector General (DOD IG), 

and the Army Audit Agency that highlighted the program’s unproven efficacy. 

One clue as to how and why the military was able to reconcile these alternate 

views of CERP can be found in a 2009 USFOR-A response to a SIGAR inspection 

report on a CERP-funded road construction project. In that case, USFOR-A said 

they strived “for a balance between static inaction and dynamic reconstruction 

efforts that move the Afghanistan people forward” and referenced an “obligation 

to make progress with respect to reconstruction efforts.”671 The implication 

was that although the problems with the CERP status quo might be glaring, the 

military was charged with meeting obligations and achieving certain effects, 

and those tasks required action, regardless of whether DOD’s efforts could be 

sustained. Conditions were not ripe for success, but “static inaction” was not a 

solution either. One senior civil affairs officer who deployed to RC-East multiple 

times said, “At one point, I told my brigade that if we are going to ignore impact, 

then the smartest thing to do is nothing. I got crickets. ‘We can’t build nothing,’ 

they said.”672

Buying Victory

Pressure to generate results translated into an emphasis on spending CERP 

dollars as quickly as possible. According to General Petraeus, “What drove 

spending was the need to solidify gains as quickly as we could, knowing that 

we had a tight drawdown timeline. . . . And we wound up spending faster than 

we would have if we felt we had forces longer than we did.”673 The pressure 

to spend CERP funds often came from senior officials who, like Petraeus, felt 
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political pressure to generate results and shared a belief in the power of CERP 

expenditures. A senior USAID official in southern Afghanistan recalled, “There 

was a real and pervasive belief that if you dumped money into an economy, you 

could save it. Those of us who said otherwise were ignored. . . . The strategy was 

‘money expended equals success.’”674

“There was a real and pervasive belief that if you dumped money 

into an economy, you could save it. Those of us who said otherwise 

were ignored. . . . The strategy was ‘money expended equals success.’”

—Senior USAID official

At the brigade level and below, CERP project implementers reported that the 

burn rate was excessive, but their pleas to slow the spending fell on deaf ears. 

The senior USAID official said that infantry commanders were going outside their 

chain of command and urging USAID staff to help “‘turn the money off.’ They kept 

telling me, ‘We’re having to look for people and projects to spend it on.’”675

The difficulty of understanding the complex political and social dimensions of 

the environment and developing suitable metrics, combined with the pressure to 

generate demonstrable results, led military forces to measure things they could 

see, which in this case was the outflow of CERP dollars. Thus, money became 

the metric for implementers, such as the PRTs, who were judged on how much 

they spent, among other criteria.676 As a former senior USFOR-A CERP official 

U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Latha Caillouette, a PRT Zabul engineer, shows contractors erosion control repairs 

that are needed at a bridge in Shah Joy District, Zabul Province, on March 4, 2011. (U.S. Air Force photo by 

1st Lt. Brian Wagner)
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described, in Afghanistan, “no one in the military was ever given credit for 

saving money.”677

CERP may have overshadowed the Afghan government and its equivalent 

local development initiatives, such as the National Solidarity Program.678

 Both 

programs typically implemented small projects, and both sought to use those 

projects as springboards for building relationships between the community and 

the government. According to a number of U.S. officials, CERP was a direct 

competitor to the Afghan government’s efforts, particularly NSP, which was 

regarded as relatively successful.679 Whether CERP overshadowed the Afghan 

government or not, many DOD personnel felt it was beneficial. A survey of 

uniformed personnel conducted by RAND suggested that 60 percent of Marines 

and 80 percent of special operators who had been involved with the use of 

CERP at the tactical or operational level believed CERP helped their mission. 

Even some of the 30 percent of Marines who said the program may have 

hindered their mission believed that it could be effective if it was paired with 

improved operational and strategic guidance.680

Lack of Priorities Inhibited Thoughtful Deliberation

Abundant funds, weak guidance, and pressure to spend and generate results 

also contributed to poor project planning and distracted from the need to assess 

project impacts. A senior civil affairs officer pointed out: 

In a resource-restricted environment, if you want your project to be funded, 

it has to be rigorous and thoughtful. If the resources are infinite, there is 

no need to use your head or be accountable. If we don’t have to make any 

tradeoffs, priorities, or sacrifices, why would we think at all? If no one has to 

ask why, the ideas are going to be awful. And that’s what happened.681

This was a significant departure from spending habits earlier in the war, when 

CERP budgets were leaner and thus projects were more thoughtful. Brigadier 

General Martin Schweitzer, who commanded U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan 

from 2006 to 2007, observed, “Early on it was a very deliberate process. We 

assessed where we’d get the biggest bang for the buck, and if an area wasn’t 

ready, we didn’t spend there.”682

RAND’s interviews with CERP implementers indicated projects that were 

poorly designed for a given context contributed to what they considered to be 

project failures.683 Inadvertently building a road through local farmers’ cropland 

or providing motorcycles to Afghan Local Police without a maintenance plan 

undermined the projects’ intended effects.684

While CERP guidance provided definitions and example projects for each 

of the approved project categories, commanders were given flexibility to 

develop projects specific to their areas of operation. A 2009 report by the 
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U.S. Army Audit Agency revealed that some projects described as “urgent 

and humanitarian” in nature were in some cases large infrastructure projects, 

economic projects, or “quality of life” efforts that pushed the boundaries of the 

permissible scope of CERP funds.685

Shortage of Qualified Civil Affairs Personnel

Another significant challenge for CERP implementation was the shortage of 

well-trained and experienced personnel. Although civil affairs was the military’s 

premier specialization for stability and humanitarian operations, many CA 

personnel were unfamiliar with CERP and received insufficient training on its 

use. Implementers often failed to follow CERP processes and guidelines, such as 

filing legal reviews and statements of work.686

The GAO, DOD IG, and Army Audit Agency attributed some of the bureaucratic 

dysfunction to poor training, but there was another layer to the problem that 

was often overlooked by outside observers.687 According to one senior CA 

officer, “When I would ask RC-E CERP managers to explain the impact of 

a specific project being considered, I was often told, ‘It might work,’ as its 

justification. None of them had development backgrounds; they were only 

concerned with preventing waste, fraud, and abuse at the most simple level.”688

Personnel were not only ill-prepared to document and implement projects, they 

were also sometimes unprepared to properly conceptualize projects.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan revealed a need for more personnel with 

special skillsets outside traditional, conventional military occupations; these 

skillsets included civil affairs. In recognition of the demand for units with 

Afghan government officials and members of PRT Zabul meet with elders in Safidar village in Zabul 

Province in February 2011 to discuss the distribution of winter supplies. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. 

Brian Ferguson)
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“softer” skills, DOD made the decision in 2006 to sharply increase the number 

of civil affairs units.689 However, the surge’s demand for civil affairs personnel 

outstripped supply, which was limited by training timelines; newly trained 

CA personnel did not finish training until 2008. In 2009, a number of units 

specializing in chemical warfare were converted to CA units to help further 

address the shortage.690

These stopgap measures and rapid scaling diluted the quality of CA personnel. 

Civil affairs is a sophisticated skillset that cannot be mass produced. By trying 

to do so, the Army degraded the quality of the CA cadre significantly, which, 

in turn, undermined its ability to oversee CERP. SIGAR interviews revealed 

concerns about the capabilities and training deficiencies observed among some 

CA personnel during the height of the surge, for example.691 One senior CA 

officer with multiple tours in eastern Afghanistan described how these factors 

contributed to a dysfunctional personnel system that rose up to the level of 

senior officers:

Those of us in civil affairs, especially the reserve component, let ourselves 

be told what our program was in order to accommodate a rapid call-up and 

surge, which required us to lower our standards for officers and enlisted. 

We needed bodies. The tempo required us to shorten the CA training to four 

weeks, and it was all PowerPoint. At one point in the surge, we converted 

chemical companies into CA companies. So, not only did we minimize what 

a properly trained civil affairs operator can bring to the fight, but we also 

glossed over the base requirements. No judgment on our chemical brethren, 

but many of them were unable to branch transfer when they tried to do so at 

the completion of their combat tour. Frankly, as a collective whole, they were 

not competent.

But the real problem was at the senior officer level. We had those who were 

late arrivals to the CA branch and had no experience leading civil affairs 

teams. They were then thrust into staff positions on PRTs, brigades, and 

above with no true understanding of the doctrine or ability to articulate 

concerns from CA in the field, so they were incapable of preventing CERP 

from becoming a spending machine.692

By late 2009, the Department of the Army was taking remedial action to address 

skills and training shortfalls.693 However, by that point, CERP had already been 

in Afghanistan for half a decade and suffered from poor training, insufficient 

evaluation systems, and no real strategic direction.

No Consistent CERP Strategy

In accordance with the FMR guidance for CERP, senior leaders devolved a great 

deal of control over funds and decisions about how and when to implement 

projects to the brigade level and below. The categories of acceptable projects 

were broad, which provided commanders the flexibility to address the needs 

they perceived in their respective areas of operation, but in combination with 

abundant funding and pressure to spend liberally, this weak guidance resulted 

in a diverse project portfolio that ran the gamut, both in terms of scale and 

project type. Senior leaders did not provide clear, strategic guidance and left it 
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up to implementers to generate effects from the bottom up. There simply was no 

consistent or persistent strategy to obtain the results officials hoped would flow 

from CERP.694

The imprecise thinking on how CERP would generate stabilizing effects seeped 

down to the lower levels where projects were devised and implemented. 

Consequently, CERP project implementers often did not share a common view 

of how the program would help stabilize Afghanistan, and many field grade 

commanders were not able to articulate how their CERP projects aligned with 

program guidance.695 An excerpt from a RAND report is telling:

The general officers we interviewed indicated that use of CERP was rarely 

part of any considered strategy. . . . Once CERP was created, the focus at 

the general officer level shifted to monitoring and spending of CERP funds 

rather than trying to nest CERP into a broader military strategy. . . . With a 

lack of strategic guidance for CERP, subordinate commanders at the company, 

battalion, and brigade level would develop their own ‘strategies’ to use CERP.696

Thus, divergent lines of thinking developed at the implementer level regarding 

what CERP was and how it should be employed. As a former senior USFOR-A 

official in charge of CERP finances observed, “Some wanted CERP to be small—

just battlefield remediation with no huge projects—but others thought that we 

had to make a big difference because the clock was ticking and CERP was the 

only available funding source we had to create strategically important impacts 

on behalf of the government of Afghanistan, so the more money we could spend, 

the better, in their eyes.”697 Different perspectives between implementers over 

Using CERP funds, Afghan men rebuild markets in Now Zad District, Helmand Province, on December 17, 

2009. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Daniel M. Moman)
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which project characteristics were more likely to generate favorable outcomes 

were reportedly not isolated incidents.698

The various iterations of the MAAWS-A documents are overwhelmingly 

procedural and focused primarily on financial management. Through 2010, the 

introductory letters to the MAAWS-A were written by a colonel in the USFOR-A 

J8, and typically reflected the document’s financial management focus. That 

began to change, however, in February 2011 with the introductory letter by 

Major General Timothy McHail, who specified that the intent of CERP was to 

achieve “‘focused effects’ with an emphasis to meet urgent humanitarian needs 

and providing maximum employment opportunities for the Afghan people.”699

The mention of a specific overarching goal for CERP, like supporting Afghan 

employment, was a step toward tying the program to specific objectives. The 

following year, a joint introductory letter to the MAAWS-A by General Allen, the 

ISAF commander, and Ambassador Crocker went a step further in their attempt 

to synchronize CERP with the Integrated Civ-Mil Campaign Plan and the ISAF 

Theater Campaign Plan. They wrote:

Thus far, CERP projects have been executed to support the USFOR-A 

Campaign Support Plan, “Support Sectors Targeted for Development,” 

“Promote Job Growth,” and “Advance the Economic Foundation” but not 

as part of a formal strategy or measured in terms of attaining strategic 

objectives and goals. This MAAWS-A [Standard Operating Procedure] 

provides the details on narrowing potential CERP projects to five categories 

(from 20) that are best suited to support our counterinsurgency objectives 

and refines the list of recommended project types within each category based 

on desired effects and synchronization within the Campaign Support Plan.700

The evolution of the MAAWS-A from 2011 through 2013 demonstrates that 

commanders in theater recognized and began to address the need for additional 

guidance and strategic direction for CERP. As the U.S. mission shifted to a 

support role in 2014 and beyond, U.S. military operations and CERP spending 

contracted and MAAWS-A reverted to its more procedural antecedents. 

VILLAGE STABILITY OPERATIONS

VSO was a DOD program implemented by U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) 

from 2010 to 2014 that attempted to stabilize strategically located villages. A VSO 

guidance document from 2011 described the program as “a range of planned 

activities designed to stabilize a village and connect it to formal governance at 

the district and provincial levels.”701 The desired outcome was an environment 

inhospitable to insurgents’ influence where legitimate local leaders could provide 

security and services, with connection to the Afghan government.702

At the village level, a multifunctional team called a Village Stability Platform 

(VSP) consisted of up to about 50 individuals, including a 12-person SOF team 

and a support network of intelligence personnel, civil affairs, information 
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operations personnel, and communications specialists.703 These teams 

implemented a four-phase VSO process.704

Human terrain

generally refers to 

the social, cultural, 

political, and economic 

characteristics of the 

indigenous population.

VSO Phases

Shape: Assess the physical and human terrain of an area, engage the local community, 

build rapport, and establish a small base of operations in or near the community. The 

phase is complete when the team is accepted by the community.705

Hold: Improve local security and counter insurgent intimidation by recruiting and 

organizing an Afghan Local Police force. The phase is complete when intimidation is 

eliminated and there is “local capacity” for security, governance, and development.706

Build: Connect the village to the Afghan government by creating a symbiotic relationship 

between an informal, traditional village council and the district government, where the 

government provides resources and the village provides security and extends the writ 

of the state. The phase is complete when there is a “clear connection” between the 

community and the district government.707

Expand/Transition: Replicate the success at the community level in adjacent areas, 

eventually covering the entire district before transferring security responsibilities to 

the ANDSF.708

VSP efforts to connect villages to the district and provincial governments were 

facilitated by SOF personnel at the district, provincial, and national levels, who, in 

theory, helped local Afghan officials develop functional relationships with Afghan 

communities and the national government in Kabul.709 In the capital, for example, 

the Village Stability National Coordination Center was charged with coordinating 

VSO efforts with the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development 

to ensure national-level development resources made it down to each VSP, so 

communities would see the benefit of allying with the government.710 The creators 

of VSO also envisioned that U.S. SOF teams would partner with Afghan Special 

Forces teams, who would eventually assume the responsibility for cultivating 

local forces and expanding the operation after the withdrawal of U.S. forces.711

Origins of VSO

Beginning in 2009, the concept of local security forces protecting their own 

communities gained traction within the coalition. There were several reasons 

for the increased interest in local defense forces, in addition to the fact that all 

other efforts to stem the growing insurgency had failed. These reasons included:

• Coalition withdrawal: The anticipated 2014 drawdown of coalition troops 

articulated at Lisbon in late 2010 demanded that Afghan forces assume 

responsibility for security, but there was not enough time to properly train and 

field ANDSF in sufficient numbers to protect key terrain.712
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• Local legitimacy: The largely non-Pashtun ANDSF who were deployed 

to Pashtun areas, particularly in the south, were viewed by the locals as a 

foreign force.713

• Security for Afghan partners: Local Afghans who worked with the U.S. and 

Afghan governments via programs like the Afghan Social Outreach Program 

were vulnerable to insurgent attacks.714

• The Iraq model: The success of the Sons of Iraq population mobilization 

program appeared to have marginalized al-Qaeda and created a semblance 

of stability.

715

• Cost: Local security forces were less expensive than uniformed ANDSF.

716

In October 2008, U.S. and Afghan officials had their first discussions about 

a local defense initiative that would come to be known as the Afghan Public 

Protection Program (AP3).717 Four months after the initial U.S.-Afghan meeting, 

AP3 began operating within the Ministry of Interior (MOI) at pilot sites in 

four districts of Wardak Province: Chak, Jalrez, Maidan Shar, and Nerkh.718

Similar to later programs in the VSO lineage, AP3 was intended to be based on 

locally sourced security forces who were selected from the community by a 

representative council of local villagers.719 In this case, AP3 was initially tied 

to community councils that were fostered by the USAID-funded Afghan Social 

Outreach Program, another pilot program in Wardak.720

But AP3 was beset by the same challenges that plagued earlier local police 

efforts, including recruitment, logistics, and corrupt local commanders.721

Further challenges were attributed, at least in part, to the program’s Afghan 

leadership.722 The general consensus among the SOF personnel in Wardak 

was that the MOI’s involvement made implementation overly centralized and 

bureaucratic.723

 The concept and implementation needed to be refined.

Meanwhile, at U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Brigadier General 

Edward Reeder was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan to take charge of the 

newly created Combined Forces Special Operations Component CommandAfghanistan (CFSOCC-A) in Kabul. Prior to departing SOCOM, Reeder reflected 

on his 2006–2007 tour as commander of the Combined Joint Special Operations 

Task Force-Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A), during and after which the insurgency 

continued to grow, despite CJSOTF-A’s aggressive kill/capture missions.724 The 

failure of “direct action” to stem the insurgency led Reeder and many of his 

colleagues to conclude that CFSOCC-A needed to take a different approach.725

Reeder began by consulting members of the intelligence community, who 

described the root causes of seasonal fighting patterns and the ways insurgents 

gained traction by allying themselves with local communities who were at odds 

with the majority tribes and their government backers. The product of those 
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conversations was a new take on local security and governance, the details of 

which were refined by Reeder’s staff.726 The program they created, Community 

Defense Initiatives (CDI), was based on historical accounts of Afghan politics 

and society dating back to the 19th century.727 It was, in essence, the first 

iteration of what would become the VSO model.

When Reeder arrived in country, he discovered the coalition was already 

employing a similar concept at the AP3 site in Wardak. In Reeder’s opinion, 

however, that effort was not receiving the attention and support it needed to be 

improved and expanded. Thus, Reeder simply used AP3 to help make the case 

for CDI and advance the local security and stability agenda. He and his staff 

consulted and lobbied both the Afghan government and ISAF for support, an 

effort that took months to gain traction. In the interim, CFSOCC-A proceeded 

with CDI, but as a low-key sideline project, rather than the main effort.728

By the middle of 2009, U.S. Army Special Forces 

were managing a handful of CDI pilot sites in 

Nili (Daykundi), Achin (Nangarhar), Gereshk 

(Helmand), Arghandab and Khakrez (Kandahar), 

and parts of Paktika.729 Six more sites were 

added to areas across the south and east.730

These sites produced a collection of lessons that 

were used as a basis for refining the program 

concept.731 In Daykundi, for example, the 

12-man Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 

“operationalized” the concept handed down 

by CFSOCC-A, developing an implementation 

plan that foreshadowed the shape-hold-buildtransition methodology emphasized by later 

VSO guidance.732 (See page 108.)

In July 2009, General McChrystal assumed 

command of ISAF and USFOR-A with a 

mandate to overhaul the coalition’s strategy 

and implement a counterinsurgency campaign 

that planners hoped would turn the tide of the 

conflict. With that in mind, CFSOCC-A briefed 

McChrystal on the latest local defense concept 

and won his support to integrate the SOF 

program into the overarching counterinsurgency 

strategy.733 According to Reeder, Afghanistan’s 

CIA Chief of Station had been very supportive 

of CDI and was instrumental in convincing 

New ALP members line up to receive their assigned weapons during 

a graduation ceremony in Maiwand District, Kandahar Province, on 

March 16, 2013. (U.S. Army photo)
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McChrystal of the program’s merits and potential.734 What emerged was a dualtrack SOF program comprising two tasks: (1) cultivating small anti-Taliban 

militias at the village level (what would eventually become VSO/ALP), and 

(2) training the Afghan National Army Special Forces (ANASF) to eventually 

assume the responsibility for militia development, support, and expansion.735

In early 2010, CDI was renamed Local Defense Initiatives (LDI) and two months 

later received the enduring title of Village Stability Operations.736 Brigadier 

General Scott Miller took command of CFSOCC-A from Reeder in April of 2010 

and began to ramp up VSO, with McChrystal’s support.737

By the middle of 2010, General McChrystal was receiving encouraging reports 

from several VSO sites.738 Special Forces mentors suggested that local security 

forces had low rates of attrition and desertion, won many battles, created 

one-mile security bubbles around VSO sites, were more agile and quick to 

respond than their conventional counterparts, knew local terrain well, and 

provided quality intelligence.739 Based on those developments, McChrystal 

began advocating for a major expansion of the program.740 He was opposed by 

U.S. Ambassador Eikenberry and Afghan President Karzai, who both feared 

these local defense forces would devolve into predatory militias. Eikenberry 

insisted on a clear approval for the program from both Karzai and his cabinet 

before the effort was expanded.741

After replacing McChrystal as ISAF commander in July 2010, General Petraeus 

also advocated for VSO and personally lobbied Karzai, who eventually agreed.742

In August 2010, Karzai formally authorized a 10,000-man force for a period of 

two to five years.743 Many in the local defense forces were expected to transition 

into the ANDSF as the VSO program came to a close.744

By the time it was approved, the program was already well underway, with VSPs 

operating at 20 locations around the country.745 As expansion got underway, 

however, the coalition and its Afghan partners began to deviate sharply from the 

original concept.

Expanding the Afghan Local Police

The perceived success of VSO and ALP during the early years of the program 

led top military officials to believe the ALP could be a “game changer,” filling 

the security vacuum as international forces withdrew.746 (See figure 10.) The 

rapid expansion of the program beginning in 2011 was driven by the withdrawal 

timeline.747 Still, according to General Allen, who oversaw the ALP expansion 

as COMISAF, “Of the many measures we initiated for stabilization, the ALP 

program was one of the most effective. The ALP stood their ground 80 percent 

of the time they were attacked. Indeed, the Taliban were more concerned 
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about ALP than almost any other single measure taken to protect the Afghan 

people.”748 Yet, many of the challenges that confronted the VSO program first 

appeared or worsened during this expansion phase. One of the major challenges 

was establishing and maintaining the legitimacy of the ALP as an extension of 

the Afghan government.

FIGURE 10
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Absorbing Militias

Rapid ALP growth was achieved, in part, through the wholesale integration of 

preexisting armed groups. The Afghan government, and President Karzai in 

particular, seemed to view the ALP as an opportunity to draw private militias 

into the fold.749 A directive from the MOI released in June 2011 stated that, 

from the ministry’s perspective, the aim of the ALP program was to absorb all 

prior village and district defense programs.750 The idea did have a precedent; 

in August 2010, the original CDI/LDI militias were subsumed into the ALP 

under the MOI.751 While that initial round of inductees into the ALP was 

reasonable given that they were recruited and vetted in accordance with ALP 

recruitment guidelines, subsequent forces were often not properly processed, 

which sometimes led to a lack of legitimacy and hostile relations with the local 

population.752 As a result, some Afghan officials began to express reservations 

about ALP feasibility, including at least one former champion of local 

defense programs.753

“Of the many measures we initiated for stabilization, the ALP 

program was one of the most effective. The ALP stood their ground 

80 percent of the time they were attacked. Indeed, the Taliban were 

more concerned about ALP than almost any other single measure 

taken to protect the Afghan people.”

—General John Allen

In Wardak, for example, the AP3 was slated to be disbanded during FY 2011, but 

Provincial Governor Halim Fidai argued he needed to provide newly unemployed 

forces with a mission, and that he also needed them to help secure Highway 1.754

With the apparent approval of the MOI, the governor anointed the militiamen as 

ALP, circumventing the approval and vetting procedures by local communities, 

which, in theory, would have endowed them with a certain level of legitimacy.755

The former AP3 militias brought their predatory practices and lack of legitimacy 

to the ALP, problems that eventually compelled ISAF to demobilize 260 of them, 

ostensibly for noncompliance with new MOI ALP guidance published in the 

summer of 2011, which stipulated that ALP must be locals and properly vetted.756

Efforts to expand the ALP into other areas of Wardak failed due to recruiting 

problems.757 Meanwhile, Governor Fidai began to recognize that the ALP 

were generating popular discontent in his province. In March 2012, he wrote 

to President Karzai, informing him the ALP were not compatible with the 

population of Wardak, where the tribal structures had been decimated and even 

small communities were riven with factionalism. He recommended that the 

province’s 1,600 ALP be disbanded and replaced with 1,000 uniformed police. 
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In private, senior U.S. military personnel and the civilian leadership in Kabul 

shared some of Fidai’s sentiments.758

But the recommendation to curtail ALP numbers ran against the tide. There 

were ample reports of success as the new VSO methodology and best practices 

took shape, and the pressure to make progress as transition approached was 

significant.759 In June 2011, Afghan and coalition officials agreed to triple the 

target strength of the force, from 10,000 to 30,000.760 At that point, there were 

6,500 ALP personnel distributed across 41 VSPs.761 By March 2013, there would 

be nearly 22,000 ALP.762

Six months after the expansion of ALP was announced, Karzai called for the 

“disbandment” of all local and provincial militias outside of the ALP.763 That 

order also applied to three ISAF-supported local defense forces: CommunityBased Security Solutions in RC-East, Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) 

in RC-North, and Interim Security for Critical Infrastructure in RC-South and 

RC-Southwest. Those forces were slated for complete demobilization by the 

end of 2012, with the option of transitioning to ALP after undergoing the MOI’s 

recommended course of vetting.764

Folding preexisting militias into the ALP often 

created as many problems as it solved.

Although well-intentioned, folding preexisting militias into the ALP often 

created as many problems as it solved. Giving government officials influence 

over the absorption of existing militias and the recruitment and establishment 

of new ALP made the process subject to the sway of strongmen. In Baghlan and 

Kunduz, for example, local Tajik and Uzbek power brokers reportedly hijacked 

the ALP selection process by marginalizing local elders—who should have been 

tasked with recruiting and vetting ALP—and selecting their own recruits.765 On 

the other hand, an embassy cable from 2013 noted that rolling the members of a 

CIP militia into an ALP unit in Kunduz may have resulted in a more disciplined 

militia and greater political stability than in an adjacent community where the 

CIP militia was simply disbanded and its members essentially left to their own 

devices.766 In other words, absorbing militias into sanctioned forces like the ALP 

might give the government a modicum of influence over the force, but creating 

ties to those militias might sully the government’s reputation by signaling its 

tacit approval for past or future misconduct.

Governance and Legitimacy Take a Back Seat to Rapid Expansion

While the Afghan government advanced the policy of folding other militia 

forces into the ALP, demands from U.S. policymakers and senior military 
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officials to expand the force also guided the program away from its original 

purpose. General Petraeus came to view VSO as an opportunity to fill the 

security vacuum as coalition forces withdrew.767 The overriding focus on ALP 

development, rather than VSO methodology, caused the implementers of VSO 

to bypass the political and other nonmilitary aspects of the program.768 Thus, 

according to Scott Mann, who was involved with early implementation of 

VSO, the local security force component of the originally holistic VSO concept 

became the program’s new raison d’être, effectively sidelining the political and 

development aspects.769

Civilian resource constraints only solidified this move away from a holistic VSO 

process. According to Petraeus, “VSO was working initially, but as it expanded 

we ran out of development people from the embassy. So, we were trying to 

replace them with uniformed people, and they’re not the professionals in that 

area.”770 In this way, a broader initiative based on the VSO process, of which ALP 

was only one component, eventually became almost exclusively an ALP effort, 

despite the admonitions of one of the program’s early patrons. As Brigadier 

General Miller, commander of CFSOCC-A, noted, “You can do VSO without ALP, 

but you can’t do ALP without VSO.”771

Not only were governance and development de-emphasized as ALP grew, even 

the idea of representative governance within the ALP itself became secondary. 

For example, according to Colonel Bradley Moses, commander of the 3rd 

Special Forces Group, the rapid development of the ALP meant some ALP were 

not indigenous to the village or village cluster they were assigned to protect, 

undermining a fundamental premise of the program.772 As one military official 

noted, “Both at the strategic and operational level, doing VSO/ALP right took a 

backseat to doing it fast.”773

ALP stand in formation prior to a validation shura at Ab Band District, Ghazni Province, on March 14, 2013. 

(U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Jerry Griffis)
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In addition to diminished community outreach and development efforts, the 

way ALP were trained to secure their area also shifted from the active security 

procedures practiced under CDI, such as patrolling and meeting with local 

residents, to a less adaptable and community-oriented approach based on 

checkpoints and static security. Using ALP for static security in areas outside of 

their local communities reduced community engagement and made them more 

vulnerable to attack.774

“Both at the strategic and operational level, doing 

VSO/ALP right took a backseat to doing it fast.”

—U.S. official embedded with VSO 

Insufficient Numbers of U.S. Special Operations Forces

The rapid scaling of VSO/ALP outstripped the supply of U.S. SOF and supporting 

enablers. During the pilot phase, VSO was conducted by U.S. Army Special 

Forces, units with a long tradition of training indigenous forces that stretched 

back to the Vietnam War. In 2010, however, 

General Petraeus informed CFSOCC-A that other 

services’ SOF personnel would participate in the 

VSO ramp-up.775 Navy SEALs and Marine Special 

Operations Command operators were brought in 

to supplement Army Special Forces.776

Even their combined efforts were not enough. 

There were reports that some SOF units were 

split in two to cover more VSO sites, albeit 

with diminished capacity.777 In 2011, an annual 

progress report to Congress highlighted 

the shortfall in SOF, stating, “The approved 

expansion to 30,000 ALP patrolmen will likely 

strain the capacity of the coalition Special 

Operations Forces in Afghanistan, and may 

require additional conventional forces in order 

to adequately support projected ALP growth.”778

According to Petraeus, “We didn’t have enough 

SOF to do VSO, so I added two infantry 

battalions. And we split all of the [ODA] teams 

in half, augmented them with a squad or more of 

infantry, and doubled the number of VSO sites. 

Again, this was a big-time race against the clock. 

We needed to extend security while we could, 

while we had the forces.”779

ALP and members of coalition SOF conduct a patrol in Shah Joy 

District, Zabul Province, on January 27, 2012. (U.S. Navy photo by 

Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jon Rasmussen)
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Special Operations Forces’ Uneven Embrace of VSO

The execution of VSO as it was originally conceived was not a simple task. 

Establishing contact and building rapport required strong interpersonal and 

cross-cultural communications skills.780 Although U.S. SOF who served as VSO 

team leaders were well versed in military operations, their ability to influence 

Afghan communities varied.781

Reports from VSO program staff suggest a disparity between the military 

services’ aptitudes for VSO. One staff member who worked with multiple SEAL 

teams noted they did not do well with VSO because it was not part of their 

mission training or profile. They reportedly eschewed interacting with locals, let 

alone engaging with them as part of a deliberate political outreach campaign.782

A second person who worked with a VSP in eastern Afghanistan staffed with 

SEALs said the team did not have a point of contact in the local community, nor 

did it have any information about the local social structure. The VSP’s SEAL 

personnel were focused almost exclusively on kinetic operations, and there was 

little evidence of development activity.783

“This was a big-time race against the clock. We needed to extend 

security while we could, while we had the forces.”

—General David Petraeus

Senior military officials were aware there was a disparity between the services. 

General Petraeus noted, “I think it’s fair to say the Green Berets, the Army SF, had 

a gift for this. It was very much in line with the Foreign Internal Defense that has 

long been a task for Green Berets, and other SOF had emphasized that less.”784

However, Army Special Forces did not always embrace the political component 

of VSO, either. At a VSP in Kandahar in 2013, for example, there was reportedly 

no real relationship with the community.785 The Special Forces team delegated 

the community relations piece to support personnel, who were viewed by 

the team as the conduit to the community, while the team focused almost 

exclusively on security and monitoring the ALP.786

There are several possible explanations as to why some SOF teams engaged 

communities more than others. As mentioned above, a lack of familiarity with 

the underlying concept of VSO is one possibility. A fundamental incompatibility 

between the VSO mission and an organization’s culture, identity, and history is 

another. SOF units selected and trained primarily for direct action cannot be 

expected to also perform community outreach with equal facility. Likewise, 

SOF had a wide range of training responsibilities and selection criteria; those 

competing demands limited the amount of training devoted to softer skills. That 
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is not to say that all SOF had an aversion to community engagement. SIGAR 

interviews with a number of enablers and advisors who supported VSOs at 

various locations across Afghanistan throughout the 2010–2013 time period 

reported they did encounter a number of SOF who made a genuine effort to 

meet and communicate with the local community.787

Like CERP and other stabilization programs, reliable monitoring and evaluation 

in VSO was a challenge, and more of an art than a science. When asked why he 

believed VSO was achieving the desired effects, General Petraeus said, “Blocks 

were turning from red to amber to green. And if you do this week after week 

after week, you can feel whether it’s working or not. I also visited many sites 

and was comfortable that, while very difficult, the concept was working.”788

At the same time, there were efforts to formally assess and improve the 

effectiveness of VSO: CFSOCC-A and later Special Operations Joint Task ForceAfghanistan both welcomed a team of researchers from RAND to embed at their 

headquarters to assess the program. RAND’s analysis included interviews with 

SOF who implemented VSO and Afghan public opinion data.789

Considerations of Key Terrain Superseded Community Readiness

During the ALP expansion, VSO site selection mirrored the broader COIN 

strategy of concentrating on key terrain. Sixty-one percent of KTDs had VSO 

at some point during the program’s duration. (See figures 4 and 10.) Planners 

also considered how the Taliban managed to seize control of Afghanistan in 

A U.S. Marine special operations team member assists with security during a construction project for an 

ALP checkpoint in Helmand Province on March 30, 2013. (DOD photo by Sgt. Pete Thibodeau)
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the 1990s by fanning out in small bands in a clockwise progression along the 

Ring Road, beginning in Kandahar.790 CFSOCC-A tried to mimic that advance 

by expanding VSO sites in KTDs in the vicinity of the Ring Road.791 The VSO 

site near Maidan Shar, for example, was selected because it was at a critical 

intersection of Route 1 and Route 2, on the doorsteps of the capital.792

The operational advantages of certain terrain sometimes trumped the original 

prerequisite for the establishment of a VSO site: a community’s genuine desire 

to participate in the program.793 Even during the early stages of VSO when 

sites were chosen based on their perceived favorability for ALP, 60 percent 

experienced “serious difficulties” recruiting local police.794 The reality was, 

relatively few places in Afghanistan may have been suitable for VSO.795

In contrast, CDI sites were deliberately placed in areas where (1) non-local Taliban 

forces were trying to exert influence, and (2) the local community welcomed 

the support of the U.S. Special Forces.796 Prioritizing those two considerations 

improved the chances the site would develop a productive relationship with the 

community, which in turn would support CDI’s security objectives.

Senior planners at CFSOCC-A headquarters at Bagram Airfield could judge 

the value of key terrain based on an area’s geographic relationship to critical 

infrastructure and population centers, but the suitability of the human terrain 

could only be assessed by operating at the ground level and interacting with 

SOF personnel take cover to avoid flying debris as they prepare to board a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter 

during a reconnaissance mission in Kunar Province to identify the site for a future Village Stability Platform 

in February 2012. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Clayton Weiss)
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local communities. That initial assessment phase—and the follow-on politicking 

required to gain entry into the community—may have been the most demanding 

in terms of communication and social aptitude. Planners and the teams running 

VSO at the village level needed socially attuned advisors. 

Some Militia Commanders Co-Opted the Program

Even when the VSP staff did adhere to the principles of the VSO concept, the 

underlying assumptions and the broader applicability of the program were 

questionable. The idea of VSO was based on historical accounts of Afghan 

society that may not have been accurate or applicable to contemporary 

Afghanistan. The concept was coherent and supported by literature, but 

as several experts point out, “The theory was based on an outmoded set of 

assumptions about the capacity of tribal leaders to command the loyalties of 

local villagers. In practice, it was the militia commanders who held the real 

power.”797 Elders involved in establishing ALP forces simply could not compete 

with the influence of these commanders. To their credit, U.S. military forces 

made an effort to test the fundamentals of the program in several locations 

prior to scaling up, and in those areas where the right conditions did exist, 

the program may have achieved its intended purpose. Despite those efforts, 

implementation and scaling befell the same challenges that plagued other local 

defense antecedents, like the Afghan Public Protection Program. 

Some of the worst documented abuses by militia commanders occurred in 

northern Afghan provinces, such as Badakhshan, Takhar, Faryab, Baghlan, and 

Kunduz, areas well beyond the intended geographic extent of the program under 

CDI.798 It was in those areas that many of the militias loyal to local commanders 

found their way into the ranks of the ALP.799

In late 2012, the Afghan government asked the United States to expand the ALP 

from 30,000 to 45,000 members.800 U.S. commanders were initially supportive, 

owing to the fact that the ALP was more economical than the ANDSF, but in the 

summer of 2013, Washington eliminated the possibility of expansion.801 The task 

of transitioning the ALP to Afghan control would be challenging enough, even 

without additional growth.

Transition to Afghan Control

With the announcement in November 2010 that security would be transitioned 

to Afghan control by the end of 2014, there was enormous pressure on coalition 

forces to make quick progress and hand off responsibility to Afghans. Accordingly, 

CFSOCC-A initiated transition planning in 2010 and added a transition phase to 

the VSO shape-hold-build-expand model in 2011.802 The transition of the ALP to 

full Afghan control was slated to begin in the summer of 2012.803
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During the early stages of transition, ISAF called for a relatively small number 

of sites to be handed over to Afghans, which allowed planners to select the sites 

with better security, where the ALP were performing well.804

 By December 2012, 

21 districts had transitioned to Afghan control.805 Meanwhile, during transition, 

the ALP continued to expand, from 6,500 in June 2011 when the second 

expansion was authorized, to more than 16,000 in the summer of 2012, and 

22,000 in the spring of 2013.806

At the same time the ALP were expanding, coalition support for VSO began 

receding from a peak strength of 80 SOF teams and two conventional infantry 

battalions in mid-2012.807 Although the drawdown of VSO was not necessarily 

tied to the drawdown of conventional brigade combat teams, in practice 

VSPs were often reliant on conventional forces’ facilities and transportation 

infrastructure for logistical and medevac coverage. Without that support, some 

VSO sites were forced to close ahead of schedule.808 In early 2013, the combined 

pressure from both scheduled and forced closures left commanders no choice 

but to “transition” ALP units that did not meet the program’s transition criteria. 

Subsequently, in some transitioned areas, checkpoints manned by unprepared 

ALP were overrun by insurgents.809 Training and mentoring programs were also 

curtailed in areas where VSO remained, with some ALP spending less than a 

year with their SOF mentors, rather than the two-year duration recommended 

in VSO guidance.810 These necessary compromises were products of the political 

pressure to scale up ALP and withdraw coalition forces on precipitous timelines.

The transition process was also complicated by the low numbers of suitable 

Afghan commanders. The original plan—to have ANASF assume responsibility 

for VSO—was scrapped due to poor cooperation between MOI, which had 

authority over the ALP, and the Ministry of Defense, which controlled the 

ANA.811 The responsibility for appointing the leadership of ALP units then fell 

to local officials, who sometimes made poor choices, or based their decisions 

on ethnic or tribal affiliations.812 Afghans at all levels of government sometimes 

saw the ALP as an opportunity to develop a power base or extract resources.813

In other cases, ALP units developed by SOF were reportedly more loyal to their 

U.S. mentors than they were to the Afghan government.814

 Some ALP units fell 

under the control of strongmen who may have been effective at commanding the 

force, but often alienated the population by resorting to draconian and arbitrary 

punishments for suspected insurgent sympathizers. 

In addition to local leadership issues, the Afghan government proved 

to be unwilling or unable to support ALP units. During the transition, 

U.S. commanders decided to turn over responsibility for ALP logistics and 

supply to the MOI in the hope that this would compel the Afghans to work more 

diligently and effectively. The commanders were proven wrong when large 
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numbers of ALP deserted when they received their salaries and supplies months 

late, or not at all. In response, the coalition resumed supply operations for 

certain ALP units out of fear that the whole program would unravel.815

Despite the problems and dysfunction, transition continued. Remnants 

of VSO continued at a reduced capacity before completely closing on 

October 31, 2014.816 While VSO ended, ALP has continued under MOI control.817

Evolving Perspectives on the ALP

Most of the written record on VSO is published by organizations or individuals 

who likely harbor a bias toward the program. On the one hand, human rights 

organizations are naturally suspicious of militias, while on the other, members 

of the defense community have a vested interest in promoting the past 

performance and future potential of VSO. This dynamic makes assessing VSO 

particularly challenging. 

In recent years, a handful of multilateral organizations and nonprofit policy 

research centers have weighed in on VSO/ALP with analyses that seem more 

evenhanded. For example, in 2014, UNAMA reported that the majority of 

communities with an ALP presence said the ALP improved security, particularly 

in areas where the militiamen were locally recruited and deployed.818 The report 

also said the ALP were highly visible in communities, in contrast with the ANA, 

who generally stayed on their bases unless they were conducting operations.819

An ALP officer fires a machine gun during live-fire training conducted by Afghan National Police (ANP) officers 

in Helmand Province on March 26, 2013. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Pete Thibodeau)
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According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, “The 

ALP has had a positive performance, particularly in Marjah, Nad Ali, Nawa, 

Garmsir, Gereshk, Musa Qala, and Sangin Districts of Helmand Province and 

local officials in Kunar, Kunduz, Jowzjan, Sar-e Pul, and Nuristan have expressed 

their satisfaction with the role and performance of the ALP in providing security 

for communities.”820

There have also been reports of improved accountability among the ALP. In the 

first six months of 2014, the MOI’s ALP Monitoring and Investigations section 

investigated 11 allegations of abuse by ALP units, which led to seven arrests and 

two convictions.821 A review of the ALP program ordered by President Ghani 

in June 2015 recommended 6,000 ALP members undergo additional training.822

In 2015, residents of Zabul were able to get an abusive ALP commander 

removed and replaced with a local figure who had more popular support and 

improved ALP conduct.823 The same year, civilian casualties attributed to the 

ALP decreased nationwide, with the most persistent problems concentrated in 

northern Afghanistan.824 The downward trend in civilian casualties continued in 

2016, possibly as a result of greater efforts on the part of the ALP Directorate to 

improve accountability.825

The inklings of accountability within the ALP may be cause for cautious 

optimism, but there was continued evidence of abuses by ALP throughout the 

period. UNAMA reported in 2014 that there appeared to be a certain tolerance 

within the MOI for abuses committed by the ALP, and documented cases of 

crimes by the ALP continued to trickle in to UNAMA throughout the 2014–2017 

period, with an increase in incidents in 2017.826

* * * * * * * * * * *

In summary, VSO was conceived as a stabilization program that would integrate 

governance, development, and security at the local level. SOF would gain 

the support of a village cluster with development assistance, organize locally 

chosen villagers into an anti-Taliban militia, and connect them with the district 

government. In theory, the system would be self-sustaining as the district 

government provided development assistance and the village militias supported 

the government. The model was intuitive, but the program faced challenges 

ranging from unrealistic timelines, an aversion to community engagement 

by some SOF teams, communities that were not suitable for engagement, 

corruption within the Afghan government, and abusive Afghan militias. In 

concert, these problems pushed VSO toward a platform that focused entirely on 

local security. While some ALP units succeeded in this undertaking, a program 

that started as a stabilization program did not end as one. Unsurprisingly then, 

by 2017, according to the New York Times, even U.S. officials estimated security 

had improved in only a third of areas patrolled by the ALP.827

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During the surge, progress on stabilization programs was primarily measured 

in two ways: first, by how much money was spent, and, second, by counting 

outputs, such as the number of person-days of labor hired or the number of 

schools rehabilitated.828 The hope was that hiring people and rehabilitating 

schools would decrease local violence by increasing faith in local governance 

and decreasing support for the Taliban. Yet, there were limited attempts to test 

whether the desired end state of increased stabilization was, in fact, resulting 

from the outputs.829 To some degree, this was the result of the tendency to focus 

on and invest in indicators and programs that were more easily measurable, to 

the exclusion of those that were not.830 However, it was also a reflection of the 

emphasis within USAID during this period on output indicators and activity-level 

outcomes, such as access to jobs or more productive agriculture, instead of the 

more abstract and meaningful concepts that the agency was moving toward, 

such as community outlook for the future and attitudes toward violence.831

A spring 2011 report from the Feinstein International Center found the 

British in Helmand also faced similar pressure to deliver outputs largely 

defined as “projects started” and money committed. A UK Stabilisation Unit 

report identified a need for an approach to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) 

that focused on impacts and outcomes, particularly relating to changes in 

USAID photo

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perceptions, relationships, and behaviors of politically significant actors and 

groups, rather than outputs and inputs.832

Furthermore, prior to 2011, when these inadequacies began to be addressed, 

efforts by the U.S. military and ISAF to assess the effectiveness of military 

campaigns were also hampered by an overreliance on quantitative 

measurements, such as the number of violent incidents or schools built, and 

an underutilization of qualitative analysis, such as through what the military 

refers to as contextual assessment.833 However, aggregated, centralized, 

and quantitative measures, in the absence of the qualitative context 

necessary to shed light on their significance, often produced inaccurate or 

misleading findings.834 This emphasis on quantitative measurements was driven 

by the difficulty of knowing what to measure and how to measure it and a desire 

for standardization across different regions, with a resultant emphasis on more 

easily measurable indicators. 

The same was true at USAID. According to the final evaluation of the four SIKA 

programs, the implementing partners’ M&E units for those programs “essentially 

served as outputs indicator clearinghouses instead of as autonomous evaluation 

tools within the SIKA project structures.” The same evaluation found that 

“SIKA project [implementing partners], for the most part, did not use their 

M&E units as vehicles for understanding programming and this was a major 

lost opportunity. . . . This [was] one reason why the projects succumbed to 

conducting low-priority interventions that were not effective countermeasures 

for [sources of instability].”835 This problem was by no means specific to the 

SIKAs, but rather, was driven by the U.S. government’s demand for metrics, 

whereby implementing partners were incentivized to focus on hitting numeric 

output targets. For example, according to program evaluators, the M&E 

efforts of the Afghanistan Transition Initiative did not go beyond monitoring 

output completion.836

The September 2010 U.S. “Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development” 

marked a new emphasis on monitoring and evaluation at USAID and on 

assessing impact. The directive stated, “Our development policy and practice 

will be driven by the disciplined assessment of impact. Simply put, programs 

and policies that might make us feel good, but do not deliver results, will be 

phased out; programs and policies that yield tangible and sustainable outcomes 

will be scaled up.”837 Yet, what may have been a clear and reasonable threshold 

for many of USAID’s traditional sectors remained nebulous for its stabilization 

work, where results were far more difficult to measure. 

For example, to understand how stability changed in response to stabilization 

programs in Afghanistan, key stakeholders needed to first agree on: 
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• The definition of stability (for example, the absence of violence, the absence 

of the Taliban, government control, government legitimacy, community 

cohesion, resilience)838

• What movement toward stability would look like (less violence against 

government and allied forces, less violence against or among civilians, an 

increase in security force coverage of an area, greater freedom of movement, 

greater confidence in local formal government, greater confidence in local 

informal government)839

• What metrics should be used to measure that change (number of attacks, 

territorial control, or perception data)840

• How, in practical terms, the change could be measured given the challenges of a 

war zone, where the number of variables impacting stability were numerous and 

overlapping, surveys were typically unreliable, and the prioritized districts were 

often too dangerous to ask beneficiaries questions or even make sure projects 

were completed841

As detailed below, the difficulty of these tasks was immense and made more 

complicated by:

• A lack of clarity on the multitude of divergent, shifting, and unclear 

programmatic approaches and theories of change842

• Absence of a census and baseline data843

• Severe information gaps about the operating environment844

• Difficulty of attributing impact in a complex and fluid environment845

• Biases in perception data in an environment where violence and intimidation 

were rife and where respondents had incentives to manipulate results to attract 

more projects846

• Reliance on non-professional census takers and surveyors847

• A need to triangulate different metrics due to the limited reliability of any single 

data source848

• Enormous political pressure to report good news849

The Difficulty of Conducting M&E During a War

Properly discerning cause and effect in a stabilization program is dependent on 

being able to design quality research and collect reliable data. These were difficult 

tasks in most circumstances and exceptionally difficult in an armed conflict. 

Particularly after 2012, M&E relied heavily on perception surveys, which 

posed a myriad of challenges.850 Given the limited reliability of each source of 

information on its own, it was important to triangulate information collected 

by different sources and with different degrees of accuracy, yet in practice, this 

does not seem to have been the norm.851 In 2013, USAID described for Congress 

what it called its “multi-tiered monitoring” system (MTM), which was designed 
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to triangulate information from a variety of sources, including U.S. government 

staff, Afghan government officials, civil society actors, and beneficiaries. 

However, in 2015, the USAID Office of the Inspector General documented at 

length the limitations of that system as it was implemented in practice, and 

the USAID Afghanistan Mission admitted the system was “aspirational.”852

 In 

2017, the mission released an order on performance monitoring to standardize 

the implementation of the MTM approach. The order established specific 

requirements, such as requiring Contracting Officer’s Representatives to hire 

third-party monitors to conduct site visits when CORs were unable to do so 

themselves, which was the majority of the time.853 The guidance also required 

CORs to triangulate third-party monitoring and implementing partner reporting 

with other sources of information, such as Afghan government officials, civil 

society, or other international organizations, but only once a year.854

At the same time, even if every effort had been made to collect high-quality data, 

there still would have been immense challenges related to data bias inherent to 

the environment. For example, ISAF cataloged violent events, commonly known 

as “significant activities” (SIGACT), which could be useful for measuring changes 

in levels of violence over time. In fact, SIGACT data were and remain some of the 

most prevalent source material for analyzing violence levels, both in government 

and in academia.855 Yet, ISAF only collected data on violence in the areas where 

it had forces to collect and verify it, making it difficult to compare these areas to 

those that received less attention and resources. SIGACTs also primarily measured 

attacks involving coalition and Afghan forces, which may or may not have reflected 

levels of violence affecting civilians.856 This was particularly problematic because 

conflict tended to follow coalition forces and implementing partners wherever 

they went, as insurgents hoped to undermine the security and development 

that accompanied coalition personnel.857 This dynamic made it difficult to know 

whether the insurgents would have bothered launching attacks in the area had 

there been fewer coalition and coalition-partner targets to draw their attention. 

It is difficult to know whether the insurgents would have 

bothered launching attacks in the area had there been fewer 

coalition and coalition-partner targets to draw their attention.

Paradoxically, the programming meant to reduce violence could not have taken 

place without the military or private security contractors protecting USAID 

and its implementing partners. Rigorous data collection was difficult when the 

collectors—simply by being there—fundamentally altered the environment they 

were attempting to understand and measure, often in ways they did not intend. 

Overall, the U.S. government presence inevitably created multiple independent 

variables that complicated any observer’s ability to discern cause and effect.858
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Even Monitoring Was Spotty

As noted earlier, one of the most common criticisms of stabilization M&E was 

that it typically measured outputs, without seeking to assess the deeper impact 

of programs and projects. Yet, even output measurements and the project 

GPS coordinates that supported them were not well tracked or vetted, which 

led to inaccuracy, inflation of output numbers, and even outright fraud.859 The 

magnitude of the problem was illustrated by the fact that USAID was not able 

to provide the external evaluators it hired to assess stabilization programming 

with reliable information about which projects were implemented in which 

areas of the country, nor did it require implementing partners to track spending 

at the village, district, provincial, or even regional level, creating a myriad 

of problems for data analysis.860 When SIGAR asked USAID for project data 

on all stabilization projects—including descriptions, locations, and funding 

amounts for projects—USAID responded that the stabilization project data it 

had was “fairly inconsistently collected and unverified. . . . We do not use that 

information for programmatic purposes, nor would we recommend using it for 

evaluative or analytic purposes since it wasn’t designed for this purpose, and 

due to quality concerns.”861

USAID’s data quality—particularly that collected in its central Afghan Info 

database—was so poor that it significantly hindered M&E efforts, both by 

implementing partners hired by USAID to conduct M&E and by external 

researchers. For example, MISTI’s scope had to be expanded to enable it to 

make sense of poor data and to independently verify project locations, which 

consumed 60 percent of the program’s time at its outset and delayed its ability 

A MISTI surveyor in Paghman District, Kabul Province, is taught how to take GPS coordinates during site 

inspections. (USAID photo)
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to produce analysis to inform programming.862 Other relevant data, including 

military geospatial data, would have been helpful, but USAID was unable to 

share it with MISTI.863 USAID has recently taken steps to improve the quality 

of the information in Afghan Info, for example, by cleaning up indicators and 

requiring CORs to be trained in verifying partner-reported data, both in 2017.864

In addition, the USAID Mission issued guidance in August 2016 concerning 

collection protocols for geospatial and GPS data.865 SIGAR has been unable to 

independently verify the degree to which these efforts have been successful in 

improving data quality in Afghan Info.

USAID and DOD stabilization efforts in Afghanistan were marked by poor 

situational awareness, a lack of reliable data, a mismatch between short 

project timelines and highly ambitious long-term goals, and frequent shifts 

in priorities.866 However, USAID and DOD analysts was also overly reliant on 

unverified implementing partner self-reporting, which was inclined to be biased. 

Just as the military faced pressure to present data in the most favorable light to 

show progress, so did USAID and its implementing partners.867 As challenging as 

the design of effective M&E approaches was in the middle of a war, resisting the 

political pressure to report good news was even more difficult.868

USAID and DOD stabilization efforts in Afghanistan were 

marked by poor situational awareness, a lack of reliable data, 

a mismatch between short project timelines and highly 

ambitious long-term goals, and frequent shifts in priorities.

It is not surprising that this high-pressure, low-accountability environment was 

rife with fraudulent reporting. One former senior USAID official who worked 

in RC-South recounted how a clandestine business in Kandahar would, for a 

fee, provide contractors with generic photographs of projects customized with 

fraudulent geo-tags embedded in the digital photos, to help contractors defraud 

USAID.869

 Similarly, a single stabilization program fired 34 staff based on the 

results of fraud and corruption investigations, including for falsifying monitoring 

and site visit reports.870

More Comprehensive Approaches to M&E

USAID M&E systems did improve over time, however. They were stronger in 

the 2012–2017 period than during the surge, and were most robust in the latter 

half of that period. Moving beyond outputs, USAID shifted its M&E focus toward 

increasingly complex, abstract, and meaningful (but more difficult to measure) 

concepts.871 USAID got better at monitoring and evaluation, in part, because 

of an increasing push to demonstrate a return on the enormous stabilization 

investment and ensure accountability for taxpayer funds.
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Recognizing that internal reporting from USAID programs was unreliable and 

rarely moved beyond output monitoring, the USAID mission turned to outside 

contractors to evaluate the Stabilization Unit’s programs. However, these efforts 

were initially poorly coordinated. By 2010, Stab-U was overseeing $465 million 

in programming, with the assistance of three different contractors running 

three different performance evaluations, each focused on a single program 

in isolation.872

Meanwhile, there was noticeable momentum building in the United States 

toward developing the necessary toolkits to properly measure progress at the 

strategic level. A number of U.S. government and NGO stakeholders developed 

the Measuring Progress in Conflict Environments framework “to provide 

indications of trends toward the achievement of stabilization goals over time.”873

Similarly, USAID and others initiated a number of efforts to more 

comprehensively assess stabilization gains as part of an effort to incorporate 

lessons learned from the first generation of stabilization programs into the 

second round.874 RC-East came up with an M&E system based on the District 

Stability Framework that was dominant there, RC-South developed its own 

approach, and the British in Helmand created a third.875 A fourth program, 

MISTI, an umbrella evaluation program covering 10 different individual 

programs, was the U.S. government’s premier effort to assess the effectiveness 

of stabilization.876 All of these were pioneering efforts in uncharted territory. 

In the words of the U.S. government’s 2011–2015 interagency PMP, “The main 

A MISTI surveyor interviews an elder in Helmand Province in late 2013. (USAID photo)
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similarity between all of these [stabilization] programs, especially the ones 

that attempt to quantify higher-level stability impacts, is that the measurement 

techniques and metrics are untested and experimental.”877

MISTI, which exclusively assessed USAID programs, collected quantitative 

results from almost 200,000 individual interviews conducted over a 27-month 

period, as well as qualitative research from in-depth evaluations of individual 

stabilization programs.878 To allow for comparisons between communities, 

overall stability and resilience indices were created using survey data, as well 

as observations about tangible changes in the operating environment, such as 

which actors were present in a village and the frequency of violent incidents in 

the vicinity of a village.879 This mixed methods approach was common across 

assessment approaches of this period.880

MISTI sought to use perception data to measure stability and resilience by 

deconstructing complex underlying concepts, such as community cohesion.881

USAID sought to use MISTI to move beyond outputs, such as measuring how 

many people were employed and how many retaining walls were built, to 

measuring impact, like how these projects increased trust in and support for 

the Afghan government.882 The assumption was that once perceptions changed, 

behaviors would change soon after, leading the population to openly support 

the Afghan government. It was further assumed that this groundswell of support 

would enable the newly legitimized government take control of the country.

MISTI’s methodological approach has been criticized in a number of ways by 

USAID and others, an exploration of which can be found in appendix B. It 

was, however, notably rare for a stabilization evaluation to be conducted by 

a government in such a public and transparent manner. In fact, an academic 

survey of 19 studies concerning the relationship between aid and violence found 

that only one was initiated and conducted by a donor nation.883

PROGRAM FLEXIBILITY IS KEY

MISTI provided useful lessons for future stabilization efforts, many of which 

were validated by other studies on the efficacy of stabilization. One of these key 

findings was that programmatic flexibility was critical to the effectiveness of 

stabilization programming.

The Importance of Iterative Learning

M&E is not useful if programs are unable to feed results back into both existing 

and new programs in real time. Stabilization programs need sufficient flexibility 

to adapt both to lessons learned and the shifting operating environment. This 

level of flexibility was rare, however. Lessons from M&E can only inform 
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existing programs if there is a well-established system for identifying and 

incorporating them. While both internal and external M&E systems have a role 

to play, the internal structure is the first line of defense against inappropriate or 

ineffective programming.884

While M&E’s iterative learning process can take time, USAID was constrained 

by its three to five-year planning horizon.885 In a fast-paced, violent environment, 

the lag between design and implementation meant that programs started to 

become obsolete before they were initiated and were near completion by the 

time any lessons could be learned.886

Furthermore, in a 2017 meta-analysis of 89 studies of stabilization and 

development programming in Afghanistan, the Empirical Studies of Conflict 

project demonstrated that, as a result of these constraints, even when best 

practices and lessons were identified, they were rarely implemented.887 The 2014 

Stab-U Performance Management Plan came to the same conclusion, noting that 

internal M&E opportunities were being missed and there was “little evidence 

any of the Stab-U [implementing partners were] consistently considering lessons 

learned . . . from implementation experience.”888

Former Zabul provincial governor Ashraf Nasiri summarized the problem 

succinctly, stating, “There should have been an assessment at the end of each 

one of these programs, and the shortcomings should have been removed in the 

next programs. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen.”889 In 2016, USAID updated 

its evaluation policy, and, in accordance with that policy, USAID’s Afghanistan 

Mission now requires post-evaluation action plans to ensure that recommended 

follow-up actions are identified and implemented.890 Nevertheless, significant 

hurdles remain to learning from programming and incorporating these lessons 

into subsequent programs, particularly in places like Afghanistan.891 As recently 

as 2016, the agency acknowledged it still struggled to achieve accountability 

for programming in the most challenging and non-permissive environments in 

which it works.892

The Virtues of Flexibility

There is evidence that where stabilization programs had sufficient flexibility, 

it paid off in programmatic effectiveness. Beyond Afghanistan, former USAID 

Administrator Natsios has argued that USAID is particularly risk averse 

because of its lack of political support in Washington. He observed that “good 

development practice requires experimentation, risk taking, and innovation,” 

but there is little room for any of those attributes in the modern bureaucracy 

of many donors, including USAID and the World Bank.893 Such flexibility is 

important during conflict, when operating environments are especially fluid and 

unpredictable.894 Indeed, a 2010 report by the UK Stabilisation Unit identified 
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one of its key take-aways as the need for “speed, flexibility, and adaptability” in 

stabilization programming.895 Programmatic flexibility ideally includes the ability 

to quickly shift funding between programs or to descope or add new types of 

activities or move activities to different geographic areas within a program.896

Flexibility, for example, was instrumental in enabling the Community Cohesion 

Initiative to quickly tackle a national-level source of instability by mobilizing 

international election observers to audit the presidential vote count in 2014. 

While stabilization efforts typically took place at the community or district level, 

and to a lesser degree at the provincial level, CCI was able to fill a gap in the 

international community’s response to the election crisis and assist the larger 

international effort to legitimize the national government.897 CCI’s comparative 

advantage over other donor-funded programs was its ability to rapidly stand up 

a new type of activity. 

It was critical to accept a certain degree of risk and

 failure as the cost of figuring out what worked.

The CCI final performance evaluation also found that the program began to 

remove “some of the inertia surrounding the focus on community infrastructure 

activities” in stabilization programming, suggesting that stabilization 

programming should address national-level sources of instability when they 

are the most salient.898 In other words, programmatic flexibility enabled CCI 

to break out of the narrow silo that came to define it and other stabilization 

programs: local-level programming largely focused on the construction of simple 

infrastructure. Such limitations prevented most stabilization programs from 

addressing sources of instability stemming from higher-level political dynamics. 

As articulated in joint military doctrine, “instability is a symptom of a political 

crisis rooted in how political power is distributed and wielded, and by whom. To 

help resolve the situation, stabilization efforts seek to reshape the relationships 

with the indigenous populations and institutions, the different communities 

that make up the [host-nation] populace, and elites competing for power.”899

Stabilization programs alone were unable to start to change political dynamics 

by working at the local level and could not effect a political solution or singlehandedly impart legitimacy on the government of Afghanistan; however, they 

might contribute to such goals when allowed to do work that falls outside the 

constraints of local-level community development.

According to a senior USAID official, with such an experimental approach, it 

was critical to accept a certain degree of risk and failure as the cost of figuring 

out what worked.900 However, this flexibility required a greater investment 
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in USAID personnel to oversee and manage this risk taking. Another USAID 

official observed that the Office of Transition Initiatives was frequently criticized 

for having so many personnel overseeing its programs. Yet, the same official 

observed that it was precisely those high staffing levels and programmatic 

engagement by CCI’s oversight personnel that enabled USAID to sign off on 

necessary programmatic shifts.901

Still, there is a delicate balance between being “fast and flexible” and switching 

strategy so often there is insufficient time to test each approach. Effective 

programs are rarely created perfectly or are ideally suited to their environment 

at inception; they evolve and generally improve over time.902 At their best, they 

use a strong feedback loop to continually incorporate lessons from M&E into 

programming; they learn by doing.903 Yet, when the direction of programming is 

switched too frequently or pressure to implement quickly is great, they do not 

have time to improve and learn from their mistakes.904 It is a difficult balance to 

strike. According to the program’s evaluators, CCI, the same program credited 

with skilled adaptation, would have been more effective if it had stuck with one 

approach for several programming cycles before pivoting.905

DID STABILIZATION WORK?

The evidence concerning the effectiveness of USAID stabilization programming 

in Afghanistan from 2002–2017 is inconclusive and contradictory. Some 

research found the programming was stabilizing, some found no impact, and 

other research found it was, in fact, destabilizing.906 What is clear, however, 

is that even at its most successful, stabilization was incremental, rather than 

transformative. The impact of discrete stabilization interventions was generally 

short-lived. However, a somewhat more sustained impact was achieved 

through repeated and geographically concentrated (or “clustered”) stabilization 

Elders gather at the district office of the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, and Livestock for a USAID-funded 

open house with district officials in Shamal District, Khost Province, in late 2013. (USAID/OTI photo)
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interventions. Stabilization was more effective in areas where the government 

had a degree of control, and it was actually destabilizing in insurgent-controlled 

areas. It was also more successful when implementers undertook fewer 

activities with a higher degree of oversight, flexibility, and staffing; doing 

stabilization well was labor intensive for the donor and implementing partners.

Stabilization Efforts were Sometimes Destabilizing

MISTI determined that the stabilization programs it evaluated between 2012 

and 2014 (SIKA, CCI, and KFZ) generally did not help stabilize target areas and 

occasionally made them worse. Specifically, during a portion of the time period 

studied, it found that villages that received at least one stabilization project 

showed a greater drop in stability than did control villages.907 Explanations for 

the results vary. As SIGAR previously noted, USAID and MISTI cited external 

factors, such as general insecurity and political instability, to explain the drop 

in stability indicators at the time. However, these external changes should 

have affected all villages studied, both control villages and those that received 

interventions, not just those that received USAID stability assistance.908 A 

more likely explanation is that many stabilization projects attracted insurgent 

attention, and security forces were often unable to deter or disrupt attacks. 

However, before the stability index dropped in villages that received a project, 

there was an initial increase in stability in the same villages, as compared to the 

control, between spring 2012 and spring 2014.909

 Therefore, the more plausible 

explanation, which MISTI proposes, was that as programs launched in these 

areas, expectations were raised, but they were subsequently undermined by an 

erosion of confidence in the Afghan government, which were only compounded 

by implementation challenges.910 For example, SIKA projects prioritized by the 

community through the SAM process were often not implemented, while lesser 

priorities were chosen instead due to risk aversion by implementing partners, 

budget constraints, and late program funding disbursements.911

Government Control is a Prerequisite

One factor that seems to influence whether stabilization programming is 

effective is the degree of government control of an area. A baseline of control 

seems to be necessary for success or to make an area ripe for stabilization 

programming.912 In fact, MISTI concluded that stabilization programming 

actually led to an increase in support for the Taliban in 13 of the 72 villages 

that were Taliban controlled, had no government or coalition presence, but still 

received a USAID stabilization project during the period studied.913

Similarly, a systemic review of 19 studies of the relationship between aid and 

violence found that foreign aid expended in highly insecure areas was more 

likely to result in increased violence than aid expended in areas with greater 
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government control.914 According to a 2012 study of NSP, the program improved 

Afghans’ perceptions of the government and their own economic wellbeing, 

and it reduced violence, but only in areas where pre-intervention levels of 

violence were “moderate.”915 Thus, there is a threshold of violence beyond which 

stabilization programming is not only unlikely to succeed, but is destabilizing.

There is a threshold of violence beyond which stabilization 

programming is not only unlikely to succeed, but is destabilizing.

Stabilization’s Impact was Transitory, Not Transformative

The positive impact of stabilization programming faded relatively quickly 

and that progress was, at best, incremental and transitory, rather than 

transformative.916

 In the words of one academic paper, “The ‘hearts and minds’ 

which may have been won in spring may be lost in fall already.”917 Likewise, 

ESOC found that stabilization programs “that have been ‘successful’ may have 

short-term positive impacts, but they do not appear to generate large shifts 

in security, attitudes, or capacity.”918 The fact that stabilization programs did 

not demonstrate particularly lasting effects should not invalidate their utility, 

however. In fact, they were designed to be catalytic stopgap measures, rather 

than systemically transformative of the communities in which they operated, 

particularly over the course of a typical program length of two to four years.

Progress toward stabilization is slow and messy. At best, it results in small gains 

that require constant reinforcement to avoid reversals.919 Given the unrealistic 

timeline of the surge, in both troops and USAID programming, there was no 

time for the progress achieved by stabilization programs to be reinforced such 

USAID road construction efforts along the Khost-Gardez road in March 2010. (USAID photo)
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that it could be sustained. The timeline erroneously assumed that quick security 

gains would be matched by equally quick stabilization and governance gains.920

The latter failed to materialize before security forces withdrew and instability 

returned to many of the areas where stabilization programs were working. 

In areas that showed improvement, there was little follow-on programming 

in place to pick up where stabilization left off to maintain the momentum.921

Without adequate security, the stabilization process stopped in its tracks 

and any hard-won progress disappeared.922 In fact, not only did longer-term 

development programs often not follow stabilization programming, at least 

not at anywhere near the same scale, but even stabilization programming 

prematurely hopscotched around the map, rather than building gradually upon 

its successes.923 In any case, given the timeline and the decision to prioritize 

the most dangerous districts, few Afghan communities stabilized enough to 

demonstrate if these temporary gains could be leveraged into the next phase 

of long-term development.

Community Cohesion is an Easier Objective than Stabilization 

MISTI’s findings suggest that building community cohesion and informal 

governance may have been easier than improving perceptions of formal 

governance. MISTI measured community cohesion by assessing social capital 

and perceptions of local informal leaders.924 The theory behind CCI, which 

was designed to build community cohesion, also referred to as resiliency, 

was that building interpersonal trust at the lowest level, between and within 

communities, was necessary to prevent them from being exploited by 

insurgents.925

 This focus on community cohesion, as opposed to improving 

perceptions of the government, was an attempt to achieve stabilization without 

necessarily relying on the reputation of the Afghan government, which CCI 

recognized to be “fragile and unable to deliver good governance [and] basic 

services to the majority of the population.”926 Working with informal leaders 

also provided stabilization programs an alternative partner if local government 

representatives were corrupt or had ties to the insurgency. Such officials 

presented challenges with ASI, and indeed, likely all programs whose core 

operating model was built around extending the reach of government.927

In contrast, stabilization programs actually built more connectivity between 

and within communities than between communities and formal government. 

For example, MISTI found that stabilization interventions were most effective 

for increasing community cohesion, social capital, and local (informal) leader 

performance between fall 2013 and fall 2014, during which time nationallevel political uncertainty undermined perceptions of formal government.928

Likewise, MISTI found the SIKA programs did not, generally, improve stability 

or governance in target districts. However, they did result in an improvement 

in perceptions of community cohesion and resilience, as well as improved 
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perceptions of informal leaders.929 There is also some evidence that NSP 

increased interpersonal trust among male residents of target villages.930 Together 

this suggests that perceptions of higher-level formal governance structures 

might be more closely tied to the government’s broader legitimacy, and when 

these were compromised, supporting community-level social trust and local 

leader legitimacy might be a more realistic goal. 

Stabilization programs actually built more connectivity 

between and within communities than between 

communities and formal government.

Central Importance of Clustering

MISTI found, and other studies confirmed, that clustering projects improved the 

likelihood that stabilization gains would be enduring. Research has also shown 

that, while the impact of stabilization programming was questionable after a 

single project, positive results started to emerge when projects were clustered 

both geographically and temporally. This is known as a “dosage response” 

effect.931 The theory is that each small project contributes incrementally to 

achieving the desired program outcome, and layering them on top of one 

another in an area increases the magnitude of project impacts and improves 

the prospect that these gains will be sustained over a relatively longer period 

of time.932 Clustering also creates the impression that the community is being 

continuously served as part of an ongoing relationship with the government. 

PRT Khost civil affairs officer walks the grounds of the Wazyan boys’ school to inspect the plot of 

land designated for the new school house in July 2010. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman 

Julianne M. Showalter)
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MISTI showed that the clustering of USAID projects magnified their impact, 

as did clustering of mixed USAID and NSP projects.933

 Areas benefiting from 

multiple stabilization projects also reported increased community cohesion and 

satisfaction with government with each additional activity.934

Likewise, during the last period MISTI surveyed in 2014, it was only when both 

stabilization programming and NSP programming were conducted in the same 

area that a significant reduction in support for the Taliban was observed.935

During this time period, villages receiving both types of programming 

demonstrated an increase in stability, according to MISTI’s metrics, while 

villages receiving just one or the other did not.936 A study on the impact of 

NSP found that multiple rounds of funding had to flow through a CDC before 

its impact expanded from increasing the legitimacy of village-level informal 

governance to increasing the legitimacy of formal government structures.937

Academic research on stabilization programming also supports this dosage 

effect, concluding that government legitimacy has to “constantly be earned in a 

continuous process of interaction.”938

It is difficult to imagine how one small project, implemented 

by a foreign entity with donor funding, could substantively 

change a community’s perceptions of its government.

However, such clustering was rare. Stabilization activities were so often 

conducted in isolation that MISTI had a hard time finding villages that 

received multiple, consecutive projects. In fact, in only a third of the villages 

surveyed were projects taking place beyond a single six-month interval.939

Given that individual stabilization projects tended to have short timelines, 

lasting an average of three to six months, one-off projects were more common 

than sustained stabilization programming.940 In the SIKAs, the majority of 

communities received just one small project, such as a short gravel road, a 

culvert, or a school boundary wall.941 The fact that one-off projects were the 

norm, rather than the exception, sheds light on why MISTI found weak and 

internally inconsistent impacts on stabilization, and likely why other studies 

also found inconclusive results. It is difficult to imagine how one small project, 

implemented by a foreign entity with donor funding, could substantively 

change a community’s perceptions of its government’s service delivery.942

As a result, clustering more projects to increase impact was one of MISTI’s 

core recommendations.943

Doing Less, But Better

Research also validated the argument that implementing smaller projects 

helped programs avoid some of the common pitfalls of working in the midst 
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of a counterinsurgency. Avoiding these pitfalls of stabilization—elite capture, 

corruption, exacerbated rivalries, and insurgent sabotage—while still providing 

tangible benefits to communities was easier on a smaller scale.944 According to 

a 2010 Embassy Kabul cable on best practices in stabilization programming, 

it was also easier to ensure community buy-in and ownership of small-scale 

infrastructure projects than it was for large ones.945 As the 2017 ESOC study 

found, “A number of studies, as well as evidence from NSP, CERP, and LGCD, 

highlight the possibility that smaller projects can be targeted at important, 

specific gaps and are less likely to be targeted for violence or fuel instability 

by disrupting local political status quos.”946 ESOC further argued that small 

size is “the most important program feature that could enable success” and 

recommended future stabilization efforts focus on “modest programs” and 

have “bounded expectations on the size and duration of impact” that those 

programs can achieve.947 Similarly, some academic research has shown that 

smaller-scale CERP projects were more effective at reducing violence than 

larger-scale ones.948

Additional academic research has shown that superficial measures of aid, such 

as the sheer amount of money spent or outputs produced, were not correlated 

with impact. What did determine whether projects achieved their desired impact 

was whether the community perceived a project to be useful. Communities were 

more likely to perceive projects to be useful when the project was implemented 

through a participatory process, suggesting that the additional time and 

resources required to do so were worth the effort.949

Not only were projects more effective when implementers were not stretched 

thin, but the overall effort was also more successful. More was accomplished 

in the aggregate by doing less, but doing it better. In the words of MISTI’s final 

evaluation of the SIKAs, “Sometimes it is better to get it right in a few places 

than try to get it right in a hundred places.”950 Rapid aid expenditures spread 

across too many projects resulted in counterproductive effects, including 

exacerbating corruption, creating grievances and rivalries from inequitable aid 

distribution, and the capture of aid money by insurgent groups and other antigovernment actors, such as warlords.951

In summary, even if prioritizing direct implementation, scoping projects smaller, 

taking the time to understand the complex political terrain, and engaging in 

time-consuming community engagement processes limited the amount of 

programming that could be done, it was more effective in terms of impact 

achieved to implement fewer projects, with greater oversight.

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While the narrative and challenges of the Afghanistan stabilization effort 

have been described in detail, the section below explores the broader 

implications and impacts of these challenges, including how the strategy 

hindered efforts on the ground, how coalition assumptions about the best way 

to legitimize the Afghan government ran aground, how programming tools and 

approaches themselves hurt implementation, and how prioritizing the most 

dangerous districts often forced stabilization programs to be implemented 

prematurely and poorly. 

THE STRATEGIC IMPACT OF COMPRESSED TIMELINES

As this section and much of this report demonstrates, there was a significant 

misalignment between the 2009 stabilization strategy and the timeline set forth 

to achieve it. As a result, the president and his advisors set in motion a series 

of events and institutional motivations that ensured the stabilization strategy 

would not succeed: first with the rapid surge and then the rapid transition. 

Under immense pressure to show progress in only 18 months—and then 

transition three years later—State, USAID, and DOD were overwhelmed as 

they confronted a list of potentially crippling compromises they knew to be 

necessary under the timeline. Worse, the narrowness of the surge and transition 

U.S. Marine Corps photo

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windows had a profound impact on countless downstream decisions regarding 

planning, staffing, and programming.

Timelines Hurt Planning

Building local institutions, changing civilian perceptions, and buttressing a 

government’s legitimacy are political undertakings and should be implemented 

with instruments and timelines suited to these tasks.952 Yet during the 

2009 strategy reviews, the discussion revolved around military options 

and considerations, with the civilian-led components regarded mostly as 

subordinate. As NSC senior coordinator Lute observed, “The only professional 

group that does real strategy is the military,” so generally at the NSC, there 

was “a heavy burden on the military for strategy development . . . and an 

underappreciation of policy, diplomacy, and development. These were all 

considered secondary to the primacy of military ways.”953

Subsequently, given the military’s role in framing the debate in Washington, it 

was only logical they were better positioned to set the terms for operationalizing 

the strategy in Kabul, even as the civilian considerations of stabilization took 

shape. One military planner in Kabul noted, “Despite the explicit civ-mil 

approach, everyone knew the military was in the lead.”954 Yet, the military cannot 

do faster what it was not designed to do to begin with, and the urgency both 

masked that fact and could not compensate for it.

The military cannot do faster what it was not 

designed to do to begin with, and the urgency 

both masked that fact and could not compensate for it.

Civilian and military officials had to revise the draft campaign plan in the summer 

of 2009 when it became clear that conditions-based end states would require too 

much time to achieve. According to the same military planner in Kabul:

We were told by State in DC to move away from three- to five- to ten-year 

objectives and use nearer-term objectives, which took a lot of work because, 

what could be achieved in this environment in one to three years? Most of 

our objectives would take time, so we had to identify different objectives that 

could be accomplished in the near-term.955

Similarly, only a year later, the timeline had taken on a life of its own, such that 

progress or lack of progress on those campaign objectives did not inform the 

president’s decision to end the surge and transition to Afghan control. “None of 

that mattered,” said one senior U.S. official with knowledge of the deliberations. 

“We were drawing down, no matter what.”956 In turn, as General Allen noted, the 

premature move to begin to transition in 2011 meant any meaningful effort to 

clear, hold, and build rural Afghanistan ground to a halt: 
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I had to close over 800 bases, send back 33,000 surge troops, transition the 

main NATO and U.S. force component to accomplish an ‘advise and assist’ 

mission, push ANDSF into the lead for combat operations, and somewhere in 

there I also had to figure out how to get stabilization just right. We had to use 

our logistics pipeline to close bases and send troops and equipment home, 

which functioned in direct competition with my operational sustainment 

requirements. So, our ability to conduct combat operations suffered across 

the board. Stabilization requires time to measure and adapt, and we lost all 

that. It was all pulled out from under us. We went from an end state to an 

end date.957

As former SRAP senior advisor Vali Nasr noted, “It is arguable that we should 

never have embraced COIN, but once we did, we should not have ditched it so 

quickly.”958 The short surge and hasty transition were driven by factors unrelated 

to conditions on the ground, which meant that Afghan officials were no more 

ready to rapidly build up subnational governance capacity by 2011 than they 

were to take control of the country by 2014. 

“Stabilization requires time to measure and adapt, 

and we lost all that. It was all pulled out from under us. 

We went from an end state to an end date.”

—General John Allen

Timelines Hurt Staffing

Lacking the military’s “float” that gives the armed forces 10 percent extra 

personnel to ensure continuous readiness, State and USAID faced enormous 

U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates meets with General McChrystal and other ISAF members in Kabul on 

March 8, 2010. (DOD photo by Cherie Cullen)
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difficulty trying to hire nearly 1,000 civilians to fill positions at Embassy Kabul, 

regional platforms, PRTs, and DSTs to make the most of the short surge in 

resources.959 Even the military’s float did not allow it to meet the demand as it 

struggled to mobilize and train the necessary civil affairs units to staff PRTs and 

embed with conventional and special operations forces. Likewise, U.S. Army 

Special Forces struggled to find enough Green Berets to staff all of its Village 

Stability Platforms. Even harder than finding available civilians and troops on 

this timetable was finding qualified and experienced candidates. Ramping up 

this quickly limited both the quality of the personnel hired and the training they 

received before deploying. Equally important, moving at such speed also meant 

taking numerous shortcuts with staffing for Afghan civil servants to account for 

the high demand and minimal supply of qualified Afghans willing to work in the 

most violent areas of the country.960

Timelines Hurt Programming

As civilians and military officers prepared for the end of the surge and 

then transition, programming quality was often sacrificed in the interest of 

expediency. For example, CERP was a “spending machine” that injected as 

much money into the economy as possible, with little attention paid to impact; 

burn rate became a proxy for success in USAID programming too, particularly 

during the surge. As Halim Fidai, governor of Wardak and Logar Provinces, 

observed, “Normally the clear phase took a month, but the hold and build parts 

were not possible in months, they needed years. But the clear, hold, and build 

approach didn’t provide years. It demanded results in months.”961 In other 

words, as one U.S. official noted, “Given our desire to ramp up quickly and leave 

quickly, there was no reasonable threshold we could reach where we could 

leave behind good governance.”962

THEORIES OF CHANGE: HOW THE RUBBER HIT THE ROAD

In development circles, a theory of change is the articulation of a program’s 

intended impact, as well as a chain of steps, expectations, and underlying 

assumptions that will enable that program to have its intended impact. As 

USAID suggests, it “articulates a set of beliefs about how and why change 

happens,” and it should be “plausible, achievable, and testable.”963

 The 

primary elements of stabilization’s overarching theory of change have been 

outlined already, but their implications and complications will be explored in 

depth below. 

Economic Opportunity

A central premise of many USAID and DOD stabilization programs is that 

insecurity is directly linked to poverty, and that Afghans who benefit from 

“social and economic assistance and income-generation opportunities” are 
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less likely to join or support the insurgency.964 CERP provided grants to build 

infrastructure, in part, to employ Afghans during the construction and to grow 

small businesses. USAID likewise used cash-for-work (CFW) for everything from 

building schools to cleaning irrigation canals. The paid labor was not simply 

a perk for the effort; it was often the driving rationale for the programming. 

The premise of CFW was to “put Afghans to work” and to “improve per capita 

income via development projects” in the hopes it would generate enough local 

spending and investment to create genuine and self-sustaining economic growth, 

which would, in turn, make joining the insurgency less appealing.965 As a more 

immediate goal, CFW also presumed that temporary employment would reduce 

the pool of fighting-age men available to support the insurgency.966

In practice, however, the results of CFW were often poor. USAID’s third-party 

evaluators concluded CFW failed to create self-sustaining growth, likely because 

it distorted local economies, increased support for the Taliban in areas they 

controlled, created aid dependencies, exacerbated local conflict, and paid 

communities to do what they traditionally did for free.967 Still, particularly in 

central Helmand, where unemployment reportedly disappeared overnight, there 

were reports that insurgents were being put to work among the thousands of 

CFW laborers.968 As Marc Chretien, a political advisor to the Marines, noted, 

“In Helmand, anywhere between 3–5 percent of those laborers came up hot on 

The Abbas Qala Community Development Council used a USAID grant to clear a deep karez (irrigation 

canal) in Baraki Barak District, Logar Province. Members of three local communities served by the karez 

terraced one wall and then formed a shovel brigade to move debris from the bottom to the top in November 

2013. (Photo by Ahmad Salarzai)
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BATS-HIIDE,” the biometrics database of known insurgents.969 Thus, the Marines 

knew for certain that a significant number of the men who were working as 

laborers had previously left forensic evidence (such as fingerprints or DNA) on 

explosives, weapons, or crime scenes, indicating that CFW in central Helmand 

was meeting the immediate intent of pulling some fighters off the battlefield, at 

least during the day. 

While CFW was sometimes regarded as ineffective, the relative success in 

temporarily stabilizing areas like central Helmand made it difficult to discern 

the various causes of this success, with CFW perhaps being one among 

them. Tooryalai Wesa, the former governor of Kandahar, said, “If people have 

work, they will not want to get into trouble. . . . Instability happens because 

of unemployment.”970

 In that context, CFW’s various liabilities, which were 

recognized by some on the ground at the time, were often viewed as the cost of 

doing business.

Other practitioners believed CFW’s shortcomings were not inherent to CFW, 

but rather tethered to the way it was employed. One stabilization contractor 

who worked extensively in the east believed CFW was a “critical tool when 

used to support the engagement process between the community and local 

governance.”971 Echoing a 2011 embassy cable, CFW was more effective when 

U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Brock Wilki, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, scans the iris of an Afghan 

man at an ANP checkpoint in Nawa District, Helmand Province, on September 25, 2009, in order to register 

him in BATS-HIIDE. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Jeremy Harris)
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used as a means to an end, rather than an end unto itself, as was often the case, 

particularly in the south.972

More broadly, however, our literature review of multiple protracted conflicts, 

including Afghanistan, suggests there is little empirical evidence to date 

of a correlation between local employment and a reduction in violence or 

support for political violence, undermining the central premise of this theory 

of change.973 It is worth noting that many of these studies looked strictly at 

employment and did not distinguish between employment creation for its own 

sake and employment creation in the context of a larger effort to achieve other 

goals, like extending the government’s reach. As noted, when CFW was a means 

to an end beyond mere employment, it tended to be more effective in bringing 

communities and governments together, and the literature rarely distinguishes 

between holistic and narrow approaches to employment creation.

Extending the Reach of Government

The application of COIN doctrine dictated that the Afghan government needed 

to be viewed by the local population as legitimate.974 As a result, the coalition 

hoped to extend the government’s reach to facilitate service delivery and 

therefore increase the government’s legitimacy.975 In the near term, this would 

encourage the population to report insurgent activity, and in the longer term, 

it would solidify a permanent, mutually reinforcing relationship with the 

government. Extending the government’s reach became the most prominent 

theory of change driving stabilization in practice; however, this theory assumed 

the Afghan government simply lacked the necessary capacity, and that more 

capacity in remote areas would naturally lead these communities to expel 

the Taliban and ally with the government. Yet, disillusionment with formal 

governance was often based not on the government’s absence, but rather on its 

behavior when present, and stabilization tended to exacerbate this dynamic.976

Moreover, despite a widespread belief that an area’s physical remoteness made 

its population more likely to support the Taliban, no such connection has been 

shown to exist.977

Disillusionment with formal governance was often based 

not on the government’s absence, but rather on its behavior when 

present, and stabilization tended to exacerbate this dynamic.

Service Delivery

An implicit assumption behind the idea of extending the reach of the 

government was that it would give more Afghans access to government services, 

which would increase the government’s legitimacy. As Barna Karimi, the former 

Deputy Minister at IDLG observed, “The government’s legitimacy is not just 
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from ballot boxes, it is from services. If there are no services, then how is the 

government going to be legitimate?”978

Stabilization programming, then, was intended to jump-start that government 

service delivery to visibly demonstrate the presence, power, and benevolence of 

the government, thereby making government officials the legitimate source of 

local governance and marginalizing insurgents competing for the population’s 

allegiance. In other words, the coalition believed it had to help the government 

out-govern the Taliban. 

Yet, Afghans did not live in a free market of ideas where insurgents and 

counterinsurgents competed for the allegiance of the population and respected 

their choices. As detailed below, while the Taliban provided limited services 

in pockets of the country, they primarily secured the population’s support 

through simple coercion—forced cooperation under threat of death.979 In the 

latter case, stabilization had less to offer a community that already despised the 

Taliban and would gladly expel them if they could safely do so. As academic 

research and multiple senior Afghan and U.S. officials observed, many Afghans 

in contested territory preferred the government but were not willing to stand 

up to the Taliban until they were confident the government could protect them 

from retaliation.980 Those hearts and minds did not need to be won; those people 

simply needed help removing the boot from their throats.981

Many Afghans in contested territory preferred the government 

but were not willing to stand up to the Taliban until they were 

confident the government could protect them from retaliation.

The coalition’s service delivery model assumed that wherever the population 

tolerated the Taliban, they did so because of the services the Taliban 

provided, rather than fear. Given that this was often not the case, earning 

the population’s support could have sometimes simply been a matter of the 

government providing fewer services, but to a higher standard. Specifically, 

in some cases, to out-perform the Taliban, the government only needed to 

provide reliable security and decline to prey on the population. Alternatively, 

in cases where the Taliban actually went beyond coercion and earned the 

population’s support with limited services, usually in areas they controlled or 

influenced, stabilization had a more important role to play in filling this service 

void after clearing, to ensure programming competed on the explicit terms of 

each community.982

That stabilization’s role would vary depending on the nature of the Taliban’s 

local support appears not to have been a consideration in stabilization’s theory 
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of change. After all, if reliable and non-predatory security was all that some 

communities needed to keep the Taliban out indefinitely, stabilization should 

not be necessary there at all, yet it was implemented consistently after clearing, 

wherever resources permitted. Granted, as explored below, tools like the 

DSF recognized that sources of instability were community-specific; however, 

DSF also assumed that addressing all of those sources was in the power of 

stabilization programming. Yet, in environments where the absence of reliable 

and non-predatory security was the primary source of instability, stabilization 

programming was unlikely to “move the needle” and might be unnecessary.983

In fact, most practitioners we spoke to believed stabilization rarely brought 

communities closer to stability than merely providing reliable and non-predatory 

security would have. 

More broadly, while the service delivery model is intuitive, a five-year study 

on the relationship between service delivery and state legitimacy in eight 

conflict-affected countries found this relationship was much less linear 

than the state-building effort in Afghanistan assumed. The study found 

there was no clear relationship between improvements in people’s access 

to or satisfaction with services and improvements in their perceptions 

of government.984

Furthermore, in Afghanistan specifically, the literature suggests legitimacy 

is not historically related to service delivery, in part because the social 

contract between governments and their populations is typically tethered to 

an exchange—taxes for services—that is wholly absent in Afghanistan.985 Any 

services Afghans receive are mostly free, so the services bestow little legitimacy 

on the government. 

As scholar Astri Suhrke notes, even the idea that service delivery could 

legitimize the government is foreign to Afghan political traditions. Legitimacy 

in Afghanistan is historically anchored in the government’s ability to harness 

Islam and nationalism, often rallying the country around an external threat. 

In contrast, the promise of service delivery as a legitimizing force requires 

tangible and visible results in ways that employing Islam and nationalism 

do not, as the latter are “ideational” and thus easier for a government to 

sell and deliver to the population.986 As former MRRD Deputy Minister Tariq 

Esmati noted, moving toward a democracy after the U.S. invasion only 

amplified the public’s service expectations and highlighted the government’s 

shortcomings in this area.987

 In fact, when the promise of improved services 

raised expectations and failed to materialize, Afghans who saw more of their 

government through stabilization projects actually developed less favorable 

impressions of it, perhaps a worse outcome than if the government had not 

reached into their lives at all.988
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While the literature highlights a tenuous relationship between services 

and government legitimacy, the highly consultative NSP did increase the 

government’s favorability and legitimacy through the delivery of services, if only 

temporarily. From a stabilization perspective, therefore, in areas where services 

beyond security are necessary to stabilize the community, a fundamental issue 

is identifying the precise services necessary to win over a particular contested 

population, which is discussed in detail below. 

When the promise of improved services raised expectations and 

failed to materialize, Afghans who saw more of their government 

through stabilization projects actually developed less favorable 

impressions of it.

Local Officials Accountable to Kabul, Not to Constituents

On paper, the Afghan government is among the most centralized in the world. 

District and provincial administrations are appointed by the central government, 

which means they are accountable upward to Kabul, rather than downward to 

the people they serve.989 As a result, failing to serve the population does not 

necessarily result in local officials being kicked out of office, as would be the 

case if they were regularly up for reelection by their constituents. Instead, as 

long as they maintain the support of IDLG and the Office of the President, they 

need not worry about serving the interests of their communities. In theory, poor 

performers would be replaced by IDLG because poor performance is typically 

cause for dismissal; yet, in a country as notoriously corrupt as Afghanistan, 

positions are regularly purchased and the criteria for obtaining and losing 

employment often has little to do with performance.990 Thus, in addition to the 

other challenges the stabilization effort faced, the coalition was at an automatic 

disadvantage as it tried to legitimize local administrations that had little 

structural incentive to serve the population effectively.991

Karzai Obstructed Efforts to Bolster Subnational Governance

Just as the Afghan government was not structured to support accountable 

constituent services, it was also unwilling to work against that structure to 

support the COIN and stabilization mission.992 First, President Karzai was 

not invested in building up the country’s formal subnational governance 

structures because he believed Afghanistan’s instability was borne from 

Pakistani interference, not poor or predatory governance at home.993

 He thus 

fundamentally disagreed with the entire premise of the U.S. stabilization mission 

and acted accordingly. The fact that it took six months to persuade Karzai of the 

merits of Operation Moshtarak in Marjah, and that IDLG only sent one official to 

staff the “government-in-a-box” there, exemplifies how U.S. stabilization efforts 

as a priority were either ignored or obstructed by the central government.994
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As Ehsan Zia, former Minister for Rural Rehabilitation and Development, 

observed, “Karzai was not serious at all about building local governance.”995

Second, building subnational governance institutions created competition for 

Karzai’s informal networks of power brokers across the country, whose power 

was directly threatened by nascent formal subnational governance institutions.996

So, Karzai ensured formal local governance was subordinate to his own informal 

networks of allies.997 Granted, in a country where allegiance is often determined 

by patronage and personality, Karzai’s actions may have been vital to maintaining 

the political stability of the national government and preventing additional 

communal fissures in the provinces. As one U.S. official noted, “Relying on formal 

governance was not an effective way for Karzai to prevent the government from 

fracturing because it is far harder to control formal governance. So, to ensure that 

formal government officials were not disruptive of this balance, he often installed 

substandard officials because it was their loyalty or role in some bigger political 

relationship that mattered to him.”998

“Karzai was not serious at all about building local governance.”

—Ehsan Zia, former Minister for Rural Rehabilitation and Development

No matter its relative merits, Karzai’s undertaking was wholly at odds with any 

effort to institutionalize subnational governance. In one well-known example, 

President Karzai visited Helmand in January 2010, at the height of the surge, 

to highlight the province’s stabilization. Rather than praise and legitimize 

Helmand Governor Gulab Mangal receives President Karzai on January 2, 2010, at a public gathering in 

Helmand to discuss security and development in the province. (DOD photo)
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Helmand’s diligent governor, Gulab Mangal, who was sitting next to him, Karzai 

gave credit for local progress to Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, a former Helmand 

governor, warlord, and Karzai loyalist who was removed from office in 2005 

after nearly 20,000 pounds of opium were found in his house.999 Other senior 

Afghan officials were similarly hostile to “downstream” coalition efforts to build 

local governance because they felt these efforts undermined their informal 

influence networks.1000 Predictably, these reservations by senior officials in 

Kabul stymied efforts to extend the reach of government and reinforced the 

power of personalities, rather than institutions. 

The Coalition Inadvertently Supported Predatory Officials

Throughout the last century, Afghans have seen widely varying levels of 

formal government in their lives. In contrast, informal governance and dispute 

resolution mechanisms have been more consistent and prevalent at the local 

level.1001 The literature is quick to note that many rural Afghans (particularly 

those in the heavily Pashtun areas prioritized for COIN’s clear-hold-build 

process) often did not want the reach of formal government to be extended 

because it was traditionally foreign to them.1002 Yet, among the more than 

100 U.S., British, and Afghan practitioners we spoke to—from ambassadors, 

generals, and senior USAID officials to governors, civil affairs officers, 

stabilization program managers, and implementing partners—not one had ever 

heard Afghans say they did not want more government in their lives. 

What many did imply, however, was that if presented with the choice between 

no government and predatory, corrupt, and incompetent government, Afghans, 

like most people, would certainly opt for no government, and that was often 

the choice they faced.1003 As scholar Vanda Felbab-Brown noted, “Everyone 

craves good governance, and Afghans want democracy, or at least pluralism 

and accountability. However, if democracy delivers abusive, predatory, and 

capricious governance, then even predictable brutality may be better.”1004

“Everyone craves good governance, and Afghans want 

democracy, or at least pluralism and accountability. However, 

if democracy delivers abusive, predatory, and capricious 

governance, then even predictable brutality may be better.”

—Vanda Felbab-Brown, Senior Fellow at Brookings

This distinction pointed to a significant challenge for extending the 

government’s reach: Because it moved as fast as it did, the coalition had little 

choice but to support many government officials who were predatory, corrupt, 

or incompetent. As practitioners noted, the irony was painful. The effort to 

legitimize the government was undermined when the very Afghans brought 
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in to lead the effort themselves became sources of instability as repellent as 

(if not more repellent than) the Taliban.1005 As former IDLG Deputy Minister 

Farid Mamundzai observed, “Stability programs didn’t address these causes of 

instability” and sometimes “enabled them.”1006

In fact, because stabilization programming was meant to be public and involve 

deliberations among community elders and local officials, these deliberations 

were unlikely to identify those very officials as local sources of instability. After 

all, few elders participating in a stabilization working group would publicly 

accuse their own local officials of malfeasance.1007 As a result, the stabilization 

process often inadvertently introduced or legitimized sources of instability and 

then immunized those sources from being identified and extricated. 

The Scope was Too Ambitious and Missed Opportunities 

to Focus on Dispute Resolution

In part because of the assumption that COIN and stabilization in Iraq could be 

replicated in Afghanistan, the idea of extending the reach of the government 

was not properly tailored to Afghanistan.1008 Specifically, the implicit value 

proposition explaining why Afghans should trust their government more than 

the Taliban had little to do with the Afghan context and more to do with what 

the coalition was well-positioned to try to build.

The primary services the Taliban had occasionally provided since 2001 were 

physical security and sporadic dispute resolution—neither of which, as IDLG’s 

Barna Karimi noted, required a development budget or technical skill.1009 The 

Taliban mostly opted to forsake services entirely and secured the support of 

the population through predation and coercion.1010 Yet, it was widely assumed 

that to compete with the Taliban for the allegiance of the population, Afghans 

would need access to high-quality government services pushed down from 

most ministries.1011

In contrast, after decades of war, the ease of the Taliban’s rise to power 

and resilience since 2001 suggested that the specific services the Taliban 

occasionally provided—security and dispute resolution—were sufficient for 

many Afghans to grant them legitimacy in areas where those services were 

available.1012 Afghan minister and governor of Laghman, Paktika, and Helmand 

Provinces Gulab Mangal observed:

I have seen cases where people have spent five to six years for a small issue 

in the government courts. A small issue like that gets solved by the Taliban 

in one day. I don’t believe the Taliban were just and provided real justice, but 

the thing is that people want results. In many cases, people will say that I 

want my case solved even if I don’t win. I don’t want to spend money on my 

case for five years and spend double or triple the amount of the property that 

I am contesting. . . . So, if we had focused all our effort only on security and 

justice, it would have been better.1013
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However, instead of using the Taliban offerings as a baseline for the government’s 

own value proposition, the coalition tried to build soaring institutions that the 

Afghan government was unprepared to manage or sustain. “We did what we know 

how to do, not what needed to be done,” said former SRAP senior advisor Barnett 

Rubin. “We build bureaucracies, so that’s what we did.”1014

“We did what we know how to do, not what needed to be done. . . . We 

build bureaucracies, so that’s what we did.”

—Barnett Rubin, former SRAP advisor

Even within dispute resolution, the U.S. government chose to focus on formal 

rule of law, rather than informal rule of law, also called traditional dispute 

resolution (TDR). TDR in Afghanistan employs a varying mixture of traditional, 

community-specific norms, and Islamic legal principles, or sharia.

1015 As early 

as 2007, international legal experts highlighted the coalition’s inattention to 

informal justice, even though an estimated 80–90 percent of Afghan disputes are 

handled through TDR, and many Afghans have more faith in it than in formal 

dispute resolution.1016

The TDR system predates the Taliban, which simply administers a harsh form 

of sharia-based TDR in the areas it controls and influences, and forbids the use 

A CERP-funded appellate courthouse in Mehtarlam, Laghman Province, on June 4, 2013. (DOD photo by 

Spc. Hilda Clayton)
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of state-run justice systems.1017 Even with popular and respected Taliban judges, 

the process and results can be abusive or inequitable.1018 However, according to 

former IDLG Deputy Minister Farid Mamundzai, “The rules of justice the Taliban 

follow are already understood in the society, which makes it easy for people to 

accept,” allowing the Taliban to secure legitimacy by providing an important 

service that “already existed at the local level.”1019 In other words, not only was 

TDR more familiar and acceptable, but the Taliban demonstrated the value of 

using TDR as a politically legitimizing force. 

However, according to a former senior USAID official, “We dismissed the 

traditional justice system because we thought it didn’t have any relevance 

for what we wanted to see in today’s Afghanistan. We wanted to give them 

something they had never had before.”1020 Furthermore, supporting TDR would 

have posed other challenges. As Barnett Rubin noted, “Trying to compete with 

the Taliban’s successful dispute resolution would have meant allowing sharia, 

and that’s not something we could politically do.”1021

“We dismissed the traditional justice system because 

we thought it didn’t have any relevance for what we wanted 

to see in today’s Afghanistan. We wanted to give them 

something they had never had before.”

—Former senior USAID official

The U.S. government spent more than $1 billion on rule of law programming 

in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2015, of which less than $100 million 

(approximately 10 percent) was spent on enhancing informal rule of law.1022

State’s 2009 rule of law strategy—the only one it drafted—recognized the 

importance of TDR to Afghans, even calling it a “pillar” of the coalition’s effort; 

however, the balance between funding for formal and informal rule of law 

programming did not seem to reflect this recognition.1023 Worse, the kind of 

dispute resolution promoted by formal rule of law programming was not only 

considered corrupt, but also foreign to most rural Afghans. As Dr. Sibghatullah, 

the director of the District Delivery Program, noted:

For the first year after Marjah was cleared, formal judiciary officials only 

heard five cases because no one was used to it. Locals would tell us, ‘We’ve 

never seen this and need to see if it works.’ They also didn’t think it was 

practical because of the slow appeals process. Some believed locals were 

not using it because of Taliban intimidation, but they were still going to the 

district governor for dispute resolution, so they couldn’t have been afraid. 

And when the district governor would refer them to formal judiciary officials 

and the huqooq [mediator], whose job it was to address those grievances, 

locals never followed up with them.1024

Of the rule of law funding devoted to informal justice, approximately $40 million 

was spent on USAID’s “Rule of Law Stabilization Program-Informal Component” 
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(RLS-I) from 2010 to 2014.1025 According to State’s 2009 rule of law strategy, 

informal rule of law efforts would “provide security and space for traditional 

justice mechanisms to reemerge organically in areas cleared of the Taliban.”1026

RLS-I operated in 48 districts and sub-districts, among them 23 key terrain 

districts, and like many stabilization programs, it was most successful in 

areas “where elders have some level of education, implementation is not 

threatened by insecurity, and where there is a district government that is 

at least partially functioning.”1027

While results were mixed, RLS-I was at least built on foundations more 

appropriate to its Afghan context.1028 For example, according to a program 

fact sheet, “through a series of trainings and outreach tools, [RLS-I] introduces 

principles of sharia law to TDR stakeholders to reduce the likelihood of TDR 

decisions violating the rights of Afghans.”1029 Despite the sensitivity of promoting 

non-Western rule of law principles and the coalition’s general reluctance to do 

so, USAID actually tried to make TDR more aligned with sharia because the 

agency recognized that doing so in this case would make TDR more democratic, 

less violent, and actually help communities resist Taliban interference. 

Similarly, while not a rule of law program, ASOP’s successes in resolving 

disputes through traditional means actually decreased the work load of formal 

judiciary officials, who were regarded as unable to meet the demand.1030

RLS-I and ASOP showed that the U.S. government was capable of promoting 

sharia in principle, as well as extending the government’s reach through a 

tailored stabilization approach that Afghans could find familiar, legitimate, 

and effective—a model that pointed to the importance of developing fewer 

institutions, better.

Regardless of the mechanisms and details, connecting people in unstable 

environments to legitimate and competent government officials, institutions, 

and services (including security) is important for effective stabilization. As 

one senior USAID official noted, “We can’t build a country by addressing 

thousands of local grievances ourselves.”1031 Even building and sustaining 

the kind of informal rule of law that helps legitimize the Afghan government 

requires extending the government’s reach to a certain degree. At the very least, 

extending the reach has to be a part of the solution, as there has to be a capable 

government to hand everything off to when the effort scales down. 

IMPLEMENTATION

The coalition faced a number of challenges specific to the nuts and bolts of 

implementing stabilization programming that deserve special attention. 
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The Tools Were Too Complicated

Analytical tools like the District Stability Framework were important for 

helping military and development professionals identify and program against 

local sources of instability. Unfortunately, the tools were so complicated that 

even the most skilled users needed several days of training to use them.1032 It 

took USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives a full year to help its Afghan staff 

understand the concept of “sources of instability” because for years they had 

been trained to address community needs and wish lists instead.1033 Predictably, 

then, Afghan elders and district officials were often overwhelmed by the 

terminology, concepts, and processes.1034

To its credit, USAID recognized these challenges and modified the DSF for the 

second round of stabilization programs after 2012, dubbing the new version 

the Stability Analysis Methodology (also called Stability Assessment Method). 

Unfortunately, SAM users often experienced similar problems.1035

Reverse Engineering

Perhaps one effect of the confusion behind DSF 

and SAM was its misapplication by Afghans 

in stability working groups. Specifically, DSF 

and SAM sought to identify projects through 

the prism of what would make a particular 

community more or less stable. Yet, there 

were consistent examples of Afghans and 

implementers who “reverse engineered” this 

process. Instead of identifying the source of 

instability and collectively working toward 

the appropriate intervention to address that 

SOI, many participants would first identify 

whatever project they wanted or needed and 

surreptitiously devise a plausible SOI that could 

be superficially linked to that desired project to 

ensure it would be funded.1036

Addressing Needs vs. Sources of Instability

While some practitioners believed that reverse engineering would be less of 

a problem had USAID and its partner staff been better trained and qualified, 

the reverse engineering issue was only one of many with DSF and SAM that 

points to a larger question as to whether it would have been better to program 

according to need, rather than according to the stability criteria favored by 

USAID.1037 The Afghan elders who reverse engineered tools like DSF and SAM 

were actually trying to program by need because (for any number of reasons) 

they did not value projects that attempted to address instability. According 

An elder talking about sources of instability at a Stability Analysis 

Methodology training session in Baghlani Jadid District, Baghlan 

Province, in March 2014. (USAID photo)
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to former SRAP senior advisor Barnett Rubin, “Afghans knew this influx of 

funds wouldn’t last, and they wanted to make the best of the windfall without 

endangering themselves.”1038

Other practitioners believed that reverse engineering was caused by a 

disconnect between the diagnosis and the available remedies; that is, the 

sources of instability identified by the DSF and SAM were typically systemic 

(e.g., corruption and impunity) and not fixable in the near-term. USAID 

evaluations likewise expressed doubt that the small projects typical of 

stabilization could address these larger problems.1039 As former Deputy Minister 

at IDLG Farid Mamundzai observed, while stabilization projects “positively 

impacted the local economy and [provided] a sense of hope. . . [they] couldn’t 

address root causes of instability.”1040 If used properly, these tools should 

have pointed to the type of long-term interventions for which the coalition 

did not have the time or mandate. Indeed, Afghan officials and elders typically 

preferred long-term programs and projects that they believed were more likely 

to have an enduring impact on sources of instability than an abundance of 

small projects.1041

Without long-term solutions on the menu, Afghans played the game and often 

identified “systemic problems” they claimed could be addressed with a retainer 

wall or cash-for-work. USAID and its partners were not in a position to object 

because all parties wanted immediate impact.1042 So, interventions remained 

mostly socioeconomic in nature and addressed issues such as “unemployment, 

illiteracy, lack of social services, and inadequate infrastructure,” rather than 

the political, factional, ethnic, tribal, and communal conflicts that usually drove 

instability.1043 With modifications, the DSF or some version of it could have 

addressed some of these more complicated sources of instability; priorities for 

quick impact simply precluded it from doing so. 

Lack of Government Reach Often Not a Source of Instability

If extending the reach of the government was the main premise of stabilization, 

then needs-based programming would seem to be the logical solution, as it 

would connect communities to multiple levels of local governance in a far 

simpler way. If reach is the primary issue, it would have made more sense to 

simply meet the people’s needs with more NSP-like programs and show Afghans 

the benefit of working with the government, thus meeting the COIN criteria of 

legitimizing the government and weakening the insurgency.1044

After all, NSP improved the government’s legitimacy, and even temporarily 

improved local perceptions of the government, in proportion to visits by local 

officials and security forces.1045 As one USAID evaluation noted, “Considering 

that the SOI may be the poor response of the government to the desires of the 
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community (regardless of what those are), acting on requests is itself addressing 

a source of instability.”1046

It turned out, however, that despite claims at State and USAID, lack of reach 

was often not the source of instability.1047 Rural Afghanistan is immeasurably 

diverse, so the Taliban’s value proposition in one village cluster might be 

completely different from its approach in a nearby cluster, and the government’s 

approach to address those sources of instability would need to be tailored 

accordingly.1048 To drive the Taliban out, some communities might need more 

officials and services, others fewer, and others still might simply need physical 

security.1049 Particularly in the south, there was a frequent assumption (likely 

due to the operational tempo) that merely extending the reach would be 

sufficient to stabilize these communities, and that was often untrue, particularly 

when the government officials were predatory, corrupt, or incompetent.1050

Because lack of reach was not the primary SOI, focusing on extending reach 

alone was insufficient.1051

Fortunately, despite having identified lack of reach as a unifying nationwide 

source of instability that overtly drove most stabilization programs, USAID in 

practice also recognized that there was actually no single nationwide source of 

instability and created the DSF and SAM to analyze local grievances and tailor 

CCI-funded road construction in Sarkani District, Kunar Province, during summer 2013. (USAID photo)
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local solutions. While there was some tension between the two ideas—that there 

was and was not a primary source of instability—some practitioners reconciled 

them by claiming that extending the reach was only part of the means (and 

certainly not the ends) of achieving stability, and that making officials and 

services available at the local level made it possible for unrelated SOIs to be 

properly addressed.1052

To that end, the DSF and SAM were in a position to help identify precisely what 

kind of reach was necessary at the local level, but instead, according to several 

current and former USAID officials, the coalition would often “blindly” bring 

in more officials and services from the ministries.1053 As Governor of Kunduz, 

Wardak, Khost, and Laghman Provinces Jabar Naimee observed, “In the majority 

of districts, we never even heard the real problems of the people. We made 

assumptions, conducted military operations, brought in government staff, and 

assumed it would lead to security and stability.”1054

“In the majority of districts, we never even heard the real 

problems of the people. We made assumptions, conducted military 

operations, brought in government staff, and assumed it 

would lead to security and stability.”

—Governor Jabar Naimee

In the end, given the pressure to spend and the difficulty of using the various 

tools, many programmers opted not to use the tools and instead simply used 

pre-existing community wish lists, helped “poor people,” did projects for the 

sake of doing projects, programmed with their “gut,” or were satisfied if the 

project merely improved trust between the community and the government.1055

According to one former USAID official who trained hundreds of USAID and 

military officials in the field, few in either group were able to identify the reason 

the Taliban were accepted or tolerated in any given community, “even though 

that’s the very question that should drive all stabilization programming.”1056 So 

while diagnostic tools like DSF and SAM were necessary, they were often not 

used, or used poorly.1057

Top-Down Solutions Were Distractions

Just as often, the various diagnostic tools were bypassed from above. As 

strategic documents often do, the Riedel review, the 2009 campaign plan, 

and SRAP’s Af-Pak Regional Stabilization Strategy diagnosed a number of 

national-level SOIs to help the mission focus. Yet, these priorities also forced 

programming to address these “flavors of the month,” which often took 

precedence over the local SOIs identified through the DSF or SAM.1058 These 

top-down prescriptions, while tempting for nationwide messaging and priorities, 
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contradicted the entire premise of stabilization—that every Afghan community 

is different and that programming had to be tailored accordingly. So, while the 

top-down prescription of extending the government’s reach could at least be 

treated as an instrument in tailoring local SOIs, these “flavors of the month” 

could not, as they left little room for local deliberations. 

For example, the Riedel review repeatedly emphasized the importance of 

developing the agricultural sector as an “essential first step to undercutting 

the appeal of al-Qaeda and its allies.”1059 In turn, by the summer of 2009, the 

Integrated Civ-Mil Campaign Plan framed “agriculture opportunity and market 

access” as one of its “transformative effects,” and SRAP Holbrooke likewise 

prioritized agriculture as a solution to stabilize the south.1060 According to 

Holbrooke’s senior advisor, Vali Nasr, Holbrooke “became a veritable spokesman 

for Afghanistan’s pomegranate farmer.”1061 In December 2009, Secretary 

Clinton wrote in an agency-wide cable that “our top reconstruction priority is 

implementing a civilian-military agriculture redevelopment strategy to restore 

Afghanistan’s once vibrant agriculture sector. This will help sap the insurgency 

of fighters and of income from poppy cultivation.”1062 As a result, implementers 

had to work agriculture into much of their programming, even if the local source 

of instability had little to do with agriculture.1063

Shortly thereafter, after being prominently featured in the updated 2010 Regional 

Stabilization Strategy, gender and women’s rights became a central theme in 

Computer training for women in Mandozai District, Khost Province, in April 2015. (USAID photo)
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stabilization.1064 For a time, many stabilization projects and interventions had 

to either have gender components or sometimes explicitly center on gender, 

regardless of the SOI and even though USAID that same year was explicit 

that stabilization programming would not be gender-focused.1065 The 2010 

strategy noted the importance of tailoring solutions to local settings, even as it 

articulated top-down prescriptions to override them.1066 As one former USAID 

official noted, from a development perspective, such top-down prescriptions 

made sense, but stabilization is inherently bottom-up and is supposed to account 

for variance on the ground.1067 Forcing these prescriptions onto stabilization 

programming was thus counterproductive, both in theory and in practice. 

Zero Sum: Building Capacity vs. Implementing Projects

Even setting aside the freedom of implementers to tailor local solutions to local 

problems, programmers consistently faced an enduring dilemma: whether to 

concentrate on project implementation, which focused on immediate visible 

progress, or capacity building, which focused on sustainable long-term progress. 

Each was seen as vital to the mission, but with deadlines continuously bearing 

down, the two were often mutually exclusive.1068 As noted earlier, stabilization 

programs evolved to focus far more on building capacity from 2012 through 

2017, with the SAM focusing more heavily on ensuring Afghan participation. 

By focusing on building capacity, programmers assumed Afghan officials would 

be better positioned to provide services at some future time. However, with 

a steep learning curve, it also meant projects took far longer to implement. 

In contrast, when the coalition focused on completing projects, Afghans 

saw impact more quickly, but without knowledgeable Afghan officials to 

carry those projects and services forward, the efforts were ad hoc and often 

unsustainable.1069 Throughout, under pressure to ensure services were delivered 

to Afghans, the coalition undermined the very government it was trying to build, 

even as it often made the “right” decisions. For example, according to Marc 

Chretien, a political advisor to the Marines in Helmand, the following occurred 

one week into the clearing of Marjah in early 2010: 

There was a pocket of civilians isolated and trapped nearby because of the 

fighting and they needed humanitarian aid. The Brits wanted the Ministry of 

Refugees to handle it, but it was clear the government would take several 

weeks to deliver the aid to the displaced community, so the Marines went 

ahead and delivered the aid by air the next day.1070

It was inevitable that USAID and the military would attempt creative shortcuts 

to simultaneously build capacity and quickly implement projects. For example, 

one stabilization contractor noted:

Rather than build capacity, we sought it out. We went in and picked 

winners. We said, ‘This guy is bright’ or ‘That guy is easy to work with,’ 

regardless of whether his role was suited to that specific task or process. 

We weren’t building capacity; we were playing favorites to accommodate 

program priorities.1071
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In a broader sense, local Afghan officials valued programs like CERP and vehicles 

like PRTs because “they wouldn’t have the same influence or money if the PRTs 

went away, but we were blocking normal governance by being there,” said retired 

Major General Karl McQuillan, former Deputy Commanding General for eastern 

Afghanistan.1072 As one USAID official noted, “The Afghan government had no 

motive to create their own budget process because the spigot was turned on full 

force.”1073 More than preventing good governance from emerging, the coalition 

sometimes undermined existing and relatively successful government programs 

like NSP by inundating communities with CERP.1074 Likewise, some USAID 

programs also undermined governance processes by distributing massive amounts 

of aid without substantive community engagement processes. AVIPA handed 

out enough tractors, water pumps, seed, and fertilizer to distort local economies 

and made no effort to work through local governance systems.1075 Ultimately, 

a community was unlikely to grant more legitimacy to its government or 

thoughtfully deliberate as a community about its NSP grant if the coalition offered 

them far more money, jobs, and infrastructure through CERP or AVIPA. 

“The Afghan government had no motive to create their own budget 

process because the spigot was turned on full force.”

—USAID official 

Production agriculture specialists from the Iowa National Guard’s 734th Agribusiness Development Team 

(ADT) till the ground inside the greenhouse at the Chowkay Demonstration Farm in Chowkay District, Kunar 

Province, on December 5, 2010. (U.S. Air Force photo by Capt. Peter Shinn)
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PRIORITIZING THE MOST DANGEROUS AREAS 

MADE STABILIZATION LESS EFFECTIVE

Until 2009, to the extent USAID attempted to stabilize Afghanistan, it did so with 

limited stabilization programs in the south and east, as well as a broader effort 

to expand already existing bubbles of stability, for example, in the larger cities 

and many of the provincial capitals.1076 From 2005 through 2008, the embassy 

shifted from a war footing to normalized embassy operations, which meant that 

its development and stabilization portfolios focused on more secure areas.1077

By 2009, most analysts agreed that these efforts were failing. The March 2009 

Riedel review clearly articulated the urgency of clearing, holding, and building 

the least secure areas of the south and the east as a way of permanently 

displacing al-Qaeda and the Taliban from those areas.1078 Later that summer, 

the campaign plan claimed that “securing the most unstable provinces will 

have a cascading impact on the rest of the country,” and General McChrystal’s 

August 2009 assessment agreed that “ISAF will initially focus on critical highpopulation areas that are contested or controlled by insurgents.”1079 Within 

months, 30,000 more troops and hundreds of civilians had been ordered to 

deploy to meet this strategic intent in the newly created key terrain districts 

that were seen as islands of vulnerability or Taliban support in strategic areas 

of the south and east with limited or no government presence. Yet, while an 

aggressive campaign in the Taliban’s heartland could be justified militarily, as 

shown below, prioritizing the most dangerous areas of the country haunted the 

stabilization effort.1080

Rewarding Instability and Penalizing Peace

By clearing, holding, and building areas where the Taliban presence and support 

base was strongest, the coalition rewarded unstable districts at the expense of 

stable or semi-stable ones, even after transition began.1081 As a senior USAID 

official recalled, “Governors in the north and the west would come to Kabul 

and ask us, ‘What do we have to do to get some love—blow something up?’” 

As a result, a backwards incentive structure developed, whereby communities 

could only receive stabilization projects by supporting or otherwise enabling the 

Taliban so the communities could then be “turned” with aid projects.1082 Another 

senior USAID official noted, “Why not make an example of stable areas to make 

others envious? . . . Instead, we built schools in areas that are too dangerous for 

kids to leave the house.”1083

More broadly, for a government to provide services and resources to only some of 

its citizens was already “textbook poor governance;” it was inequitable and viewed 

by many Afghans as a form of corruption and an affront to Islamic values.1084 At 

the same time, however, stabilization programming had to apply a triage system: 

resources were limited and some areas needed to be prioritized. By their very 
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nature, stabilization programs must take place in areas suffering from some 

insecurity, so such imbalances will often be present in stabilization missions. 

“You can’t buy love; you can only incentivize 

good behavior after the fact.”

—Major General Karl McQuillan

Yet, ignoring peaceful communities was less problematic than the way targeted 

communities were rewarded for being unstable. Instead of inviting the behavior 

the coalition and government sought and then rewarding it when that behavior 

manifested itself, the reward of projects was offered for free in the hope of 

generating the desired behavior. As one U.S. official noted, “Giving things away 

doesn’t work. Stabilization should always be quid pro quo.”1085 The frequent 

absence of such an explicit exchange meant Afghans did not own the process, 

nor were they motivated to own it.1086 As a result, vulnerable communities that 

either did not want or were otherwise not ready for stabilization received the 

services anyway in the hope that it would naturally lead them to embrace the 

government and expel the Taliban. Echoing numerous senior Afghan officials, 

retired Major General McQuillan noted, “You can’t buy love; you can only 

incentivize good behavior after the fact.”1087 In other words, the intended change 

in behavior was often an expectation or hope, rather than what it should have 

been: a precondition for projects. 

Men wheel out a bag of fertilizer at a USAID event on April 9, 2010, in Arghandab District, Kandahar 

Province. (USAID photo)
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For the coalition to have credibility in such a proposed trade, however, the 

Afghans who were being pressured to denounce and mobilize against the Taliban 

needed to see “beacons on the hill,” examples of nearby districts and contested 

communities that had been rewarded after siding with the government. That 

way, every success would yield others in neighboring areas as the ink spot of 

improved governance and security spread from one community to the next.1088

Yet, those beacons of success were rare, given the priority to target some of the 

most dangerous areas of the country first and the immense difficulty in turning 

each of them.1089 So, rather than tackle the hardest districts first and use the 

momentum to stabilize less challenging districts, as the coalition had intended, 

this prioritization simply meant that less was accomplished as the coalition was 

increasingly bogged down.1090

Even Securing the Population was Difficult

By targeting the most insecure areas first, the coalition made it difficult to 

showcase the full clear-hold-build cycle, as insecurity kept much of the coalition 

perpetually stuck in the clearing and holding phases.1091 In fact, according 

to some practitioners, discussions never even evolved to the last phase of 

building.1092 As COIN advocates fully recognize, and as was particularly true in 

Afghanistan, physical security is the bedrock of stability.1093 Bob Crowley, the 

senior governance and development advisor to the ISAF commander, noted, 

“Unless the population is convinced the government will support and protect 

them indefinitely, counterinsurgency and stabilization won’t work.”1094 Yet, the 

targeted areas were so dangerous they needed to be cleared and re-cleared again 

and again, akin to “mowing the grass.”1095 For example, one former DOD advisor 

recounted the cycle this way:

ISAF would move into a valley with ANDSF in tow, clear the area, and 

set up an ISAF/ANDSF patrol base, if the forces were available, so 

stabilization could begin. But, when it came time to clear a neighboring 

valley a few weeks later, the forces from that first patrol base would often 

be withdrawn to help, leaving behind a skeleton crew that couldn’t patrol 

the newly cleared valley. The Taliban would then re-infiltrate the valley, 

and stabilization projects would be put on hold until the area could be 

re-cleared and the trust-building process would begin again. And when 

we finally returned, it was obviously harder to convince the Afghans in 

that valley that we’d stick around, and they’d be right not to trust us. We 

couldn’t protect them.1096

Other times, ANDSF would be available to hold while ISAF pushed on to the 

next valley, but would be unwilling to do so without ISAF collocated to protect 

them.1097 Thus, rather than connecting increasingly stabilized ink spots, creating 

new ink spots often meant removing old ones.1098 After all, these communities 

were relatively easy to infiltrate; there were no walls or fences protecting them, 

and only those who benefited from VSO even saw their Afghan protectors every 

day. The rest saw ANDSF patrols once or twice a week at best, and the Taliban 

exerted control in the area the rest of the time.1099
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“Unless the population is convinced the government 

will support and protect them indefinitely, 

counterinsurgency and stabilization won’t work.”

—Bob Crowley, senior governance and development advisor to the ISAF commander

As candidates for stabilization, districts that endured this dance season after 

season (sometimes year after year) rarely developed a new sense of normalcy 

and government protection, and the trust required to change the local calculus 

and behavior in favor of the government did not materialize.1100 Worse, according 

to former Minister for Rural Rehabilitation and Development Wais Barmak, after 

the drawdown, the situation deteriorated dramatically as “the Taliban started to 

infiltrate back into those areas and district governors were often limited to the 

office building of the district center.”1101

Programming in an Information Vacuum

Collecting information about Afghan communities—their rivalries, histories, 

and leaders—was extremely difficult, even in the best of circumstances. As 

one member of General McChrystal’s initial assessment team noted, effectively 

implementing a counterinsurgency and stabilization effort required “a level of 

local knowledge that I don’t have about my hometown,” a standard that was 

often impossible for foreigners to meet.1102 The United States and its coalition 

U.S. Marines with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, conduct a security patrol in Nawa 

District, Helmand Province, on August 7, 2009. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Artur Shvartsberg)
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partners were overly reliant on local leaders for intelligence and insight, which 

left stabilization programmers vulnerable to manipulation by these same 

leaders.1103 Basing decisions on poor or inadequate information was inevitable. 

As one civ-mil planner observed:

We were played all the time by the Afghans. If you didn’t understand what 

had come before, rolling in with some help wasn’t going to do very much. 

Clear, hold, and build doesn’t work if you don’t have an underlying political 

understanding and a grasp of the human terrain.1104

The challenge was made far harder by the lack of security, which meant that civil 

affairs, stabilization programmers, and implementing partners often operated 

in information vacuums.1105 Every soldier, diplomat, and practitioner we spoke 

with had stories of unintended consequences driven by poor information and the 

coalition’s limited access to KTDs. The coalition often unknowingly implemented 

projects that supported one local power broker, faction, tribe, or ethnic group 

over another, which aggravated local conflict and gave disaffected communities 

a reason to start or continue supporting the Taliban. In one example in Kunar, 

civil affairs used CERP to dig a well for one village, but not its neighbor, and 

unintentionally reinvigorated a 400-year dispute over a bride-napping.1106

Information vacuums led not only to 

programming decisions that drove fencesitters to support the Taliban, but sometimes 

even benefited the Taliban directly. According 

to a stabilization contractor, “There was one 

SIKA-East project that program staff were 

particularly proud of because it was done in 

such a dangerous location, but we found out 

accidentally that it was only implemented there 

because the Taliban shadow governor wanted 

it there.”1107

Well aware of the challenges at the time, 

the military fielded Human Terrain Teams 

(HTT) staffed with civilian social scientists 

to embed with military commanders, mostly 

at the brigade and regiment level, to help the 

military understand the grievances of and 

relationships between the populations in which 

they operated.1108 First deployed to Iraq and then 

Afghanistan, the success of these teams varied 

considerably depending on their composition 

and the relationships they built with their 

respective military commanders and staffs.1109

Human Terrain Team social scientist Kathleen Reedy discusses 

challenges and business opportunities for women at a shura in Jaji 

Maidan District, Khost Province, on February 10, 2011. (U.S. Army 

photo by Spc. Tobey White)
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The handful of studies on HTTs largely agree most military commanders valued 

the HTTs embedded with their units, but the program was controversial, poorly 

managed, and faced many of the personnel issues that troubled the civilian 

agencies.1110 Few disagreed, however, that there was a dire need for resources 

to help U.S. government agencies and military units better understand the 

communities whose hearts and minds they were intent on winning, lest they 

waste money or even create and exacerbate the very problems they were hoping 

to help the Afghan government address.1111

In an environment rife with local conflict, reliable information was often 

elusive. However, by prioritizing highly insecure areas, and by moving so 

quickly to stabilize them, the coalition significantly worsened its prospects 

of understanding the local environment and leveraging that understanding to 

stabilize communities. 

Dearth of Willing and Qualified Afghan Government Officials

The lack of security in priority areas made it far less likely that qualified 

Afghan government officials would sign up to work in these districts.1112 The 

absence of qualified (or any) officials highlighted that successful stabilization 

depends on the existence of some local governance already in place.1113 Without 

qualified local civil servants, the government cannot build legitimacy, capacity, 

or sustainable momentum. In fact, to be effective during stabilization, these 

civil servants need to already have been in place long enough to know their 

constituents’ concerns and grievances. USAID quickly recognized this, which 

is why the District Delivery Program was intent on recruiting and fielding 

more Afghan officials to deliver and sustain the services provided through 

other stabilization programs. Yet, prioritizing the most dangerous areas 

meant that the required history of local governance could not be established 

before stabilization programming ramped up.1114 With little time available for 

security to improve, governance and stabilization programming were often 

attempted simultaneously.1115

In 2010, one brigade in Zabul filled the void by using CERP to hire advisors, or 

unofficial district governors, for almost every district in the province. According 

to an officer on the brigade staff at the time: 

Some of the districts had no governors, and the rest had governors who 

refused to leave [the provincial capital of] Qalat. We only had three U.S. 

companies to devote to clearing most of the province, so we had no choice 

but to bypass clear and go straight to hold and build. So, we used CERP 

to hire an advisor for every district who worked with elders to determine 

project priorities, which we then used to target CERP projects. The advisors 

were born and raised in the district, unlike the district governors who were 

viewed as outsiders to local tribes. The tribal elders appointed the advisors, 

who we then hired. They did exactly what district governors were supposed 

to do because the governors refused to.1116
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There was not sufficient security to extend the government’s reach, so this 

brigade hoped that well-conceived CERP projects would create the necessary 

security and demand for governance such that the district governors would feel 

comfortable taking over governance when they could. Yet, in the meantime, 

from their perspective, progress was too critical to wait for that to happen, and 

the area was too dangerous to expect it to happen any time soon. 

Even the most senior U.S. civilian officials in Kabul had the impression that 

Americans were expected to assume Afghan government functions in KTDs 

where Afghans were unavailable or unwilling to do so.1117 Although the quality 

of civil servants would likely be an issue anywhere in Afghanistan given that 

“growth rates of organic government . . . are sociologically constrained,” as 

Ambassador Eikenberry noted, this problem was compounded by the decision 

to prioritize the most dangerous areas first.1118

Programming was Ineffective in Highly Insecure Areas

KTDs, particularly in the south, were so dangerous that stabilization 

implementing partners were often unable to implement programs effectively 

or complete projects accountably.1119 As one former senior USAID 

official recounted: 

The military asked us to build a 38-kilometer road in Arghandab, Kandahar, 

and five kilometers in, our implementing partner told us it’s not safe enough 

to go further. The military asked why we stopped, so we all flew out there 

Shah Joy District Governor Abdul Qayum speaks to elders about security and elections during a shura near 

Forward Operating Base Bullard in Shah Joy District, Zabul Province, on September 5, 2010. (U.S. Air Force 

photo by Senior Airman Nathanael Callon)
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to take a look, and it was so insecure that our landing zone was under fire 

and we had to turn back. Think about that. We were supposed to build roads 

in an area so dangerous that armed U.S. military helicopters could not even 

land nearby.1120

According to USAID’s own internal guidance, a certain baseline of security was 

required before holding could begin to take place, and attempts to implement 

prior to that point were ineffective. As noted in the U.S. government’s 2011–2015 

interagency Performance Management Plan: 

While a high level of insecurity is assumed in the areas where most 

stabilization partners will be operating, there must be some basic level of 

security in order to allow project staff to operate, quality assessments to be 

performed, high-quality, successful projects to be implemented, and results to 

be felt by the community. Without basic security, programs may exacerbate 

instability and provide resources for [anti-government elements].1121

Similarly, an evaluation of the Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative found 

that small-scale infrastructure activities implemented in areas that were 

still in the clear phase failed to achieve much, but the same approach bore 

fruit in areas where community leaders felt secure enough to associate with 

the government.1122

By 2013, a USAID lessons learned report went one step further and suggested 

that stabilization projects should not take place until the build phase of COIN.1123

Yet, as noted above, it was difficult to hold—much less build—areas that were 

not patrolled regularly by competent security forces. In any Afghan community 

A village elder talks with an ANA commando during a mission in search of insurgent weapons caches in 

Alahsang village, Wardak Province, on March 6, 2012. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 

3rd Class Sebastion McCormack)
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that received such limited government protection, few residents would risk 

reporting, denouncing, or mobilizing against the Taliban, and it strains credulity 

to think that providing them a small infrastructure project could overcome this 

challenge.1124 As one USAID official observed:

In Wardak, we were doing all the right things and our projects were very 

well-received. Locals were happy they could use our roads to take their goods 

more easily to market, thrilled to have more jobs from the infrastructure 

projects and more prosperity from the improved value chains, but they were 

still terrified for their lives. They were perpetually concerned about security. 

They didn’t feel like their government could protect them, and we couldn’t 

change that no matter how much we built, how many people we employed, or 

how much they liked us for it.1125

Notably, Wardak comprised some of the more secure districts the coalition tried 

to clear, hold, and build. Yet, while KTDs in places like Wardak were permissive 

enough to physically complete projects, they remained too unstable for those 

projects to have the larger intended impact on behavior. 

Many communities were so dangerous that elders and government officials 

would not even participate in stability working groups or agree to accept 

projects for fear of retribution and, on at least one occasion, elders felt obliged 

to request permission from the Taliban’s Peshawar shura before allowing 

stabilization projects to be implemented, clearly defeating the purpose.1126 In 

northern Helmand, almost half of CCI projects attempted were not completed 

because, according to local staff, the Taliban did not allow the remainder 

to proceed.1127 In other places, including Kandahar City—where troops 

Tailoring training in a bazaar in Kajaki District, Helmand Province, in 2014. (USAID photo)
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were densely concentrated and aid abundant—projects, implementers, and 

participating communities were formally taxed by the Taliban and killed for 

failure to pay.1128 Others faced violent retribution or assassination for simply 

participating in the programs.1129

The Primacy of Security and Control

One important indicator of security is physical control of the terrain. In areas 

where security forces had enough control to move freely, they were in a better 

position to protect the population and civil servants were in a better position 

to provide services. One systemic review of 19 studies of the relationship 

between aid and violence during the period 2001–2016 found that “front-line 

aid,” which was spent in highly insecure regions with the strong presence of 

anti-government forces, was “more likely to exacerbate violence than to dampen 

violence.” Specifically, the review found that both CERP and community-driven 

development projects appeared to have violence-reducing effects only when the 

environment was reasonably secure.1130

While greater force levels did not always mean increased control (particularly if 

the forces were predatory), in central Helmand, force levels seemed to play an 

important role and may have contributed to a significant decline in violence. As 

highlighted throughout this report, reductions in violence did not automatically 

translate into stability, especially if there was a governance void after clearing; 

however, reducing violence was a prerequisite to stability.

Figure 11 depicts levels of violence in two districts in central Helmand: Nawa, 

which was cleared in the summer of 2009, and Nad Ali, whose large sub-district 

Marjah was cleared in early 2010.1131 These two districts, among several others in 

central Helmand, saw a significant increase in combat events during their respective 

clearing phases and a rapid drop in combat events as stabilization ramped up. 

As violence diminished, stabilization projects commenced, some communities 

that were originally too afraid to participate in them changed their minds, clinics 

and schools opened, the police became more efficient and professional, shura 

attendance spiked, some government officials who had refused to leave the 

provincial capital took up their posts at the district level, internally displaced 

persons began returning, bazaars were reopened and thrived, Marines often 

walked unencumbered throughout the districts, and communities offered their 

sons as recruits for Afghan security forces.1132 These districts, in other words, while 

certainly not stable, nonetheless seemed to be stabilizing. 

In fact, not only did central Helmand appear to gradually stabilize according to 

coalition officials on the ground, but efforts there had a unique residual effect as 

well. While never an oasis of peace and security, in terms of control, Helmand 

was the province that held on the longest after the drawdown. As multiple senior 
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ISAF officials confirmed, not until early 2015 (nearly three years after Helmand’s 

drawdown began) did the government begin to lose control of cleared areas, long 

after other cleared KTDs destabilized as a result of the drawdown.1133

“If you really want to win hearts and minds, give Afghans security.”

—Andrew Wilder, Vice President of Asia Programs at USIP

There is insufficient evidence to discern precisely why central Helmand saw 

this improvement or why it generally held for several years; as discussed 

earlier, the variables were multiple and complex. Yet, this dynamic may point 

to the one ingredient that central Helmand had that no other area did, not even 

Kandahar: a saturation of coalition forces covering an area with a relatively 

small population.1134 The Marines were able to stabilize much of central Helmand 

through their sheer force of presence, and they demonstrated that reliable 

physical security is paramount. As Afghanistan expert Andrew Wilder observed, 

“If you really want to win hearts and minds, give Afghans security.”1135

0

5

10

15

20

25

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Nad Ali

Nawa

MONTHLY COMBAT EVENTS IN NAWA AND NAD ALI DISTRICTS, HELMAND PROVINCE, 2005–2014 (PER 10,000 POPULATION)

Source: Empirical Studies of Conict Project (ESOC) analysis, data from Andrew C. Shaver and Austin L. Wright, “Data on Combatant Activity During Afghanistan War Advance Scientic 

Investigation of Insurgency,” Technical Report, 2017.

FIGURE 11
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In fact, according to Marc Chretien, political advisor to the Marines in Helmand 

and then to the ISAF commander in Kabul, “Security and stability existed 

wherever the Marines had a continuous footprint.”1136 The Marines had a 

remarkable footprint indeed: more than 20,000 Marines were operating in 

Helmand at the height of the surge in 2010.1137 In fact, Nawa and Marjah appear 

to have been among the few areas of the country to receive enough troops over 

a prolonged period to reach the minimum ratio of one counterinsurgent for 

every 50 civilians prescribed in COIN doctrine.1138 Marjah actually doubled that 

ratio with two Marine battalions through the summer of 2011, 15 months after 

the area was cleared, but both Marjah and Nawa at least maintained the ratio 

through the summer of 2012.1139 For almost three years after, even as the Marines 

drew down, Marjah and the surrounding areas in central Helmand continued to 

benefit from relatively saturated Afghan force levels because, Chretien added, 

“the operation in Marjah made it a public relations focal point.”1140

It is impossible to say if Marjah and Nawa were, for any number of reasons, 

already predisposed to stabilization in ways that other districts, particularly 

those in northern Helmand, were not. Most Nawa residents, for example, were 

from the same tribe, which precluded the kind of rivalries that often plagued 

stabilization efforts elsewhere.1141 Furthermore, Helmand’s north was equally 

saturated with troops, yet violence levels there continued increasing for years 

after clearing began. However, the example of central Helmand simply highlights 

that a saturation of forces contributed to their temporary stabilization and was a 

necessary but not sufficient condition. 

It is important to note that despite the positive effects of force saturation, all 

of Helmand eventually deteriorated and the province is now among the most 

clearly Taliban-controlled provinces in the country.1142 While force saturation 

appeared to provide some breathing room in central Helmand, no amount of 

troops could compensate for the lack of popular legitimacy and poor capacity 

of Afghan civil servants and security forces in the longer term, and the quick 

drawdown in the country’s most dangerous districts created a void that allowed 

insurgents to take control. 

Marawara District, Kunar Province

While force saturation contributed to successful stabilization in some areas, notably in Helmand 

Province, in other cases stabilization required close collaboration of capable individuals, 

including coalition civilian and military officials, as well as Afghan elders, civil servants, and local 

military leadership. Marawara District was an example of this collaboration.

For a case study of Marawara’s successful stabilization and progression through the 

clear-hold-build cycle, see appendix A.

MAY 2018 | 179

U.S. Marine Corps photo

CHAPTER 9

FINDINGS

Our study of the U.S. experience with stabilization in Afghanistan finds:

1. The U.S. government greatly overestimated its ability to build 

and reform government institutions in Afghanistan as part of its

stabilization strategy. 

During the 2009 Afghanistan strategy reviews—and after considerable 

internal disagreements among the key players—President Obama and his 

civilian and military advisors collectively set in motion a series of events 

that fostered unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved in a few 

years and ensured the U.S. government’s stabilization strategy would not 

succeed, first with the rapid surge and then the rapid transition. 

The president and his advisors relied on poor comparisons between the 

success seen in Iraq at the time and what they hoped to accomplish in 

Afghanistan. They focused on troop numbers and their geographic priorities 

and mostly omitted concerns about the Afghan government’s capacity 

and performance. Further, the scope of the strategies under consideration 

was not revised when the president shortened the surge timeline from an 

estimated 10 years to 18 months. As a result, the U.S. government settled 
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SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

on a strategy far more ambitious than it originally anticipated and poorly 

suited to the time allotted to achieve it. 

On the ground, closing the surge window so soon after opening it—and 

then opening an equally narrow window to transition to Afghan control—

gave many of the people implementing the strategy the impression that “the 

mission wasn’t to win but rather to get in and out as quickly as possible.”1143

Worse, the narrowness of the surge and transition windows had a profound 

and harmful impact on countless downstream decisions regarding planning, 

staffing, and programming.

Ultimately, the demand for fast progress meant the country had not 

stabilized when transition began in the summer of 2011, and Afghans were 

unprepared to take the reins when transition finished in December 2014.

2. The stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not 

properly tailored to the Afghan context.

To compete with the insurgents, the U.S. government assumed the Afghan 

government would need to out-govern the Taliban and provide services 

that went well beyond what the Taliban had offered. USAID and DOD 

programs sought to enable the Afghan government to provide health 

clinics, schools, retainer and flood walls, agriculture training and seed 

distribution, and countless other projects the Taliban had not offered. In 

contrast, the Taliban’s sporadic legitimacy was anchored in its provision of 

only two services: security and dispute resolution. Rather than using those 

two services as a model for its own set of service offerings, the coalition 

pursued a strategy to help the Afghan government push down high-quality 

services from most ministries. The ambitious nature of the strategy meant 

that in most key terrain districts, the coalition helped the government do 

everything poorly, rather than a few important things well. 

3. The large sums of stabilization dollars the United States devoted 

to Afghanistan in search of quick gains often exacerbated conflicts,

enabled corruption, and bolstered support for insurgents.

Under pressure to make fast progress, money spent was often regarded as 

an indicator of success. The difficulty of discerning program impact only 

compounded the problem and made it tempting to use money as a proxy 

for effect. Yet, the sums were far more than Afghanistan could absorb, 

which fueled corruption. Indeed, moving at high speed, the coalition often 

exacerbated the very problems it hoped to mitigate. Power brokers with 

access to coalition projects became kings with patronage to sell, and 
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stabilization projects created or reinvigorated conflicts between and among 

communities. In turn, Afghans who were marginalized in this competition 

for access and resources found natural allies in the Taliban, who used 

that support to divide and conquer communities the coalition was keen to 

win over. 

4. Because the coalition prioritized the most dangerous districts first, 

it continuously struggled to clear them of insurgents. As a result, the

coalition couldn’t make sufficient progress to convince Afghans in 

those or other districts that the government could protect them if they 

openly turned against the insurgents. 

Most of the coalition’s key terrain districts proved so dangerous they 

had to be constantly cleared, which meant that many of the stabilization 

programs designed to jump-start local governance and development were 

implemented prematurely and in communities ill-suited to host them. 

Coalition stakeholders at every level recognized in principle that physical 

security was a prerequisite for stabilization, yet in practice, stabilization 

still usually took place in chronically insecure environments. As a result, 

Afghans were often too afraid to serve in local government, Afghan 

civilians had little faith their districts would remain in government hands 

when the coalition eventually withdrew, implementing partners struggled 

to implement projects amid the violence, and U.S. government agencies 

were unable to adequately monitor and evaluate the projects that were 

implemented. So, rather than tackle the hardest districts first and use 

the momentum to stabilize less challenging districts, as the coalition had 

intended, this prioritization simply meant that less was accomplished 

overall as the coalition was increasingly bogged down.

5. Efforts by U.S. agencies to monitor and evaluate stabilization programs

were generally poor. 

While poor security made it difficult to monitor and evaluate stabilization 

programs, the U.S. government had not put the necessary effort or thought 

into how best to do so, even in areas that were more accessible. Agencies 

typically used the amount of infrastructure built and the number of 

civilians employed or trained as indicators of progress. Analyzing these 

outputs was a poor metric for understanding whether Afghans’ support 

for the government was increasing and their support for the insurgency 

was decreasing. The United States implemented stabilization programs in 

Afghanistan from 2002–2017, yet only in 2012 did USAID begin to take a 

more thoughtful approach to measuring impact for stabilization programs, 

and DOD never did. 
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SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

6. Successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the 

physical presence of coalition troops and civilians.

Afghan forces and civil servants were generally unwilling, unprepared, or

unable to carry forward the momentum created by coalition forces and 

civilians, particularly on the unrealistic timeline defined by the coalition. 

By the time all key terrain districts had transitioned in 2014, the services 

and protection Afghan forces and civil servants were in a position to 

provide could not compete with the threats of a resurgent Taliban. Baseline 

capacity for Afghan institutions was so low that they could not become selfsufficient on the stabilization strategy’s timelines, particularly in the most 

dangerous districts in the country. Similarly, because stabilization was only 

a stopgap measure, gains were lost when little follow-on programming was 

implemented as the coalition withdrew. 

7. Stabilization was most successful in areas that were clearly under the 

physical control of government security forces, had a modicum of local

governance in place prior to programming, were supported by coalition 

forces and civilians who recognized the value of close cooperation, 

and were continuously engaged by their government as programming 

ramped up. 

Successful stabilization projects generally occurred in areas that met four 

conditions prior to the projects’ beginning. First, physical security had 

to be sufficient to allow Afghans to feel comfortable openly aligning with 

the government if they wanted. Reliable and non-predatory security was 

the most important factor in winning hearts and minds, and stabilization 

activities were wasteful and detrimental without it in place. 

Second, the building blocks for rudimentary governance needed to be 

in place to give Afghans some form of local representation prior to the 

commencement of stabilization projects. In cases where stabilization 

projects succeeded, some form of governance, for example, a district shura 

or governor, helped facilitate projects based on their ability to advocate for 

the community. 

Third, Afghan and coalition forces and civilians had to recognize the 

value of methodically working and planning together to jump-start 

service delivery. 

Fourth, the government’s engagement had to be continuous and focused 

on process, not product. Stabilization efforts were more likely to succeed 

when projects were clustered together, even when doing so meant directly 
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impacting fewer Afghans. In fact, more was often accomplished in the 

aggregate by doing less, but doing it better, for example, by focusing on 

fewer communities, but staying in them longer. The number and dollar 

value of projects implemented far exceeded the coalition’s ability to 

monitor and evaluate them, which meant opportunities for corruption 

and elite capture abounded, making many of those projects more harmful 

than helpful. The most important value that stabilization brought targeted 

communities was often in the process of connecting them to informal and 

formal governance structures, not in the projects’ tangible end result. It was 

this relationship, not its outputs, which proved decisive. 

MAY 2018 | 185

DOD photo

CHAPTER 10

LESSONS

Afghanistan was likely among the most difficult environments for a largescale stabilization mission given the constraints discussed at length in 

this report. The challenges made it difficult to discern whether and how the 

problems seen in Afghanistan were specific to the environment or systemic 

to stabilization. 

In fact, the poor results of this particular stabilization mission make it tempting 

to conclude that stabilization should not be conducted in the future at all. 

However, in any area that has been cleared, the absence of reliable alternatives 

to stabilization means that rather than discourage the use of stabilization writ 

large, the best course of action may be to help the U.S. government (1) balance 

the importance of any given stabilization mission with a realistic understanding 

of the level of effort required and what is achievable and (2) improve its ability 

to prepare for, design, execute, monitor, and evaluate stabilization missions 

when it elects to undertake them. 

Given the substantial recent increase in investment in stabilization efforts in 

Syria and Iraq, realistic assessments that align the ends, ways, and means of 

prospective and ongoing stabilization efforts are critical. 
186 | LESSONS

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Moreover, given that stabilization was occasionally effective in Afghanistan, 

we believe it may be more effective in other countries if the lessons below are 

learned and applied in future stabilization missions.

1. Even under the best circumstances, stabilization takes time. Without

the patience and political will for a planned and prolonged effort, 

large-scale stabilization missions are likely to fail.

For future large-scale stabilization missions, the U.S. government should 

set reasonable expectations for what can be accomplished. Unless the 

expected timeframe exceeds 10 years and includes meaningful programs 

and investments following the shorter-term stabilization component, 

such a mission will likely be ineffective. In contrast, with the compressed 

one to three-year timelines seen in Afghanistan, programs will be forced 

to compromise quality as they ramp up and finish too quickly, and the 

population will not trust the staying power of the government’s improved 

services and legitimacy. Without the patience and political will for a 

planned and prolonged effort, large-scale stabilization missions are likely to 

fail, and may fail regardless, given the number and complexity of stars that 

must align to ensure success. 

2. Most U.S. government capabilities and institutions necessary in a 

large-scale stabilization mission should be established and maintained

between contingencies if they are to be effective when they 

matter most.

As occurred after the Vietnam War, there is now a tendency to believe the 

U.S. government should not and will not conduct large-scale stabilization 

missions in the future.1144 However, there is little reason to believe this 

mission fatigue is permanent, as there will likely be times in the future 

when insurgent control or influence over a particular area or population is 

deemed an imminent threat to U.S. interests, and it may not be possible to 

rely on partner forces and civil servants to clear, hold, and build the area. 

To ensure the U.S. government is better prepared for such a scenario, the 

capabilities, institutions, and cultural orientation toward counterinsurgency 

and stabilization that was built through trial by fire over the last 17 years 

should be maintained and honed, as they are likely to be critical in the 

future. Cultivating these capabilities and institutions, even if at a reduced 

scale, will also be invaluable for smaller-scale stabilization efforts, which 

are nonetheless costly and demand attention, as emphasized in the 

interagency Stabilization Assistance Review.1145
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MAY 2018 | 187

3. Having qualified and experienced personnel in the right positions at 

the right times is vital to stabilization’s success. 

Every organization and agency that worked on stabilization in 

Afghanistan—from civil affairs and SOF to State and USAID—suffered 

from personnel and programming deficits borne from rapid scaling, short 

tours, and the pressure to make quick progress. No organization was 

prepared to ramp up quickly and it showed across the board. Given the 

nature of most contingency scenarios, rapid scaling may be unavoidable, so 

properly identifying and preparing the appropriate personnel ahead of time 

is paramount. 

4. Increased funding alone cannot compensate for stabilization’s inherent

challenges, and believing that it will can exacerbate those challenges.

Unrestricted funding can exacerbate local conflicts, drive corruption, and 

distort local economies, particularly if compressed timelines are driving 

spending. The stabilization effort in Afghanistan was derailed as money 

spent became the metric of success and programming drove wedges 

between communities—and between communities and the government—

rather than between insurgents and the population. 

5. Physical security is the bedrock of stabilization. 

As noted in the recent Stabilization Assistance Review, stabilization is 

most likely to be successful where there is basic security for implementing 

partners and local stakeholders on the ground.1146 In fact, stabilization 

programs are likely to fail if implemented in areas under incessant attack 

or insurgent control. Host-nation civil servants will be unlikely to volunteer, 

reliable information about the population will be elusive, progress 

necessary to build momentum will take far longer to achieve, and the 

population will be slower to trust that any gains will endure. Further, in 

these areas, implementing partners will have less oversight, limited freedom 

of movement, and reduced capacity to implement quality projects. 

6. The presence of local governance is a precondition for effective

stabilization programming.

Attempting to simultaneously stabilize an area and build local governance 

structures is unlikely to be effective. Some semblance and history of local 

governance must be in place before an area can be stabilized with robust 

programming. Supporting pre-existing informal governance structures 

(or rebuilding them) may be preferable to building formal government, 
188 | LESSONS

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

which is both costly and often culturally unfamiliar. Either way, ensuring 

target communities have competent, accountable, and sustainable local 

governance is important for effective stabilization programming.

7. Stabilizing communities requires a tailored approach.

In poorly governed areas, top-down efforts that attempt to stabilize diverse 

communities are not effective. While this was recognized in theory and led

to the creation of the District Stability Framework, too often locally tailored 

approaches were forced aside to accommodate changing priorities, such as 

agriculture or gender, which were imposed on stabilization programmers 

at the expense of addressing diverse local sources of instability. Tools like 

the DSF and SAM can serve as springboards for future methodologies that 

prioritize community-based and tailored approaches to stabilization, once 

their known shortcomings are addressed. 

8. Stabilization efforts must be rigorously monitored and evaluated.

No matter the logistical or political obstacles, impact is the most

important criterion against which a project or program’s success should 

be judged. Unless a stabilization mission is just starting, no other metric—

money spent, number of projects, people employed—should be used 

in determining the success or failure of a stabilization program. Even 

evaluating a program for outcomes is unlikely to provide a sufficient basis 

for determining success or failure. While the high number of variables in 

stabilization environments makes it difficult to discern cause and effect, 

programming should not take place in areas where it is impossible to 

monitor and evaluate it. From the beginning of the mission, every agency 

involved in stabilization should be planning to prioritize and discern 

program impact, and they should dedicate more staff to oversee M&E 

efforts. USAID eventually made a concerted and pioneering effort with 

MISTI, but DOD struggled to develop measures of effectiveness for CERP 

and VSO. 

9. Successfully conceiving and implementing a stabilization strategy 

requires extensive local knowledge of the host-nation government

and population.

The U.S. government either did not know enough about the Afghan 

government and population or paid insufficient attention to them during 

the strategy reviews. The sense of success in Iraq by 2009 lulled the U.S. 

government into believing the governance challenges in Afghanistan were 
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MAY 2018 | 189

equivalent; they were not. This disconnect made programs overly ambitious 

and set up to fail in the timelines provided. 

On the ground in Afghanistan, DOD, State, and USAID implemented 

programs without sufficient knowledge of local institutions, sociopolitical 

dynamics, and government structures, which often exacerbated local 

conflicts, empowered insurgents, and created unnecessary enmity between 

the population, government, and coalition. 

10. Winning hearts and minds requires a close examination of what has

won and lost the hearts and minds of that particular population in the 

recent past.

The kinds of services the U.S. government sought to help the Afghan 

government deliver were unnecessarily ambitious and not tailored to the 

environment. While improvements in the delivery of healthcare, formal rule 

of law, education, and agriculture services likely helped many Afghans, the 

coalition and the Afghan government aimed to provide Afghans in contested 

areas an array of high-quality services that went well beyond what the 

Taliban had provided and required a level of capacity and legitimacy far 

beyond what the government could offer, particularly in the time allotted.

MAY 2018 | 191

Between 2001 and 2017, U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and 

contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.

At the policy level, the U.S. government overestimated its ability to build and 

reform government institutions in Afghanistan as part of the stabilization 

strategy. During the 2009 Afghanistan strategy reviews—and after considerable 

internal disagreements among the key players—President Obama and his 

civilian and military advisors collectively set in motion a series of events that 

fostered unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved in a few years and 

ensured the U.S. government’s stabilization strategy would not succeed, first 

with the rapid surge and then the rapid transition. Under immense pressure 

to quickly stabilize insecure districts, U.S. government agencies spent far too 

much money, far too quickly, and in a country woefully unprepared to absorb 

it. Money spent was often the metric of success. As a result, programming often 

exacerbated conflicts, enabled corruption, and bolstered support for insurgents.

Every organization and agency that worked on stabilization in Afghanistan—

from civil affairs and SOF to State and USAID—suffered from personnel and 

programming deficits borne from rapid scaling, short tours, and the pressure 

to make quick progress. Even harder than finding available civilians and troops 

DOD photo

CHAPTER 11

CONCLUSIONS
192 | CONCLUSIONS

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

on this timetable was finding qualified and experienced candidates who were 

trained and equipped to understand local political economies and navigate them 

accordingly. No organization was prepared for these challenges, and it showed 

across the board. 

Stabilization is an inherently political undertaking, yet given the size and 

resources of DOD, the military consistently determined priorities on the ground 

and chose to focus on the most insecure districts first. These areas often 

remained perpetually insecure and had to be cleared of insurgents again and 

again. Civilian agencies, particularly USAID, were compelled to program in 

these fiercely contested areas that were not ready for stabilization programming. 

Because the coalition focused on the most insecure areas and rarely provided 

an enduring sense of security after clearing them, Afghans were often too afraid 

to serve in local government, Afghan civilians had little faith their districts 

would remain in government hands when the coalition eventually withdrew, 

implementing partners struggled to implement projects amid the violence, 

coalition forces and civilians had very limited access to and understanding 

of prioritized communities, and U.S. government agencies were unable to 

adequately monitor and evaluate the projects that were implemented.

As a result, power brokers and predatory government officials with access to 

coalition projects became kings with patronage to sell, and stabilization projects 

sometimes created or reinvigorated conflicts between and among communities. 

In turn, Afghans who were marginalized in this competition for access and 

resources found natural allies in the Taliban, who used that support to divide 

and conquer communities the coalition was keen to win over. 

Combined, these factors meant that by the time all key terrain districts had 

transitioned in 2014, the services and protection Afghan forces and civil servants 

were in a position to provide often could not compete with the threats of a 

resurgent Taliban as the insurgents filled the void in newly vacated territory. 
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MAY 2018 | 195

The following recommendations drawn from the U.S. stabilization experience 

in Afghanistan may help increase the likelihood of success in future 

stabilization missions. Some of these recommendations require substantial 

effort. However, given the inherent difficulty of stabilization missions, without 

the political will and technical investment necessary to implement the reforms 

outlined below, in our view large-scale stabilization missions should not 

be conducted. 

EXECUTIVE BRANCH

1. State should take the lead in laying out a robust whole-of-government 

stabilization strategy, USAID should be the lead implementer, and DOD 

should support their efforts. 

For various reasons, DOD in practice made the most consequential strategic 

decisions regarding the implementation of the president’s 2009 stabilization 

strategy. However, building local institutions, changing civilian perceptions, 

and buttressing a government’s legitimacy are political undertakings and 

should be implemented with instruments suited to these tasks. In 2018, 

White House photo

CHAPTER 12

RECOMMENDATIONS
196 | RECOMMENDATIONS

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

State, USAID, and DOD all endorsed this recommendation in the U.S. 

government’s Stabilization Assistance Review.1147

With good reason, the National Security Council has institutionalized 

a Fragile States and Stabilization Policy Coordination Committee to 

oversee U.S. national security policy in priority conflict-affected areas. If 

the NSC, supported by this committee, instructs the agencies to pursue a 

large-scale stabilization mission, State’s broader strategy should assume 

a timeline of 10–15 years or longer, and explicitly outline how shorterterm stabilization efforts in targeted areas will gradually transition to 

longer-term development and host-nation control, according to realistic 

benchmarks defined by host-nation capacity and conditions on the ground. 

The stabilization component of the strategy should be integrated into 

larger political objectives, with the understanding that stabilization is not 

transformative, but rather a catalyst that will burn out if subsequent vital 

investments in governance and development are not integrated into the 

larger strategy and applied in prioritized areas. 

If implemented, this recommendation would ensure the ends, ways, and 

means of the stabilization effort are properly calibrated with one another 

and are built on a political rather than military foundation. 

2. DOD and USAID should update COIN and stabilization doctrine and 

best practices to stagger stabilization’s various phases, with the 

provision of reliable and continuous physical security serving as the 

critical foundation. SIGAR suggests the following blueprint as a model. 

Most communities accustomed to insurgent rule are not ready for 

stabilization projects immediately after clearing. They need the space to 

evaluate their new security forces and governance structures before they 

can commit themselves, so establishing security, building governance 

structures, and ramping up stabilization projects should not happen 

simultaneously. Using Afghanistan as an example, a more methodical 

approach for other environments would be as follows:

• An area is cleared of insurgents. Humanitarian aid is distributed and 

condolence and compensation payments are made, as necessary. 

DOD, State, and USAID personnel take the time to understand local 

relationships, rivalries, and sources of instability. With those insights, 

officials can (1) better identify the precise reasons the insurgents were 

tolerated in that community in the first place and (2) begin planning 

to deliver a combination of security and social services customized to 
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that community, using its previous relationship with the insurgents as 

a guide. 

• Simultaneously, pre-existing informal governance structures are 

identified and evaluated to ascertain their legitimacy. In their absence, 

stabilization programs like the Afghanistan Social Outreach Program 

should be used to establish those structures and begin resolving 

community disputes, as necessary. If formal local governance is 

requested by these informal representatives, programs like the District 

Delivery Program should make government officials available. All 

other stabilization programming designed to connect the population to 

its government should not begin until two conditions are met: (1) the 

entire community has steady and legitimate formal and/or informal 

representation, and (2) a thorough examination of the community’s 

interests and vulnerabilities has been completed. 

• Programs like Village Stability Operations should be considered at this 

stage to ensure the community continues to have sufficient and regular 

physical security so stabilization programming can progress. 

• The community is told that stabilization projects will only begin after 

it has demonstrated its support for the government by reporting IEDs, 

joining local or national police forces, publicly denouncing insurgent 

groups, and working with their informal and formal governance 

representatives to address community grievances. If they are not ready 

to do those things, then they need more time to trust the government’s 

staying power, and they are neither suited nor ready for projects, despite 

what they may say. Implementers must be afforded the space to say 

when communities are not ready for stabilization. 

• Subsequently, if the stabilization cycle is successful, the stories should 

be broadcast and leveraged in nearby areas on the cusp of being cleared, 

illustrating to neighboring communities what they can expect if they help 

keep the insurgents out once security forces clear their communities. 

More basic stabilization programs like ASOP and DDP are offered, as 

needed, on the heels of clearing operations, but robust programming, 

like infrastructure and training, must be earned by the community during 

these early stages as they increasingly expel the insurgents and support 

the government. Without reliable security, there can be no rudimentary 

governance; without rudimentary governance, there should be no 

stabilization projects. 
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SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

• In practice, this will likely mean that the transition from “clear” to “hold” 

will take longer, but doing so will give the community time to adjust to 

a new normal as a permanent sense of physical security and legitimate 

governance takes root. This conditional approach is slow, as it requires 

a step-by-step progression that is difficult to compress; however, it will 

create momentum for enduring change and clear a path for rudimentary 

governance so that each stage properly builds on the last. 

• This sequence should and will have an impact on the criteria for 

selecting areas for clear-hold-build and will likely encourage stabilization 

planners to prioritize areas that are not as insecure as Afghanistan’s 

key terrain districts, but still insecure enough to merit clear-hold-build. 

If an area is not physically secure by civilian standards, expanding the 

aperture to focus on building rudimentary governance and stabilization 

projects is wasteful, often counterproductive, and should not 

be attempted. 

In many ways, the process described above somewhat resembles what 

was philosophically intended with stabilization in Afghanistan, but the 

strategic and tactical timeframes made it impossible to take the time to 

stabilize Afghan communities with the patience, priorities, and conditional 

sequencing outlined above.

There are two circumstances under which stabilization programming can 

be expedited immediately after clearing: when host-nation security forces 

are capable and benevolent enough that they are successfully leading on 

clearing operations, and when the new local governance structures are 

already familiar to the community. Such conditions would obviously not 

apply to areas that have not had continuous security or formal governance 

in years, if ever. 

3. DOD should develop measures of effectiveness for any CERP-like

program in the future.1148

CERP, or any successor program, should incorporate measures of 

effectiveness into its monitoring and evaluation processes, and civil affairs 

personnel should be trained on these processes. DOD should modify 

CIDNE, the database used to track CERP projects, so that civil affairs 

officers are required to conduct a baseline assessment that justifies every 

CERP project, as well as an assessment of the project’s effectiveness 

after project completion and before the project can be formally closed. 

DOD should develop criteria for every CERP project to assess its impact; 
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MAY 2018 | 199

this impact assessment should be the sole criterion for judging whether a 

project is successful, even if this means fewer projects are implemented. 

4. USAID should prioritize the collection of accurate and reliable data for 

its stabilization projects.

Given the number of variables, how quickly they can change, and the biases

inherent in data collection efforts, evaluating stabilization programming is 

difficult. These problems should not be magnified further with inaccurate 

or spotty data. USAID should develop and triangulate baseline indicators 

for targeted areas before stabilization programming begins, and then to 

carefully track project spending at the community level with accurate 

GPS coordinates for every project, which USAID should hold in a 

centralized database. No matter how stability and its indicators are defined, 

understanding impact or even outcomes is far harder without properly and 

systematically comparing targeted areas before and after interventions, and 

ideally, comparing targeted and untargeted areas. Equally important, this 

process cannot be done without dedicating the necessary staff to design the 

research and collect the data. In short, understanding impact should build 

upon MISTI’s trailblazing efforts. 

5. DOD and USAID should prioritize developing and retaining human 

terrain analytical expertise that would allow a more nuanced

understanding of local communities.

Stabilization requires detailed information about what are often poorly or 

rarely studied communities and social groups. This type of information is 

difficult to collect and analyze, and the process requires a special skillset. In 

addition to qualitative research, among the many intangible skills involved 

are an ability to read social cues, to ask penetrating questions without being 

intrusive, and to understand what makes a community tick, all within a 

very short period of time. While localized subject matter expertise is very 

important, given that the locations of future contingency operations are 

difficult to identify years in advance, it is more important to recruit, build, 

and retain these adaptable, generalized skills than it is to build countryspecific subject matter expertise.1149 For example:

• DOD should establish a cadre of sociopolitical enablers for 

SOF units participating in VSO-like endeavors. U.S. SOF 

personnel assigned to Village Stability Operations needed an intimate 

understanding of local socio-political conditions and well-developed 

cross-cultural communication skills. The ability to gather and analyze 

this information and effectively influence members of the local 
200 | RECOMMENDATIONS

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

community required a unique combination of personality and training. 

The selection process for U.S. SOF personnel is already extremely 

rigorous, and adding additional requirements would narrow the field 

of candidates and extend the training pipeline. Instead, civilian or 

military personnel who have been carefully selected and trained for 

the role should be integrated as enablers into every stage of VSOlike endeavors. Each enabler’s mission will be to gather, analyze, and 

present sociopolitical information to the Village Stability Platform 

commander, help the VSO team build effective relationships with the 

local community, and help discern the appropriate ways to connect 

the community to local governance and government structures. The 

selection criteria for these personnel should include experience working 

in developing countries, advanced training in research methods, and a 

psychological evaluation. Furthermore, these enabling personnel should 

be integrated into the SOF training cycle to institutionalize them and 

ensure prospective teams appreciate and understand how to use them. 

While the above example is specific to U.S. SOF, U.S. conventional forces 

and USAID should adopt similarly tailored efforts and determine whether 

and how the need for such expertise can be met with additional training for 

existing personnel in existing structures (for example, civil affairs); existing 

personnel housed and cultivated in new structures (for example, the AFPAK 

Hands program); external personnel hired into existing or new structures 

(for example, the Human Terrain System); or some combination.1150

Regardless, under whatever structures and mechanisms are appropriate, 

identifying, recruiting, and preparing those personnel for advanced 

analysis of political economies and human terrain must be done between 

contingencies, and the role of these individuals should be institutionalized.

6. DOD should ensure it has a sufficient number and mix of civil

affairs personnel with the right training and aptitude for the next 

stabilization mission.

In recent years, the number of active duty civil affairs personnel has been 

decreasing. Currently, there is one active duty civil affairs brigade assigned 

to U.S. Army Special Operations Command, much as there was before the 

surge—but the active duty civil affairs brigade headquarters and its five 

battalions that were stood up during the surge to support conventional 

forces have been reduced to a single battalion in recent years. The future 

of any CERP-like program and its thoughtful implementation should rest 

in the hands of properly trained and supported civil affairs personnel who 

are in the best position to prioritize and measure impact. Maintaining a 

well-resourced, active duty civil affairs brigade that regularly partners 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 201

with conventional forces and civilian partner organizations is vital to 

the military’s preparedness for future stabilization missions, both large 

and small. 

7. State and USAID should designate a new civilian response 

corps of active and standby civilian specialists who can staff 

stabilization missions.

Recruiting, training, and deploying the required civilian personnel for 

large-scale stabilization missions is difficult, particularly with short 

time-horizons. Most contingencies will need to ramp up quickly with 

experienced civilian personnel who can build coalitions and understand 

diverse communities. Processes and structures need to be in place to 

ensure the quality of personnel does not suffer simply because of the 

urgency of the task at hand. As noted on pages 54–55, previous efforts to 

meet this objective were costly and hindered by political infighting, among 

other obstacles. Furthermore, justifying large expenditures today for an 

unknown future contingency is difficult. However, as highlighted in the 

U.S. government’s 2018 Stabilization Assistance Review, with only modest 

investments ahead of time, the U.S. government can maximize available 

expertise and position itself to make significant strides from the beginning 

of a contingency, when the most important decisions are considered and 

made.1151 Between contingencies, the modified civilian response corps 

outlined below could cost as little as $2 million per year, compared to tens 

of millions of dollars annually for the previous iteration of the CRC. 

At a minimum, a civilian response corps should have these three 

components, which have been modified to account for the challenges faced 

by earlier efforts.

• An active corps of government professionals who focus on 

stabilization. State’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations 

and USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives staff should serve as the 

active component of a civilian response corps, deployable within a 

week. In these two offices, the U.S. government already has scores of 

U.S.-based employees with medical and security clearances and the 

competencies to provide stabilization expertise in the first civilian 

wave of a contingency. In such an event, the Secretary of State should 

appoint someone at the under-secretary level to lead the combined 

active component, whose team would make decisions on priorities for 

the deployments of this active corps. In contrast to previous efforts, 

participation in this active corps would be limited to State and USAID, 
202 | RECOMMENDATIONS

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

which have the expertise and equities to justify their role. Notably, there 

would be minimal cost associated with this active component. 

• A standby corps of government professionals with broader but 

relevant stabilization experience. If the contingency is large or many 

of the active corps members cannot be withdrawn from their current 

assignments, members of the standby corps should be activated. These 

officials would be pulled from the cleared-personnel pools at State and 

USAID, have knowledge of and experience working in conflict-affected 

environments, and be deployable within 90 days. The target number 

should be 300–500 people with diverse skillsets, including contract 

management, program management, and political engagement.1152

Signing up and deploying should be regarded, particularly by managers, 

as the kind of professional development that currently exists with 

detailees, secondees, and those on temporary duty assignments across 

State and USAID: an opportunity that would add value to host agencies 

and departments upon the official’s return. State and USAID staff 

should be encouraged to participate with career-enhancing benefits 

and financial incentives. If activated to deploy, participants in the 

standby corps would be compelled to do so. Agencies and departments 

that lose staff to fill contingency civilian slots would be compensated 

for temporary backfills, under the assumption that supplemental 

congressional funding would be forthcoming in a contingency operation. 

This standby corps would not necessarily include the CSO and OTI 

bullpens of stabilization and transition advisors, as the nature of their 

employment and regular deployments is voluntary.

• A database of former State and USAID employees and other 

civilians with relevant experience. Depending on the size and 

nature of future contingencies, it is possible that the active and standby 

components would be insufficient in number of personnel or diversity 

of skillsets. In that case, it may be necessary to hire another wave of 

temporary employees, such as the “3161s” at State and the “Foreign 

Service Limiteds” and “Personal Services Contractors” at USAID. To 

prepare for such a situation, State and USAID should maintain profiles 

and contact information for their junior-, mid-, and executive-level 

professionals as they leave government service, in order to easily invite 

them back in the event of a contingency. State and USAID currently 

have an authority and a mechanism for hiring recently retired personnel 

for 180 days per year, a process called “When Actually Employed”—

but outside the context of retirement, no equivalent system exists for 

other employees once they leave government service. Having an easy 

way to locate, recruit, and hire qualified individuals in the event of a 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 203

contingency would allow State and USAID to avoid much of the chaos 

of the civilian surge in 2010, at minimal cost. This database should also 

be open to civilians without government experience but still relevant 

stabilization experience to ensure all capabilities and skillsets are 

available in this database. 

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH

Congress has an important role to play in overseeing agency-specific reforms 

to stabilization.1153 To that end, Congress should consider providing adequate 

resources to ensure executive branch agencies implement the reforms laid out 

above. Specifically, Congress should consider:

1. Funding a modified civilian response corps. 

In 2005, U.S. civilian agencies established a civilian response corps, which

Congress authorized in 2008.1154 As discussed on pages 54–55, however, 

by 2011 the CRC had lost the political and financial support necessary to 

continue, and its host, the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, 

became State’s Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations. The CRC 

was discontinued, which inhibited the U.S. government’s effort to organize 

and deploy civilian stabilization experts from multiple civilian agencies. 

SIGAR recommends Congress revive the CRC, with the necessary 

modifications outlined in the executive branch recommendations above. 

Doing so would ensure this important mechanism is fiscally sustainable and 

positions civilian expertise where and when it is most needed for future 

stabilization missions. 

Specifically, Congress should provide State and USAID funding to pay 

the financial incentives for members of the standby component to enlist 

between contingencies, to pay for backfills when members of the standby 

corps are activated during contingencies, and to pay State to build and 

manage a regularly updated database of former State and USAID employees 

with relevant experience in conflict-affected environments.

2. Requiring State, the designated lead on stabilization, to develop and 

implement a stabilization strategy within a broader campaign strategy

and in coordination with USAID and DOD. 

At the outset of a contingency operation to stabilize a country or 

region, Congress should require State to take the lead in developing 

and implementing an overall strategy with at least a 10–15 year plan 
204 | RECOMMENDATIONS

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

that outlines its specific stabilization components, including geographic 

priorities, benchmarks, how the various stabilization and development 

programming phases will be sequenced, and under what specific 

conditions control of territory will be transitioned to the host nation. 

Congress should require State to report regularly on the status of the 

strategy’s implementation. 

3. Requiring USAID, the designated lead on implementation, to develop 

and implement an M&E plan in coordination with State and DOD.

Shortly after State has written its stabilization strategy, USAID should 

write and provide to Congress a robust data collection and monitoring 

and evaluation plan outlining how the agency will determine whether 

stabilization programs are pushing cleared territory closer toward the 

benchmarks outlined in the strategy, and in ways that improve upon the 

problems outlined in this report. Congress should require USAID to report 

regularly on the status of the plan’s implementation.

4. Focusing its oversight on stabilization outcomes. 

Congress should use its oversight authority to scrutinize how U.S. funds

are being spent and to what effect. Representing U.S. taxpayers, Congress 

sets the tone for a contingency operation’s expected return on investment. 

If Congress focuses on outcomes, the agencies will have an incentive to 

do the same. Specifically, in order to focus on outcomes, Congress should 

inquire about the agencies’ progress on implementing this report’s executive 

branch recommended reforms, both before and during a contingency. 
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MAY 2018 | 207

APPENDIX A: CASE STUDY: MARAWARA 

DISTRICT, KUNAR PROVINCE

The stabilization effort in the Marawara District of Kunar Province in 2010 

and 2011 demonstrated that remarkable progress was possible when a 

number of factors coalesced. These factors included: 

1. Capable individuals in key roles, including the coalition forces’ commander, 

PRT leadership, State and USAID representatives, Afghan local 

government officials, local informal leaders, ANDSF leadership, and USAID 

implementing partners.

2. A willingness and commitment from these actors to work together in very 

close collaboration.

3. Force saturation that provided sufficient security to the population to enable 

them to safely cooperate with the Afghan government and coalition.

Harold Ingram photo

APPENDICES AND ENDNOTES
208 | APPENDIX A

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

The convergence of these factors was rare. In addition, as this Marawara case 

study illustrates, even in the best cases, gains were rarely sustained over time 

as coalition resources were withdrawn or priority districts shifted due to the 

coalition’s condensed timeline. 

Prior to Clearing

While not a key terrain district, the coalition deemed Marawara essential to 

controlling Kunar Province because it was a safe haven and insurgent staging 

area for operations against Asadabad, the provincial capital, which was, in turn, 

a key gateway to Kabul through the road to Jalalabad.1155 During the anti-Soviet 

jihad, the mujahedeen had proven the strategic importance of Marawara, as it 

served as a key point of entry from Pakistan for insurgents coming through the 

FIGURE 12
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 209

Ghaki Pass.1156 (See figure 12.) Insurgent control of the district was so complete 

in the summer of 2010 that the district governor was unable to travel outside 

the district center and, after months of trying to program there, USAID’s only 

implementing partner in the area had been forced to terminate the majority of 

its projects due to poor security. NSP had been able to stand up Community 

Development Councils and functioning District Development Assemblies 

(DDA), but they, too, encountered difficulty in implementing projects in the 

area.1157 Even coalition forces were constrained in their movements because 

of the intensity of the IED threat and the limited number of armored vehicles 

at their disposal. In contrast, the Taliban had complete freedom of movement 

throughout the district and coerced the population into submission by killing or 

confiscating the property of civilians caught cooperating with local government, 

Afghan forces, or the coalition. The Taliban also collected taxes in the district 

and provided limited dispute resolution in the district’s most remote villages.1158

A Full-Spectrum Strategy: Afghan and Coalition Civ-Mil Cooperation

The success of the stabilization effort in Marawara was a product of the quality 

and dedication of the Afghan and coalition team and the seamless way they 

worked together. David Kilcullen described the type of close partnership 

that distinguished the Marawara effort as a “full-spectrum strategy.”1159 A fullspectrum strategy is built on a central political goal shared by civilian and 

military actors from both the host nation and coalition, in pursuit of which all 

the kinetic and non-kinetic tools at their disposal are deployed.1160

Devising and implementing this shared strategy was only possible because the 

coalition had a team of unusually strong, credible Afghan partners: the district 

governor; the head of the DDA, which had been previously established by NSP; 

and the local Afghan Border Police commander.1161 District Governor Pasha 

Gul had credibility with the population because he had been a mujahedeen 

commander in the area during the jihad, while the DDA and its head, Haji Sharif, 

also enjoyed popular legitimacy.1162 These two leaders organized and jointly 

chaired monthly shura meetings with the community with no foreigners in 

attendance, allowing the shura to gain acceptance as a truly local mechanism.1163

The strength of the shared strategy was also the product of the coalition team, 

the trust they built among themselves and with their local partners, and their 

commitment to a joint approach. According to a senior stabilization contractor 

who worked in Marawara:

The most important thing that we were able to achieve in Marawara was the 

incredible cooperation between DAI [Development Alternatives Incorporated, 

the implementing partner], USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, and the 

military. That level of trust and cooperation really enabled us to do what we 

needed to do. We truly operated as one team and were able to develop a lot of 

trust with our local staff and with local authorities, as well.1164
210 | APPENDIX A

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Unlike in other areas, where coalition forces’ uneven embrace of populationcentric warfare and civilian stabilization efforts undermined mission continuity 

and success, Colonel Joel Vowell, commander of the 2-327th Infantry Battalion 

that covered southern Kunar in 2010–2011, saw his USAID and State counterparts 

as central to his mission. As he told SIGAR, “We would have been behind without 

USAID. They were instrumental in getting contracts set ahead of the military 

operation, to get a convoy of stuff ready to go in from Asadabad. . . . They brought 

to the table knowledge of the human terrain and knowledge of stability operations, 

and they had the capacity to reach back to the PRT. The infantry just doesn’t 

have that.”1165 USAID staff had been working in Marawara prior to the arrival of 

the 2-327th, which positioned them to be repositories of local knowledge.1166

Clearing Effort: Operation Strong Eagle

Coalition and Afghan forces recognized they would have to bring the fight to 

the insurgents in Marawara in order to establish sufficient security to allow 

the population to cooperate with the government. To this end they planned 

Operation Strong Eagle to clear the western half of Marawara District, 

integrating their Afghan and coalition civilian counterparts into the planning 

process from the outset. Afghan officials played a central role in planning the 

assault, and Afghan army, police, and border forces constituted about 60 percent 

of the attacking force.1167 The operation, which was the battalion’s largest since 

the Vietnam War, began on June 28, 2010, and lasted 30 days, resulting in the 

deaths of two U.S. soldiers and an estimated 150 insurgents.1168

A member of the Iowa National Guard’s ADT speaks with Afghan children and their grandfather during a 

veterinary outreach sustainment program in Marawara District, Kunar Province, on October 24, 2010. (U.S. 

Air Force photo by Capt. Peter Shinn)
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 211

A report from the Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative, the main USAID OTI 

program working in the province at the time, characterized the partnership 

between the military and USAID in Marawara as unusually close.1169 As a result, 

USAID, in coordination with the provincial and district governors, was able to 

plan a series of projects prior to the operation that were implemented about 

10 days after clearing, remarkable speed for USAID.1170 This high degree of 

coordination also enabled USAID to sequence and deconflict its projects with 

those of CERP.1171

Expanding the Ink Spot of Government Control and Security

After the operation, the military, USAID, and Afghan leaders and forces 

continued to work together closely to expand the bubble of security and 

government reach east along Marawara 1, the road stretching from the 

district center to the Pakistan border. USAID’s implementing partner, DAI, 

worked closely with the district governor and the military to improve the 

road, which until then had been a “goat trail,” a standard type of footpath 

in rural Afghanistan not suited to vehicle traffic.1172 The road improvement 

project moved eastward gradually, and each stage was closely coordinated 

with community members through the DDAs. Rather than simply paving 

this secondary road, USAID leveled and re-graveled it using local methods, 

maximizing its ability to employ local laborers and minimizing future 

maintenance costs. The governor and the DDA worked with local communities 

and USAID to identify additional projects that were implemented alongside 

A horticulturist from the California Army National Guard’s ADT gathers a soil sample from a field alongside 

the main road in Marawara District, Kunar Province, on November 23, 2009. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. 

Sgt. Brian Boisvert)
212 | APPENDIX A

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

each new segment of road improvement, including flood protection and school 

boundary walls. Rather than sprinkle projects throughout the target area, as 

was common elsewhere, projects were strategically chosen to physically and 

contiguously push out the governance ink spot from the most secure area 

immediately surrounding the district center to the least secure outlying regions 

of the district.1173 (See figure 12.)

Meanwhile, after the clearing operation was complete, the 2-327th partnered 

its patrols with the Afghan National Army and Afghan Border Police to steadily 

expand their perimeter of control. The Border Police began conducting 

independent patrols, as well; however, these were contingent upon the 

coalition’s ability to provide quick response support.1174

The power of this coordinated approach, sequenced to follow a major clearing 

operation, was illustrated by the fact that USAID had attempted the same road 

improvement project a year earlier at the request of residents, but had been 

forced to abandon the effort due to insecurity.1175 The second time the project 

was attempted, USAID was able to improve the road, even into communities, 

like Chenar, where elders had publicly proclaimed their allegiance to the Taliban 

prior to Operation Strong Eagle.1176 (See figure 12.) After the operation carved 

out sufficient security to enable residents to cooperate, the road project was 

able to proceed. It was especially impressive that the community was able to 

provide security for the machine operator, an outsider from Asadabad.1177

Additional indicators demonstrated the district was stabilizing as the newfound 

security spread roughly halfway up the valley and created space for the local 

government to reach the people. The district governor’s freedom of movement 

expanded significantly as elders provided protection to enable him to travel to 

their communities, and, simultaneously, people began traveling to the district 

center from increasingly distant and previously insurgent-controlled areas.1178

Colonel Vowell recalled that petitioners started coming from areas as far as 

Barawala Kalay, the hometown of Taliban warlord Qari Ziaur Rahman, to seek 

assistance at the district center.1179 (See figure 12.) The district’s newfound 

security soon attracted more risk-averse development actors, such as the 

UN Development Program (UNDP).1180

Effective Community Engagement 

Another key element of the success in Marawara was the intensive community 

engagement process that preceded reconstruction projects. USAID focused 

on projects NSP had already identified, but had not been able to implement. 

These projects were vetted through community shuras to ensure they were 

still priorities, and were supervised by a local project manager who was 

vetted by the community, the district governor, and the DDA. Because the 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 213

governor and assembly leader led the community engagement process, their 

credibility and authority were bolstered as they resolved the disputes that 

arose from the implementation process.1181 The transparency of this process 

repaired relationships and created trust within the communities in which the 

program worked. Respondents to an M&E study conducted by USAID credited 

local elders and DDA representatives with bringing the people of Marawara 

closer to their government.1182 One of these shuras further demonstrated its 

influence and credibility by negotiating the release of Afghan hostages taken 

by insurgents.1183

USAID’s success in Marawara also stemmed from the fact that the program 

followed a number of the stabilization best practices highlighted in this report. 

First, the program conditioned its projects on communities providing security 

for work sites.1184 Community buy-in did not prevent the Taliban from trying to 

stop projects. Instead, it allowed the community, through its local and district 

elders, to present a united front to resist regular Taliban attempts to force work 

on USAID projects to stop. Whereas one such Taliban visit would have typically 

forced a project to shut down, the Taliban in this case backed down again 

and again, presumably because opposing development projects was making 

insurgents too unpopular.1185 Both academic studies and SIGAR’s interviews with 

Afghan government and coalition officials noted that conditioning stabilization 

programming upon tangible community cooperation is essential to the 

effectiveness of those projects.1186

With the financial support of CCI, the governor of Marawara District hosts a community cohesion jirga in 

Marawara District, Kunar Province, in September 2012. (USAID/OTI photo)
214 | APPENDIX A

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Second, USAID employed a direct implementation approach, procured 

construction materials locally, and worked closely with the district assembly 

to identify local laborers in each area where it worked.1187 The program 

saturated the area with short-term employment opportunities, clustering 

multiple grants together. USAID’s implementing partner worked very closely 

with the DDA, district governor, and local shura in each area to ensure the 

equitable distribution of these jobs, avoiding the sense of inequality and 

preferential treatment of certain communities that was often the result of 

one-off projects.1188 USAID also took great care to identify truly local program 

staff, ensuring they were vetted by the DDA and district governor before hiring. 

Notably, the program prioritized local roots over qualifications more commonly 

emphasized by the international community. For example, none of USAID’s staff 

in Marawara spoke English, nor had any of them previously worked for USAID 

programs. A USAID contractor interviewed by SIGAR credited the program’s 

ability to work in remote areas near the Ghaki Pass to the credibility of the 

program’s local staff.1189

The Challenge of Sustaining a Persistent Presence

The close proximity of the 2-327th headquarters at FOB Joyce (Sarkani District) 

to Marawara district center, only five miles away, and air support and artillery 

out of Asadabad, was a critical factor in the coalition’s ability to secure the 

population.1190 In addition, according to Colonel Vowell, the overwhelming victory 

by coalition and Afghan forces during the clearing operation brought peace 

Ribbon-cutting ceremony for the CCI-funded rehabilitation of the Lahor Dag Boys’ School in Marawara 

District, Kunar Province, in May 2013. (USAID photo)
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 215

to the area for six months, having damaged the reputation of the local Taliban 

commander. This victory, in combination with other engagements in the area that 

consumed enemy attention and resources, enabled coalition forces to hold the 

area through patrols in support of Afghan bases in Marawara District. During the 

2-327th’s tour, Afghan security force concentration in the area also grew.1191

However, this approach only succeeded for a few months. By the spring of 2011, 

the insurgency had had time to rebuild its strength, and the 2-327th launched 

another large-scale assault on insurgent forces, called Operation Strong 

Eagle III. Recognizing that most of the insurgents were coming from eastern 

Marawara, an area that previous clearing operations had not targeted, Strong 

Eagle III focused on the east.1192

The 2-327th was stretched thin during Strong Eagle III. For its clearing 

operations in Marawara, the battalion was only able to allocate a large 

contingent by seriously economizing on troop levels elsewhere in its area of 

operations. During Marawara clearing operations, a skeleton crew protected the 

battalion’s bases and all non-Marawara operations came to a stop. Operation 

Strong Eagle III succeeded in its goal of suppressing the insurgent threat 

sufficiently to buy significant time and space in Marawara, enabling the 2-327th 

to focus on other districts.1193

The scale of this investment in troop strength and USAID staff time and money 

was not sustained, however. By early 2012, coalition forces had pulled out of 

Marawara.1194 According to an implementing partner staff member who worked 

on the Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative in Marawara during this period 

and then, later, on SIKA-East, USAID told the SIKA-East team during startup in spring 2012 that Kunar was no longer a priority, and therefore, USAID’s 

new flagship stabilization program would not work there.1195 The Community 

Cohesion Initiative, OTI’s follow-on program to ASI which ran from 2012 to 2015, 

did operate in the area.1196

As coalition forces and civilians began drawing down across the country in late 

2011 and early 2012, strategic interest and investment in Marawara declined as 

well.1197 By December 2012, the 2-327th had returned to FOB Joyce in Kunar as 

part of a security force assistance brigade, but it was now responsible for the 

entire province, making it harder to build off Marawara’s gains, even if there 

had been an interest in doing so.1198 Violence, as measured by combat events, 

spiked in late 2012 immediately after the U.S. military withdrew resources from 

Marawara, and continued worsening throughout 2013.1199 (See figure 13.) 

The story of Marawara captures a broad lesson from the stabilization effort: 

Many different pieces had to come together at the same time for success. Even 
216 | APPENDIX A

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

where they did, as in Marawara in 2010 and 2011, the scale of the required 

investment was difficult to sustain. The military’s role in setting and changing 

priorities on behalf of the combined civ-mil coalition effort, and the extremely 

short timeframe in which the surge strategy required they do so, meant the 

coalition saw its gains threatened each time coalition forces disengaged from an 

area.1200 Until an area could be secured by Afghans on their own, the sustained 

presence of the coalition was a prerequisite for stabilization: The sustained 

presence of implementing partners would not in itself have been sufficient. Even 

where USAID stabilization programs continued to operate after coalition forces 

pulled out—as the Community Cohesion Initiative did in Kunar, led on the 

ground by Afghan staff—they were not able to sustain the security advances in 

the area, much less achieve stabilization on their own.

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

MONTHLY COMBAT EVENTS IN MARAWARA DISTRICT, KUNAR PROVINCE, 2005–2014 (PER 10,000 POPULATION)

Source: Empirical Studies of Conict Project (ESOC) analysis, data from Andrew C. Shaver and Austin L. Wright, “Data on Combatant Activity During 

Afghanistan War Advance Scientic Investigation of Insurgency,” Technical Report, 2017.

FIGURE 13
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 217

APPENDIX B: 

USAID STABILIZATION PROGRAMS

Afghan Civilian Assistance Program (ACAP) 

ACAP was established to provide timely humanitarian aid packages to families 

affected by conflict between coalition forces and insurgents. Beneficiary 

families received small-business grants; vocational training, including education 

and training in healthcare; and small infrastructure projects to rebuild shelters, 

schools, roads, and bridges.1201 The program was implemented in 30 provinces 

and provided assistance to more than 7,400 families.1202 Program implementers 

took a “no blame” approach with regard to the circumstances that caused 

beneficiaries’ need for aid. In other words, all families that were affected by 

conflict between ISAF and insurgent groups were eligible to receive assistance; 

however, families that suffered damages from fighting between Afghan security 

forces and the Taliban were not eligible to receive assistance.1203

ACAP faced significant implementation challenges. Aid was seldom received in a 

timely fashion, USAID regulations made it so onerous to deliver certain types of 

assistance, such as medical aid, that the implementing partner did not attempt 

to do so, and corruption sometimes seeped into the implementation process, 

allowing ineligible families to receive assistance while eligible families without 

connections were unable to access benefits.1204 Unlike other stabilization 

Note: Date ranges are approximate. 

Source: USAID, response to SIGAR data call, June 22, 2017, and January 17, 2018; DOD, response to SIGAR data call, January 17, 2018; 

USAID, Timeline of USAID-U.S. Military Cooperation in Afghanistan (2002-2013), March 3, 2015; Kenneth Katzman, Afghanistan: Post-Taliban 

Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy, Congressional Research Service, October 9, 2014, p. 35; DOD, NSOCC-A Response to SIGAR, April 7, 

2014; Donald Bolduc, “The Future of Afghanistan,” Special Warfare, vol. 24, no. 4 (2011), p. 24.

AFGHANISTAN STABILIZATION PROGRAMMING FROM 2002–2017

 ACAP: Afghan Civilian Assistance Program

 ASI: Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative 

 (Ofce of Transition Initiatives)

 ASOP: Afghanistan Social Outreach Program

 ASP: Afghanistan Stabilization Program 

 ATI: Afghanistan Transition Initiative 

 (Ofce of Transition Initiatives)

 AVIPA: Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased 

 Production in Agriculture

 CBSG: Community Based Stabilization Grants 

 CCI: Community Cohesion Initiative 

 (Ofce of Transition Initiatives)

 CDP: Community Development Program, 

 previously called Food Insecurity Response 

 for Urban Populations (FIRUP)

 CERP: Commander's Emergency Response Program 

 DDP: District Delivery Program 

 DST: District Support Teams 

 KFZ: Kandahar Food Zone 

 LGCD: Local Governance and Community Development

 MISTI: Measuring Impact of Stabilization Initiatives

 PRT: Provincial Reconstruction Teams

 PRT QIP: PRT Quick Impact Projects

 RLS-I: Rule of Law Stabilization - Informal Component

 SIKA: Stability in Key Areas

 SPR-SEA: Strategic Provincial Roads-Southern 

 and Eastern Afghanistan

 VSO: Village Stability Operations 

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

CERP

PRTs

VSO

ASP

ACAP ACAP II

ASOP

CDP/FIRUP

DSTs

AVIPA AVIPA Plus

DDP

CBSG

MISTI

LGCD SIKA

ASI CCI

KFZ

 DOD USAID

 USAID-Funded USAID, Covered by MISTI

KEY & ABBREVIATIONS

PRT QIP

RLS-I

ATI





SPR-SEA

Years of Operation: 

2007–2011

Amount Disbursed: 

$71.3 million

Implementing Partner:

International 

Organization for 

Migration (IOM)

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

218 | APPENDIX B

programs, which attempted to make it seem as though the Afghan government 

was responsible for their work, ACAP’s assistance was branded “from the 

American people.” However, according to the results of a beneficiary survey, the 

Afghan population rarely knew the assistance was from the United States. In 

insecure environments, ACAP staff determined for themselves whether it was 

safe to tell Afghan communities where the assistance came from, but generally, 

communities did not associate the aid as being “from the American people.”1205

Afghan Civilian Assistance Program II (ACAP II)

ACAP II was a follow-on program to ACAP. It provided humanitarian relief to 

victims of the conflict between ISAF and insurgent forces and was designed to 

have a stabilizing effect on communities.1206 The program emphasized support 

for women’s social and economic participation, particularly in cases where 

families had lost a male head of household who had been the primary breadwinner.1207 The program operated in 29 provinces and delivered immediate 

assistance to 41,141 individuals in 7,444 families, including 8,299 women.1208

Families that suffered from more severe losses were also eligible for tailored 

livelihood assistance; 14,653 individuals in 2,209 families (including 2,320 

women) received this assistance.1209 Unlike its predecessor, ACAP II delivered 

medical assistance to individuals and families; 649 individuals and 585 families 

received medical aid.1210 Overall, four types of assistance were provided by 

ACAP II: immediate assistance of food and non-food items; medical assistance 

and referrals to medical facilities for physical and non-physical injuries; 

supplementary immediate assistance to replace damaged infrastructure, 

household items, or other property losses; and tailored assistance, such as 

materials or training to start a small business, valued between $4,000 and 

$7,000.1211

ACAP II’s goals were to provide appropriate assistance, improve assistance 

delivery through coordinated processes, and improve local governance 

participation in the relief process. ACAP II also implemented a psychosocial 

assistance component to address mental trauma experienced by recipient 

families. Seventy-two community counselors received training and subsequently 

provided assistance to 408 families through 3,170 counseling sessions.1212 ACAP 

II partnered with various ministries to better tailor assistance packages for 

families and women, and the program also worked closely with PRTs and the 

UN to identify incidents reported by potential beneficiaries. It relied heavily on 

ISAF to verify claims were legitimate, but also relied on local actors, such as 

Community Development Councils, shuras, and district governors, to ensure 

assistance packages were delivered to authentic beneficiaries.1213

Years of Operation: 

2011–2015

Amount Disbursed:

$52.4 million

Implementing Partner:

International Relief 

and Development 

Fund (IRD)

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 219

Afghanistan Social Outreach Program (ASOP)

ASOP was designed to assist the Afghan government in establishing District 

Community Councils to act as interim governing bodies until constitutionally 

mandated elections could take place.1214 Each council was democratically 

elected using the Afghan jirga process, in which several hundred leaders met 

to elect 35–50 representatives.1215 ASOP’s premise was to “strengthen and 

reactivate” traditional governance structures that could address and resolve 

local problems, convey local grievances to the Independent Directorate of Local 

Governance, connect local populations with district governors, and later, assist 

in the delivery of government services. The implicit stabilization strategy was 

that DCCs would build trust and confidence in the Afghan government and, in 

doing so, inhibit the ability of the insurgency to assert its authority.

The program’s focus was on the more insecure districts in the south and 

east.1216 A pilot phase was launched in 2008 that created eight DCCs; the 

success of the initial program prompted USAID to expand it to 131 DCCs in 24 

provinces by 2012.1217 DCCs consisted of three core committees: (1) judiciary, 

(2) development and governance, and (3) peace and security. DCC judiciary 

committees adjudicated more than 2,000 cases over the course of the program, 

while security committees submitted more than 400 reports on insurgent 

activities to Afghan security agencies in their districts.1218 ASOP staff trained 

DCC members, provided material support, paid them stipends, and educated 

other representative bodies about the program.1219 At the recommendation 

of ISAF, which was eager to legitimize the Afghan Local Police force, ASOP 

councils took on an integral role in supporting that program.1220 DCC members 

nominated ALP candidates and vetted its recruits. By the end of the ASOP 

program, it worked in some of the country’s most remote and least secure 

districts to mobilize community support for ALP.1221 As coalition troops drew 

down and could no longer provide transport to ASOP, the program’s ability to 

work in these areas was diminished.1222

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative (ASI) 

As a USAID Office of Transition Initiatives program, ASI was designed 

to (1) improve perceptions of the legitimacy of the Afghan government, 

(2) recreate linkages between the Afghan government, informal governance 

structures, and local communities, and (3) leverage communities’ ability to 

withstand and respond to crises in order to address sources of instability. The 

program did so through small, community-driven activities in support of the 

clear and hold phases of the military’s COIN efforts.1223 Many of these activities 

focused on enhancing perceptions of the district government through smallscale interventions, such as infrastructure construction or repair, short-term 

training and capacity building, and using communications campaigns to increase 

awareness of the government’s work.1224

Years of Operation:

2009–2012

Amount Disbursed:

$34.5 million

Implementing Partner:

AECOM Technology 

Corporation

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 

Years of Operation:

2009–2012

Amount Disbursed:

$45.5 million

Implementing Partner:

Development 

Alternatives, Inc. 

(DAI), Chemonics 

International

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: USAID, response to SIGAR 

data call, June 22, 2017. 
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

220 | APPENDIX B

The program was implemented in two regions. ASI-East (ASI-E) operated in the 

seven provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar, Paktika, Wardak, Uruzgan, Ghazni, and 

Khost, and ASI-South (ASI-S) operated in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces.1225

The program differed somewhat between the two regions. For example, in 2010, 

ASI-E worked closely with USAID and the Counterinsurgency Training Center 

in Kabul to create and pioneer the implementation of the DSF. The methodology 

was adopted by ASI-S starting in 2011.1226 ASI-E used a sequenced approach to 

programming, starting by building relationships and initiating dialogue with 

key stakeholders to identify drivers of instability.1227 The program supported 

the establishment of community councils to facilitate dialogue between the 

community and with the Afghan government; it then worked through these 

councils to identify and implement infrastructure projects.1228

At the beginning of the program, ASI-S often implemented projects soon after 

clearing, and programming attempted to connect citizens to their government 

through projects that repaired damaged infrastructure.1229 Because of the 

pressure to make these repairs quickly, initial ASI-S projects were often driven 

by military commanders and their U.S. government civilian counterparts, 

without thorough community engagement.1230 Prior to 2011, there was 

resistance to implementing the DSF because the consultative process was 

inconsistent with the intense burn-rate pressure.1231 By 2011, however, the 

program adopted DSF and shifted to a more Afghan-led process involving local 

leaders and communities in the project identification and implementation 

processes, including using local labor and materials.1232 In the final year of the 

program, it also provided support to Village Stability Operations in isolated 

rural districts. USAID did not require community contributions on every ASI 

grant under contract, but implementing partners were required to obtain them 

whenever possible.1233

Afghanistan Stabilization Program (ASP) 

ASP was an on-budget, Afghan government-driven initiative carried out by 

an interministerial task force and funded by international donors, including 

USAID, the Netherlands, Canada, UK, Japan, and UNAMA, to extend the 

Afghan government’s reach at the district and provincial level. Specifically, the 

program hoped to reverse the deteriorating security situation through visible 

benefits to the population and improve its perceptions of the government’s 

legitimacy.1234 A project management unit was established within the Afghan 

government to oversee program implementation, as was a provincial stability 

fund that was originally intended to provide $2.5 million to each province for 

administrative reform and reconstruction projects.1235 UNAMA also funded 

six pilot programs in six districts: Mohammad Agha District (Logar Province), 

Muqar (Ghazni), Nahrin (Baghlan), Ghurband (Parwan), Sayad Karam (Paktiya), 

and Yakawolang (Bamyan).1236

Years of Operation:

2004–2008

Amount Disbursed:

$14.2 million

(U.S. contribution)

Implementing Partner:

Not applicable 

(on-budget program)

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 221

To expand the program beyond this pilot, President Karzai instructed 

ASP to randomly select three to four districts in each province for project 

implementation in order to fairly distribute the development aid across 

Afghanistan.1237 Once expanded, the program hoped to extend the reach of the 

government into the districts and provinces by building physical infrastructure 

to enhance the capacity of local governance; through the personnel reform, 

restructuring, and staff training for provincial and district-level officials; and 

increasing interactions between communities and their representatives through 

reconstruction projects.1238 Often the capacity of the district government was 

so weak at the outset of the program that its first priority was to construct 

a physical district center building and provide basic services, such as 

telecommunications and electrification.1239 However, the program, which was 

unrealistically ambitious in scope, lost much of its funding after management 

changes in 2005 and was eventually folded into the operating expenditures 

of IDLG.1240

Afghanistan Transition Initiative (ATI)

ATI was one of the first stabilization programs in Afghanistan and was OTI’s 

first large-scale program, with a budget approximately ten times the size of the 

office’s previous average.1241 It launched in October 2001, beginning postwar 

planning from Pakistan before the ouster of the Taliban from power was even 

complete.1242 One of the program’s first focus areas was providing support to 

the 2001 loya jirga and the Bonn political process that came out of it.1243 The 

program’s main goals were to increase the government’s responsiveness to 

citizens’ needs, increase citizen awareness of and participation in democratic 

processes, and increase the capacity of the Afghan media.1244 It programmed 

over 700 activities in all 34 provinces of the country, primarily through 

community infrastructure activities.1245 However, ATI also implemented other 

types of programming, such as (1) providing funding to major privately held 

independent media outlets, (2) infrastructure and logistics support to the central 

government, (3) civic education relating to the new constitution, and (4) voter 

registration for the presidential election.1246

ATI encountered some of the same lack of communications and connectivity 

between the local and central levels of the Afghan government that would 

plague later programs.1247 The program found that communication and decision 

making between the central and local governments went only one way: 

down, not up.1248 For example, an Afghan interviewed for the final project 

evaluation described efforts to connect the population to its government: 

“Communities ask for a project, local government authorities approve it, central 

government rejects it because it isn’t a priority, the message is relayed back to 

the community, and the community asks why.”1249 ATI’s struggles with quality 

control also foreshadowed problems on subsequent stabilization programs that 

Years of Operation:

2002–2005

Amount Dispersed:

$20.5 million

Implementing Partner:

IOM, Internews, 

Voice of America, UN 

Development Program, 

and Ronco.

Note: Numbers have been rounded. 

USAID disbursement data does not 

account for ATI’s expenditures in 

2002. For example, Social Impact’s 

final program evaluation claims 

$46.6 million was disbursed. 

This was not reflected in USAID’s 

disbursement data.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response 

to SIGAR data call, January 18, 

2018; USAID, “USAID Field Report 

Afghanistan,” June 30, 2005; Social 

Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan 

Program: Final Evaluation, August 15, 

2005, p. 14.
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

222 | APPENDIX B

threatened to damage the reputation of the very government these projects 

were meant to bolster.1250 This was, at least in part, because staffing levels were 

insufficient and M&E efforts were not able to do anything more than monitor 

activity completion.1251

Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Production in Agriculture (AVIPA) 

and AVIPA Plus

AVIPA was a food security and agricultural assistance program created as part 

of the emergency response to a food crisis brought on by drought and a rise in 

global wheat prices during the 2007 and 2008 crop seasons. AVIPA was designed 

to provide accessible and affordable agricultural inputs—wheat seed and 

fertilizer—to drought-affected subsistence farmers to promote the immediate 

production of wheat for the fall/winter 2008 and spring 2009 crop seasons.1252

The program, which originally covered 18 provinces, ultimately distributed 

10,374 metric tons of wheat seed and 32,813 metric tons of fertilizer across 32 

provinces.1253 In 2009, USAID extended the program by one year, renamed it 

AVIPA Plus, and dramatically increased its scope and scale. USAID extended 

it again in 2010.1254 As part of a programmatic expansion and overhaul, USAID 

awarded the program an additional $300 million in funding, $250 million of 

which was allocated to support COIN operations in Kandahar and Helmand 

Provinces.1255 The remaining $50 million was allocated to continue operations in 

the rest of the country, where the program retained its focus on food security.

With the 2010 expansion, USAID added stabilization tools to help extend 

the reach of the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, and Livestock, empower 

local communities to take an active role in their agricultural development, 

create income generation, and attempt to put an “Afghan face” on projects.1256

However, within Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, AVIPA Plus operated in 

highly unstable environments, where the program used agriculture as a means 

to improve stability in KTDs in coordination with ISAF. Initiatives included 

cash-for-work projects, small infrastructure projects, small grants, agricultural 

vouchers, and agricultural training and capacity building.1257 Surveys determined 

the program created an agricultural and economic impact, but that ongoing 

instability was tethered more to conflict over local power struggles than to 

agricultural and economic well-being.1258

Years of Operation:

2008–2011

Amount Disbursed:

$469.5million

Implementing Partner:

IRD, CARE 

International, 

Danish Committee 

for AID to Afghan 

Refugees (DACAAR), 

Coordination of 

Humanitarian 

Assistance (CHA)

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 223

Community Cohesion Initiative (CCI) 

USAID OTI developed CCI, among other programs, to link local partners to 

larger U.S. foreign policy objectives during short-term political transitions.1259

The program sought to “increase resilience in areas vulnerable to insurgent 

exploitation,” strengthen community capacities to promote peaceful transitions, 

and support peaceful electoral processes.1260 The program worked in select 

communities across the entire country.1261 When CCI began, it focused on locallevel programming aimed at strengthening customary governance structures, 

the Afghan government, and ties between and among local communities through 

the issuance of small-scale grants.1262 Retaining its work at the community level, 

the program evolved in 2013, adding new national-level objectives of promoting 

peaceful elections and countering violent extremism.1263

CCI’s wide-ranging activities included strategic communications support to 

Afghan government entities, rehabilitating school facilities and improving safety 

by building boundary walls, and support to civil society groups to conduct 

dispute resolution in conjunction with religious scholars.1264 Grantees included 

local government entities and provincial ministry officials, as well as local 

community groups, associations, and civil society organizations.1265

CCI conducted a nationwide campaign in advance of the 2014 elections 

to encourage voter turnout and explain peaceful democratic elections to 

communities that otherwise had limited understanding of the process. The 

campaign used pamphlets and radio and television advertising to spread its 

messages.1266 During the 2014 presidential election, CCI’s Peaceful Election 

Advocacy Campaign helped ease tensions generated by perceptions of election 

fraud and quickly mobilized 40 international experts to monitor the second 

round of voting. According to a third-party evaluation, CCI became a crucial 

short-term intervention that helped to avert a potential civil war.1267

CCI hired a third-party contractor in 2013 to serve as an independent monitoring 

unit, providing OTI with important information about CCI’s activities after 

the troop drawdown in 2014 meant USAID lost access to information it had 

previously obtained from the military.1268

Years of Operation:

2012–2015

Amount Disbursed:

$40.7 million

Implementing Partner:

Creative Associates 

International, IOM, 

USIP

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

224 | APPENDIX B

Community Development Program (CDP)

CDP was a cash-for-work program that implemented small infrastructure 

projects designed to productively engage combat-age men in order to prevent 

them from joining the insurgency.1269 Different implementing partners operated 

in different parts of the country; CDP covered 19 provinces in the south and 

east, nine provinces in the north, and several districts in and around Kabul.1270

CDP was implemented over five phases, and in 2010, the program adopted 

stabilization objectives and shifted away from working in urban areas and into 

rural, underserved, insecure ones.1271 Like other USAID programs that were 

initiated before the surge, CDP was rescoped to become a stabilization program 

as the ISAF strategy shifted and USAID’s Stabilization Unit was stood up. CDP 

was originally designed to be a very different program; its original name was 

“Food Insecurity Response to Urban Populations.” When the program was 

redesigned in September 2010, it retained its mission to provide a short-term 

cash injection to at-risk communities, while redefining the “risk” from urban 

food insecurity to the risk of men in rural areas joining the insurgency.1272

Districts were chosen at ISAF’s request and with community and government 

involvement to reflect local priorities. Initiatives included short-term 

employment with local laborers, labor-intensive community infrastructure 

projects in coordination with the Afghan government, and direct implementation 

projects with limited use of subcontracting.1273 The program implemented 3,550 

projects, with typical projects lasting 30–90 days, and generated 13.3 million 

days of employment.1274 The program’s speed, flexibility, and simple, short-term 

employment allowed it to work in particularly insecure and poorly governed 

areas, both before and directly after clearing operations occurred.1275

Community Based Stabilization Grants (CBSG) 

CBSG aimed to use community development principles to hold communities in 

the north, west, and central regions of the country once clearing operations had 

ended.1276 CBSG directly provided small grants of up to $25,000 to communities 

in underserved and insecure areas.1277 In its second year, the program shifted 

from a needs-based approach that had been closely coordinated with MRRD to a 

more explicit focus on sources of instability in areas prioritized by the military’s 

COIN effort.1278 CBSG found that as insurgents sought to increase their influence 

in the north, they began recruiting non-Pashtun groups and promoting their 

cause as an ethnically inclusive war of national liberation, rather than simply a 

Pashtun movement. CBSG worked to counter this narrative.1279

By 2011, CBSG’s strategy shifted to support the COIN effort and focused on 

KTDs within the northern and western parts of the country (such as districts 

in Kunduz and Baghlan), and ceased its earlier work in the safer parts of 

the north and west (such as Panjshir, Badakhshan, and Bamyan).1280 In line 

Years of Operation:

2009–2013

Amount Disbursed:

$404.8 million

Implementing Partners:

Central Asian 

Development Group 

(CADG), Mercy Corps, 

CARE International

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 

Years of Operation:

2010–2012

Amount Disbursed:

$35.2 million

Implementing Partner: 

Creative Associates 

International, 

Afghan Development 

Association (ADA), 

Coordination of 

Humanitarian 

Assistance (CHA), 

Coordination of 

Afghan Relief

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 225

with COIN, a significant number of grants were provided to support Village 

Stability Operations.1281

Under CBSG, communities identified and implemented their own projects, 

assisting with 500 grants and 30,000 days of employment. Community 

contributions, both in-kind and cash, totaled over $2 million over the life of the 

project.1282 Local Afghan government offices and officials provided technical 

expertise and guidance, which was designed to bring about greater connection 

between the community and the government.1283 Grant projects included, among 

other things, graveling roads, building school boundary walls, weaving and 

embroidery training for women, and women’s hygiene awareness clinics.1284

District Delivery Program (DDP) 

DDP was designed to rapidly deploy civilian Afghan government personnel to 

recently cleared KTDs to extend the Afghan government’s reach as a legitimate 

alternative to the Taliban. DDP’s longer-term goal was to strengthen the capacity 

of the government by funneling funds through its bureaucracy as an on-budget 

program.1285 The program was primarily funded by USAID, but was also funded 

in Helmand by the British government and in Kapisa by the French government; 

all funds were implemented through the Afghan government’s IDLG and 

numerous ministries.1286

The program consisted of three funding streams: the first funded salaries for the 

IDLG officials charged with running the program, as well as salary supplements 

for government offices working in DDP-eligible districts; the second facilitated 

service delivery in the first year of the program; and the third stream was meant 

to enable district officials to work closely with military commanders to use 

CERP funds for infrastructure projects and the delivery of basic services.1287

Unlike most stabilization programs, USAID funded DDP directly through the 

Afghan government, rather than hiring an implementing partner. In order to 

oversee the use of these funds, a coordinating body, called the District Delivery 

Working Group, was created. The process for funding and strengthening the 

Afghan government and increasing service delivery started with budgeting and 

transferring the allocated funds to each district through IDLG. These funds were 

to provide the necessary tools and resources for line ministries to effectively 

deliver services to each district.1288 The program was intended to deliver a set of 

basic services in education, agriculture, and justice, inspired by Afghanistan’s 

Basic Package of Health Service, initiated in 2003, under which available 

services are calibrated by the number of people in a given area. For example, 

for every 15,000–30,000 people, the goal is to have 1 basic health center.1289

Finally, DDP was meant to fill vacant government positions, or tashkils, with 

civil servants.1290

Years of Operation:

2010–2013

Amount Disbursed:

$2.3 million

Implementing Partner:

Not applicable 

(on-budget program)

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

226 | APPENDIX B

Only $2.3 million of DDP’s $40 million budget was disbursed before program 

funding was discontinued due to concerns funds had been misallocated—

fears that were ultimately proven unfounded.1291 Of the 83 KTDs in which the 

program was intended to operate, 38 districts were assessed in preparation 

for the disbursement of funding before the program was shut down. Of those, 

implementation plans were drafted for 27, and only 19 ultimately received 

funding: 13 from USAID and six (in Helmand) from the UK.1292 For a detailed 

review of DDP, see page 60.

Kandahar Food Zone (KFZ) 

KFZ is an ongoing program that attempts to strengthen the resilience of 

Kandahar’s communities to better withstand economic challenges and 

address the root causes of poppy cultivation.1293 KFZ, which began as a twoyear program, was later expanded to five years and was part of a broader 

counternarcotics and stabilization effort. KFZ represents one pillar in a fourpillar Ministry of Counter Narcotics (MCN) strategy funded by USAID and 

designed by the Afghan government to reduce poppy cultivation and increase 

the legitimacy of subnational governance. The other three pillars, which are 

funded by State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement 

Affairs, include governor-led poppy eradication, demand reduction, and strategic 

communications.1294 The program worked in seven Kandahar districts in its first 

two years: Panjwayi, Maiwand, Zhari, Kandahar City, Arghestan, Shah Wali Kot, 

and Spin Boldak. However, because of budget limitations starting in year three, 

its focus was narrowed to the districts of Panjwayi and Zhari.1295

KFZ has two main components: the first is aimed at capacity building in the 

MCN’s Alternative Livelihoods Directorate and at the Kandahar Directorate of 

Counternarcotics office, and the second is to provide alternative livelihoods 

and community infrastructure to increase licit economic activities.1296 KFZ uses 

a modified version of the SAM tool to identify and program against the factors 

that are drivers of poppy cultivation and instability.1297 Thus, KFZ was part 

counternarcotics program and part stabilization program, with the assumption 

that stabilizing communities in these areas was often inextricably tied to 

enabling them to grow alternative crops.

KFZ introduced the idea of a social contract through which communities 

pledge to cease poppy cultivation in exchange for irrigation projects.1298 The 

contract is signed between the community, the MCN, provincial governor, 

and district governor with the understanding the Afghan government will 

monitor the community’s compliance with the contract.1299 As part of its goal 

of encouraging farmers to produce licit crops as alternatives to opium, KFZ 

supports infrastructure projects and capacity building to increase access 

to and the economic viability of these alternative crops, such as grapes.1300

Years of Operation: 

2013–Present

Amount Disbursed: 

$40.3 million

(program ongoing)

Implementing Partner: 

IRD, Development 

Transformations, Lapis 

Communications

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 227

For example, the program has supported the rehabilitation of vineyards, 

the expansion of existing orchards, and the establishment of new orchards. 

Additionally, KFZ has supported the rehabilitation and extension of irrigation 

canals—mainly in Panjwayi and Zhari—where improved irrigation systems 

are more likely to persuade farmers to cultivate licit crops.1301 Other KFZ 

projects include providing agricultural training to beneficiaries, promoting 

off-season horticulture crop production, marketing high-value crops, and 

developing agribusinesses.1302

Local Governance and Community Development (LGCD) 

LGCD was “enormous in scope and coverage, expensive, complicated, and 

diverse.”1303 Spanning almost five years and operating in all of the country’s 34 

provinces, LGCD was described by USAID as “its flagship stability project,” 

which substantially evolved with the U.S. stabilization effort.1304 As one of the 

first stabilization programs, LGCD was “experimental.”1305 Originally scheduled 

to end in 2009, the program was, instead, extended by two years and USAID 

almost tripled its budget from $150 million to $400 million.1306 This expansion 

was driven by an increasing emphasis on the program’s role in supporting 

the counterinsurgency effort and the civilian surge.1307 The program aimed to 

strengthen local governance, promote community development (CD), implement 

local stability initiatives (LSI), and provide support to PRTs.1308 A significant 

portion of the program’s resources was allocated to CD (47 percent) and LSI 

(24 percent).1309

Implementing partners advanced and adapted LGCD’s programming initiatives 

over time. From 2006–2008, programming focused on quick impact projects. 

There was a brief focus from 2008–2009 on improved governance, mainly at the 

provincial level, where LGCD initiatives were designed to equip, train, and assist 

governors, ministry offices, and Provincial Development Councils (interagency 

Afghan forums that prioritized projects).1310 The program’s governance 

component was ultimately removed in 2009, and the shift toward stabilization 

and COIN operations emphasized the implementation of LSI and CD.1311 Starting 

in 2009, LGCD shifted to projects that could be implemented in shorter time 

frames as part of a broader programmatic shift to quicker, simpler projects.1312

However, the program did evolve over time to better incorporate Afghan 

government officials in programming. Toward the end, communities were 

required to submit project requests through their government representatives.1313

When integrated with COIN, LGCD worked during, and even prior to, clearing 

operations.1314 LGCD sought to help communities advance along the stabilization 

spectrum such that they progressed from its quick impact projects, or LSI, 

designed for the clear and immediate post-clear phase, to the hold phase 

when LGCD would initiate CD projects. CD programming made projects 

Years of Operation:

2006–2011

Amount Disbursed:

$376.1 million

Implementing Partners:

DAI, Associates in Rural 

Development (ARD)

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

228 | APPENDIX B

conditional upon communities demonstrating their support for projects through 

contributions such as the provision of security to work sites, unskilled labor, or 

local materials.1315 Issues arose due to a lack of reliable price information and 

difficulties measuring these in-kind contributions’ dollar value, forcing LGCD to 

drop the requirement in 2009.1316 For CD projects, LGCD initially required that 

all communities make contributions of at least 10 percent of the total value of 

the grant, in an effort to ensure community buy-in and ownership of projects.1317

However, accurately estimating the value of the community contributions 

proved challenging. Therefore, while community contributions continued to 

be required, the monetary benchmark was dropped.1318 Implementation and 

progression became increasingly unrealistic, as LSI quick impact projects rarely 

progressed to longer-term CD programming.1319

Overall, LGCD was hindered because programming started late, stabilization 

was poorly defined, and the program’s goals were unrealistic. As SIGAR auditors 

and other analyses of LGCD pointed out, LGCD’s achievements were mixed, 

at best.1320 The SIKAs were follow-on programs to LGCD, but overall the SIKAs 

placed a greater emphasis on the role of local Afghan government entities in the 

selection and implementation of projects.1321

Measuring Impacts of Stabilization Initiatives (MISTI) 

MISTI was a USAID monitoring and evaluation program with two main 

components: (1) the conduct of independent mid-term and final performance 

evaluations of eight programs, and (2) the collection, synthesis, and analysis of 

data in order to assess stability trends down to the sub-district level, combining 

existing civilian and military data with surveys on Afghan perceptions of 

security.1322 Specifically, under its second line of effort, MISTI conducted 190,264 

interviews in more than 5,000 villages across 130 districts in 23 provinces 

in order to assess the overall stabilization impact of three programs: CCI, 

the SIKAs, and KFZ.1323 It also assessed the impact of implementing USAID 

programming in the same areas as the National Solidarity Program.1324 MISTI 

conducted an initial baseline survey in 2012 followed by four subsequent 

surveys over a 27-month period, the fifth of which was conducted in 2014.1325

The program also attempted to measure village-level perceptions of the Afghan 

government compared to the Taliban. The program was innovative, ambitious, 

and designed to “contribute to the body of knowledge on lessons learned and 

measuring stabilization impacts and trends.”1326 For more information on MISTI’s 

findings, see page 130.

Methodology

MISTI was a quasi-experimental approach to stabilization monitoring at the 

village level, and the largest trends analysis and stabilization impact evaluation 

the U.S. government has ever undertaken.1327 MISTI built two primary indices to 

Years of Operation:

2012–2015

Budget:

$19.3 million

Implementing Partner:

Management 

Systems International 

(MSI), Afghan Youth 

Consulting, Afghan 

Center for SocioEconomic Research

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 229

measure stability and resilience. Stability was an aggregate measure of whether 

participatory local development projects succeeded in improving perceptions 

of good governance and effective service delivery, “thereby improving citizens’ 

lives and addressing local grievances that might otherwise contribute to 

support for [armed opposition groups].”1328 Stability was measured using three 

sub-indices, all based on perceptions: quality of life, government capacity, and 

local governance. MISTI also measured community resilience (i.e., how well 

local leaders could mobilize their communities to solve local problems with 

or without formal government support).1329 Because USAID did not program 

in villages randomly, MISTI’s effort to track changes in treatment and control 

villages required it to identify control villages whose key characteristics 

matched the pre-selected treatment villages, using a quasi-experimental method 

of analysis.1330

Challenges

Despite the rigorous attempt MISTI evaluators made to adequately survey and 

measure the impacts of USAID stabilization programing, the effort faced serious 

constraints. For example, peer reviewers have noted that the programs MISTI 

evaluated lacked articulated theories of change, which created challenges for 

the assessment of outcomes.1331 One of the biggest challenges MISTI faced was 

a lack of accurate data about USAID programming. According to RAND’s peer 

review of the program’s methodology, because USAID data was so limited, 

MISTI was unable to track the multitude of overlapping development and 

stabilization programs that had taken place in any given area. The absence 

of this information made it impossible for MISTI to take into account how an 

area’s experience with historical programming may have impacted the perceived 

effectiveness of the programs it was supposed to evaluate.1332 Measuring 

program impact was also difficult because MISTI’s design required it to match 

treatment villages with a nearly identical control village, but this proved to be 

“nearly impossible” due to data limitations.1333 These factors hindered MISTI’s 

effort to discern the signal from the noise, which may have contributed to 

the fact that perception data of stabilization generally remained flat from the 

baseline to the final survey.1334

Further, both USAID and the RAND reviewers have argued that the proxy MISTI 

used for ascertaining support for the Taliban was unreliable. MISTI asked survey 

respondents whether they supported a non-controversial policy presented to 

them as endorsed either by the Taliban, the Afghan government, or no one at 

all. Respondents were assessed to support the Taliban if they expressed support 

for the policy that was “endorsed” by the group.1335 If, as RAND argues, this 

methodology was unreliable, then MISTI’s resulting finding that stabilization 

programming in a small number of Taliban-controlled areas increased support 

for the group may not be credible.1336
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

230 | APPENDIX B

PRT Quick Impact Projects (QIP)

USAID’s partnership with PRTs began in 2003 through the PRT QIP program. 

The purpose was to provide USAID officers working in PRTs with the resources 

needed to implement projects, 90 percent of which cost less than $350,000 

each.1337 USAID’s Field Program Officers selected these projects in coordination 

with the military and local Afghan leaders.1338 QIP were intended to connect 

and increase confidence between communities and the district, provincial, and 

central government and to deliver “peace dividends” that would demonstrate 

the possibility of future political and economic progress.1339 QIP sought to 

ensure local buy-in through a variety of measures, such as purchasing materials 

and hiring labor locally and requiring communities to provide security for 

projects.1340 PRTs also used funding from CERP, which generally funded projects 

costing less than $25,000, while QIP funded larger, more expensive, and more 

complex projects. For example, CERP funds were used for small-scale projects, 

such as providing latrines for schools or generators for hospitals, while QIP 

projects funded the rehabilitation of local roads, bridges, and government 

buildings.1341 In addition to infrastructure, QIP funds were used to support 

government capacity building, job placement, microfinance efforts, genderrelated activities, and media projects.1342

Rule of Law Stabilization–Informal Component (RLS-I) 

RLS-I aimed to strengthen traditional forms of conflict resolution, support the 

linkages between the informal and formal justice sectors, and facilitate the 

resolution of long-term destabilizing conflicts.1343 RLS-I focused on building 

and improving traditional dispute resolution mechanisms and connecting 

those mechanisms to formal government.1344 The program was designed to be 

Afghan-led, Afghan-owned, and Afghan-sustained through grassroots initiatives 

that used Afghan and sharia law experts to train informal leaders and broaden 

communication among TDR facilitators.1345

Network meetings and discussions among informal leaders who were charged 

with conducting TDR at the local level provided forums for collaboration and 

the identification of challenges faced by local informal justice systems.1346 Topics 

covered at these meetings included issues surrounding baad (the practice 

of giving a girl in marriage to settle a debt) and dispute prevention for local 

communities.1347 In these working groups, district officials, formal justice sector 

actors, and respected elders participated in discussions and legal training to 

clarify their different and complementary roles in the justice sector.1348

Gender mainstreaming was also a large focus of the program; women were 

introduced into the conflict resolution and justice process at the village level 

through group gatherings known as spinsary groups. Each group consisted of 

15–25 women, whom the program trained in dispute resolution skills and ways 

Years of Operation:

2003–2007

Amount Disbursed:

$86.9 million

Implementing Partner:

IOM, UN Office for 

Project Services

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 

Years of Operation:

2010–2014

Amount Disbursed:

$39.9 million

Implementing Partner:

Checchi and Company 

Consulting, Inc.

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 231

to address family conflicts. The program then attempted to foster cooperation 

between the spinsary groups and their male counterparts.1349 RLS-I also sought 

to improve legal literacy, including through radio and television programming, 

and by targeting local mediators at the village and district levels.1350 By close-out, 

the program had trained 20,000 individuals, 40 percent of whom were women, 

and facilitated the registration of roughly 700 TDR decisions with district courts 

and officials across 48 districts and sub-districts.1351

Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

The four SIKA programs aimed to address poor development and governance 

at the district level, connect districts with their provincial governments, and 

increase the population’s confidence in and support for the Afghan government 

generally.1352 The program also aimed to help local government officials 

become more sensitive to local grievances in their area and to identify and 

address key sources of instability.1353 The program was designed to be Afghanled and Afghan-owned; each SIKA program worked closely with the Ministry 

of Rural Rehabilitation and Development and the Independent Directorate 

of Local Governance, following stabilization guidelines established by the 

Afghan government.1354

The SIKA programs taken together were a vast programmatic undertaking, 

divided into four areas of operation in the west, east, north, and south; each 

program had different implementation processes, methods of identifying 

SOIs, and challenges. In total, the SIKAs operated in 17 provinces and 

implemented community-identified infrastructure projects in cooperation with 

the government, such as construction or repair of culverts, irrigation systems, 

potable water systems, schools, clinics, and other public buildings.1355 The 

program also undertook soft projects, such as training and cultural events. 

SIKA involved a significant degree of capacity building for Afghan government 

officials and offices; this included helping to formalize district government 

procedures for specific tasks, including obtaining a national identity card and 

supporting quarterly meetings between provincial and district governors.1356 The 

programs also focused on improving the communications and outreach capacity 

of district governments, which included using TV and radio to promote district 

government services and establishing hotlines to enable community members to 

contact their representatives.1357 SIKA also organized service provider fairs and 

catalogs to advertise government services to communities.1358 The SIKAs used a 

revised version of the District Stability Framework called SAM, and according 

to the terms of their contracts, were required to follow the guidelines of the 

MRRD-developed Kandahar Model that involved decentralized procurement and 

financial procedures, coupled with community contracting.1359 The SIKAs used 

a slow and highly consultative grant identification process with communities, 

Years of Operation:

2011–2015

Amount Disbursed:

$308.7 million

Implementing Partner:

AECOM Technology, DAI

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

232 | APPENDIX B

local leaders, and official Afghan entities that distinguished it from other 

stabilization programs.1360

Strategic Provincial Roads-Southern and

Eastern Afghanistan (SPR-SEA) 

SPR-SEA had three main objectives: (1) rehabilitate roads in key areas, 

(2) contribute to stabilization by connecting communities and engaging them 

in the rehabilitation process, and (3) increase the capacity for Afghan firms to 

build and maintain roads.1361 The program operated in eight provinces in the 

southern and eastern regions of the country: Ghazni, Khost, Kunar, Nangarhar, 

Paktika, Paktiya, Helmand, and Kandahar.1362 SPR-SEA’s community engagement 

component was designed to support the development of a security buffer 

around the roadway, resulting from the goodwill of local communities. To help 

build this goodwill, the program gave out grants designed to reduce opposition 

to road construction by mitigating the negative impact on communities, for 

example, by supporting the establishment of new businesses and creating 

jobs.1363 Toward the end of SPR-SEA, it piloted what it called the “Rural Roads 

Program,” which used local labor in a cash-for-work model to build roads by 

hand with the limited help of equipment, when necessary.1364 Unlike many of the 

other stabilization programs which focused on small-scale activities, some of the 

projects SPR-SEA was tasked with were major undertakings. For example, one 

road was 60 kilometers long and included two major bridges.1365

The program, which was designed and initiated before a significant decline in 

security across the country, was initially intended to work only in areas that 

were secure.1366 However, it eventually worked even prior to clearing operations, 

in some instances facing attacks that resulted in the deaths of over 100 Afghan 

contractors and the injury of over 200 more. These attacks were intended to 

impede or halt construction, and they often did.1367 Of the originally planned 

1,500 to 2,000 kilometers of all-weather gravel roads, only 160 kilometers were 

completed and 300 more were partially constructed.1368 As a result, in 2010 

USAID scaled back the program and ended it a year later.1369 Overall, 38 percent 

of its allocated funds went to administration, 54 percent to program activities, 

and 7 percent to capacity building.1370

Years of Operation:

2007–2012

Amount Disbursed:

$313.5 million

Implementing Partner:

IOM, UN Office for 

Project Services

Note: Numbers have been rounded.

Source: SIGAR analysis of data 

provided by USAID in response to 

SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 233

APPENDIX C: METHODOLOGY

SIGAR conducts its lessons learned program under the authority of Public Law 

110-181 and the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended, and in accordance 

with the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s Quality 

Standards for Inspection and Evaluation (commonly referred to as the Blue 

Book). These standards require that we carry out our work with integrity, 

objectivity, and independence, and provide information that is factually 

accurate and reliable. SIGAR’s lessons learned reports are broad in scope and 

based on a wide range of source material. To achieve the goal of high quality 

and to help ensure our reports are factually accurate and reliable, the reports 

are subject to extensive review by subject matter experts and relevant U.S. 

government agencies. 

The Stabilization research team drew upon a wide array of sources. Much 

of the team’s documentary research focused on publicly available material, 

including reports by USAID, State, DOD, and coalition partner nations, as well 

as congressional testimony from government officials. These official sources 

were complemented by hundreds of nongovernmental sources, including 

books, think tank reports, journal articles, press reports, academic studies, and 

analytical reports by international and advocacy organizations.

The research team also benefited from SIGAR’s access to material that is 

not publicly available, including thousands of documents provided by U.S. 

government agencies. State provided more than 4,000 cables—eight of 

which were declassified at SIGAR’s request—as well as internal memos and 

briefings, strategy documents, analytical reports, and civ-mil planning and 

programmatic documents. USAID provided stabilization program reporting, 

program evaluations, fact sheets, conference notes, program management plans, 

methodology documents, work plans, lessons learned and best practice reports, 

and program funding data. DOD provided district narrative assessments, 

survey data, and planning and programming documents on CERP and VSO. The 

research team also received internal, analytical, and lessons learned documents 

from the UK and German governments on their stabilization efforts in 

Afghanistan. A body of classified material, including some U.S. embassy cables 

and intelligence reports, provided helpful context; however, as an unclassified 

document, this report makes no use of that material. Finally, the team also drew 

from SIGAR’s own work, embodied in its quarterly reports to Congress, audits, 

and special project reports.
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

234 | APPENDIX C

While the documentary evidence tells a story, it cannot substitute for the 

experience, knowledge, and wisdom of people who participated in the 

Afghanistan stabilization effort. Therefore, the research team interviewed more 

than 100 individuals with direct knowledge of U.S. efforts to stabilize cleared 

or contested territory. Interviews were conducted with U.S. and international 

experts from academia, think tanks, NGOs, and government entities; current 

and former U.S. civilian and military officials who deployed to Afghanistan; 

current and former officials who oversaw key components of the stabilization 

effort from Washington; contractors who worked for USAID implementing 

partners on the ground; and other personnel from State, USAID, and DOD. 

The team also interviewed 20 Afghan government officials, including current 

and former ministers, deputy ministers, provincial governors, and stabilization 

program managers. 

Interviews provided valuable insights into the rationale behind decisions, the 

debates within and between agencies, and the frustrations that spanned the 

years, but often remained unwritten. Due in part to the politically sensitive 

nature of stabilization efforts, a majority of the interviewees wished to 

remain anonymous. For those still working in government, confidentiality 

was particularly important. Therefore, to preserve anonymity, our interviews 

often cite, for example, a “former senior U.S. official,” a “USAID official,” or a 

“stabilization contractor.” We conducted our interviews during research trips to 

Afghanistan, the UK, Germany, throughout the United States, and in visits to U.S. 

government departments and agencies in Washington. 

The report underwent an extensive process of peer review. We sought and 

received feedback on the draft report from nine subject matter experts, each 

with significant stabilization experience in Afghanistan. These reviewers 

provided thoughtful, detailed comments on the report, which we incorporated, 

as possible. 

Over the course of this study, the team routinely engaged with officials at 

USAID, State, and DOD to familiarize them with our preliminary findings, 

lessons, and recommendations and to solicit formal and informal feedback 

to improve our understanding of the key issues, as viewed by each agency, 

particularly in light of the interagency Stabilization Assistance Review, to which 

SIGAR contributed. USAID, State, and DOD were then given an opportunity to 

formally review and comment on the final draft of this lessons learned report, 

after which we met with agency representatives to receive their feedback 

firsthand. Although we incorporated agencies’ comments where appropriate, the 

analysis, conclusions, and recommendations of this report remain SIGAR’s own. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 235

Acronym Definition

ACAP Afghan Civilian Assistance Program

ADZ Afghan Development Zone

AIF Afghanistan Infrastructure Fund

ALP Afghan Local Police

ANASF Afghan National Army Special Forces

ANDSF Afghan National Defense and Security Forces

ANP Afghan National Police

AP3 Afghan Public Protection Program

ASI Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative

ASOP Afghanistan Social Outreach Program

ASP Afghanistan Stabilization Program

ARTF Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund

ATI Afghanistan Transition Initiative 

AVIPA Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Production 

in Agriculture

CA Civil Affairs

CBSG Community Based Stabilization Grants

CCI Community Cohesion Initiative

CD Community Development

CDI Community Defense Initiatives

CDP Community Development Program

CENTCOM U.S. Central Command

CERP Commander’s Emergency Response Program

CFSOCC-A Combined Forces Special Operations Component 

Command-Afghanistan

CFW Cash for Work

CIDNE Combined Information Data Network Exchange 

CIP Critical Infrastructure Protection

CIVCAS Civilian Casualty

CJSOTF-A Combined Joint Special Operations Task 

Force-Afghanistan

COIN Counterinsurgency

COR Contracting Officer’s Representative

CRC Civilian Response Corps

CSO State’s Bureau for Conflict and 

Stabilization Operations

DAI Development Alternatives Incorporated

DCC District Community Council

DDA District Development Assembly

APPENDIX D: ABBREVIATIONS

Acronym Definition

DDP District Delivery Program

DOD Department of Defense

DOD IG Department of Defense Inspector General

DSF District Stability Framework

DST District Support Team

ESOC Empirical Studies of Conflict

FM Field Manual

FMR Financial Management Regulation

GAO Government Accountability Office

HTT Human Terrain Team

ICMCP Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan

IDLG Independent Directorate of Local Governance

IED Improvised Explosive Device

IOM International Organization for Migration

IJC ISAF Joint Command

ISAF International Security Assistance Force

JP Joint Publication

KFZ Kandahar Food Zone

KTD Key Terrain District

LDI Local Defense Initiatives

LGCD Local Governance and Community Development

LSI Local Stability Initiatives

M&E Monitoring and Evaluation

MAAWS-A Money as a Weapon System–Afghanistan

MCN Ministry of Counter Narcotics

MISTI Measuring Impact of Stabilization Initiatives

MRRD Ministry for Rural Rehabilitation and 

Development

NSC National Security Council

NSP National Solidarity Program

NSPD National Security Presidential Directive

ODA Operational Detachment Alpha

OIG Office of the Inspector General

OTI USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives

PAG Policy Action Group

PKSOI U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability 

Operations Institute

PM Project Manager

PMP Performance Management Plan
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

236 | APPENDIX D

Acronym Definition

PRT Provincial Reconstruction Team

PSC Private Security Contractor

QIP Quick Impact Project

RC Regional Command

RLS-I Rule of Law Stabilization 

Program–Informal Component 

RSSA Regional South Stabilization Approach 

S&R Stabilization and Reconstruction

S/CRS State Department’s Coordinator for 

Reconstruction and Stabilization

SIGACT Significant Activity

SIKA Stability in Key Areas

SOCOM U.S. Special Operations Command

SOF Special Operations Forces

SOI Source of Instability

SPR-SEA Strategic Provincial Roads-Southern and 

Eastern Afghanistan

Acronym Definition

SRAP Special Representative for Afghanistan 

and Pakistan

Stab-U USAID’s Stabilization Unit

TDR Traditional Dispute Resolution

TFBSO Task Force for Business and Stability Operations

UNAMA UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan

UNDP UN Development Program

USAID U.S. Agency for International Development

USDA U.S. Department of Agriculture

USFOR-A U.S. Forces-Afghanistan

USIP United States Institute of Peace

VSO Village Stability Operations

VSP Village Stability Platform

VSU Vetting Support Unit
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 237

1. State, USAID, and DOD, Stabilization

Assistance Review: A Framework for

Maximizing the Effectiveness of U.S.

Government Efforts to Stabilize ConflictAffected Areas, 2018, p. 4. 

2. DOD, Principles for Afghanistan: Policy

Guidelines, Office of the Secretary of Defense 

for Policy, July 7, 2003, p. 2.

3. USAID, “USAID Afghanistan: Our Work,” USAID 

website, accessed on May 4, 2017.

4. DOD, DOD Financial Management Regulation:

Commander’s Emergency Response Program, 

April 2005, chapter 27, p. 4.

5. John Allen, SIGAR interview, November 2, 2016.

6. The White House, The National Security

Strategy of the United States of America, 

September 2002, p. 1.

7. Even before 9/11, the U.S. government was 

recognizing the importance of improving interagency coordination, particularly in complex 

contingency operations. See, for example, The 

White House, PDD/NSC 56: Managing Complex

Contingency Operations, May 1997; William 

P.  Hamblet and Jerry G. Kline, “Interagency 

Cooperation: PDD 56 and Complex Contingency

Operations,” Joint Forces Quarterly, Spring 

2000; The White House, National Security

Presidential Directive/NSPD-44, December 7, 

2005.

8. For the U.S. government and particularly in 

Afghanistan, the term “insurgents” often included any actors trying to violently overthrow

or destabilize the government, including those 

affiliated with various extremist, terrorist, and 

criminal networks. 

9. SIGAR analysis of data provided by USAID in 

response to SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018; 

DOD, response to SIGAR data call, January 17, 

2018.

10. Allen, SIGAR interview, November 2, 2016.

11. For a SIGAR study focused on long-term 

development, see Private Sector Development

and Economic Growth: Lessons from the U.S.

Experience in Afghanistan, SIGAR-18-38-LL, 

April 2018. 

12. U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) and U.S. Army 

Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute

(PKSOI), Guiding Principles for Stabilization

and Reconstruction (Washington, DC: USIP 

Press, 2009), p. 232.

13. USAID, “USAID Afghanistan: Our Work,” USAID 

website, accessed on May 4, 2017.

14. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication (JP)

3-07, Stability, August 3, 2016, p. ix.

15. State, USAID, and DOD, Stabilization

Assistance Review, p. 4. 

16. USAID, Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives

on the Experience with Provincial

Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan, 

June 2013, p. 10.

17. Joint Chiefs of Staff, JP 1-02, Dictionary of

Military and Associated Terms, October 2007, 

p.  267. 

18. U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide, 

January 2009, p. 12. The drafting of this guide 

was led by the Bureau of Political-Military

Affairs, Department of State.

19. U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide, 

p. 14.

20. U.S. Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-07, Stability

Operations, October 2008, glossary, p. 9. 

21. James Risen, “Afghans See Taliban as a Key to 

U.S. Aid Projects, Study Finds,” New York Times, 

December 15, 2015. For more on the steady 

growth of stabilization-like programs around 

the world, see Nathaniel Myers, Hard Aid:

Foreign Aid in Pursuit of Short Term Security

and Political Goals, Carnegie Endowment for 

International Peace, September 2015.

22. The White House, National Security Strategy, 

February 2015, pp. 4, 9; The White House,

National Security Strategy, December 2017, 

pp. 39–40.

23. Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. 

Sends Civilian Team to Syria to Help the

Displaced Return Home,” New York Times, 

June 22, 2017; Anne Gearan and Carol Morello, 

“Tillerson calls for allies to help stabilize Iraq 

and Syria after ISIS is expelled,” Washington

Post, March 22, 2017. During a visit to Raqqa in 

January 2018, USAID Administrator Mark Green 

and CENTCOM commander General Joseph 

Votel likewise scoped stabilization in Syria as 

addressing explosive remnants of war, getting 

people “back in their homes,” and restoring 

essential services, which is a far less ambitious 

conception of stabilization than the one shared 

by U.S. government agencies throughout the last

decade. “On the Record Remarks with USAID 

Administrator Mark Green and commander of 

U.S. Central Command General Joseph Votel,” 

January 22, 2018, USAID website. 

24. State, USAID, and DOD, Stabilization

Assistance Review, p. ii.

25. State, USAID, and DOD, Stabilization

Assistance Review, p. ii.

26. See, for example, Steve Coll, Directorate S:

The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in

Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York, NY: 

Penguin Press, 2018); Ahmed Rashid, Descent

into Chaos: The United States and the Failure

of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan,

and Central Asia (London, UK: Viking Press, 

2008); Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy:

America in Afghanistan 2001–2014 (New 

York, NY: Mariner Books, 2015); Matt Waldman, 

The Sun in the Sky: The Relationship between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan Insurgents, 

Crisis States Research Centre, London 

School of Economics and Political Science, 

December 2010; Owen Sirrs, Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence Directorate: Covert Action

and Internal Operations, (New York, NY: 

Routledge, 2017); Robert Grenier, 88 Days to

Kandahar: a CIA Diary, (New York, NY: Simon 

& Schuster, 2015); Jeffrey Dressler, Afghanistan

Report 6: The Haqqani Network: From Pakistan
238 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

to Afghanistan, Institute for the Study of War, 

2010.

27. For more on SIGAR’s work reviewing TFBSO,

see SIGAR, DOD Task Force for Business 

and Stability Operations: $675 Million in 

Spending Led to Mixed Results, Waste, and 

Unsustained Projects, SIGAR 18-19-AR, 

January 2018; Private Sector Development 

and Economic Growth: Lessons from the U.S. 

Experience in Afghanistan, SIGAR-18-38-LL, 

April 2018; Afghanistan’s Mineral, Oil, and 

Gas Industries: Unless U.S. Agencies Act Soon 

to Sustain Investments Made, $488 Million in 

Funding is at Risk, SIGAR 15-55-AR, April 2015; 

Afghanistan’s Oil, Gas, and Minerals 

Industries: $488 Million in U.S. Efforts Show 

Limited Progress Overall, and Challenges 

Prevent Further Investment and Growth, 

SIGAR Audit-16-11-AR, January 2016. 

28. Vernon Loeb, “Rumsfeld Announces End of

Afghan Combat,” Washington Post, May 2003.

29. U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), 

Afghanistan Reconstruction: Deteriorating

Security and Limited Resources Have Impeded 

Progress; Improvements in U.S. Strategy 

Needed, GAO-04-403, June 2004, p. 1.

30. The U.S. did not have a comprehensive strategy 

to direct its assistance efforts in Afghanistan until June 2003. GAO, Afghanistan Reconstruction, 

GAO-04-403, June 2004, pp. 3–4.

31. Donald Rumsfeld, “Afghanistan,” email to Paul 

Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, General Dick Myers, and 

General Peter Pace, April 17, 2002, retrieved 

from George Washington University’s National 

Security Archive.

32. Coll, Directorate S, pp. 129–130; Frances Z.

Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance: Lessons for Transition, USIP, 

September 2012, p. 2; Nadia Schadlow, War and 

the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat 

Success into Political Victory (Washington, 

DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017), p. 234; 

David Rohde and David E. Sanger, “How a ‘Good 

War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad,” New York Times, 

August 12, 2007.

33. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 2.

34. Larry P. Goodson, “Afghanistan in 2003: The

Taliban Resurface and a New Constitution 

is Born,” Asian Survey, vol. 44, no. 1 (2004), 

pp. 18–19.

35. The U.S. military’s efforts during this period

focused on hunting insurgents and terrorists 

and training the Afghan National Army, not 

building and expanding the central government 

or “nation building.” David W. Barno, “Fighting 

‘The Other War’: Counterinsurgency Strategy 

in Afghanistan, 2003–2005,” Military Review, 

September/October 2007, p. 33; Goodson, 

“Afghanistan in 2003,” pp. 15–16.

36. According to Robert Perito, PRTs evolved from

Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Cells, which 

were created in early 2002 and included a dozen 

Army Civil Affairs soldiers on small outposts “to 

assess humanitarian needs, implement smallscale reconstruction projects, and establish 

relations with the UN Assistance Mission in 

Afghanistan (UNAMA) and nongovernmental 

organizations already in the field.” Robert 

Perito, The U.S. Experience with Provincial 

Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan: Lessons 

Learned, USIP, p. 2; Goodson, “Afghanistan in 

2003,” p. 16.

37. Barno, “Fighting ‘The Other War,’” p. 40; Institute 

for the Study of War, Provincial Reconstruction 

Teams, March 2009.

38. USAID, Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives, 

p. 4.

39. Goodson, “Afghanistan in 2003,” p. 16.

40. USAID, Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives, 

p. 4; Goodson, “Afghanistan in 2003,” p. 16.

41. U.S. Army Center for Military History, Enduring 

Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army 

Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005, 2008, 

pp. 175–176.

42. USAID, Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives, 

p. 4.

43. Barno, “Fighting ‘The Other War’,” p. 34; U.S.

Army Center for Military History, Enduring 

Voices, pp. 29, 58, 61–62, 85; Astri Suhrke, When 

More Is Less, (London: Hurst & Co, 2011), 

pp. 41–42.

44. Barno, “Fighting ‘The Other War’,” p. 34; U.S.

Army Center for Military History, Enduring 

Voices, pp. 15–16.

45. DOD, Principles for Afghanistan: Policy 

Guidelines, Office of the Secretary of Defense 

for Policy, July 7, 2003, p. 2.

46. Barno, “Fighting ‘The Other War’,” p. 34.

47. The new strategy began by recognizing that 

the population was the center of gravity and

interagency cooperation was key. The five pillars 

of the strategy were: (1) defeating terrorism and 

denying sanctuary, (2) enabling the Afghan security structure, (3) sustaining area ownership, (4) 

enabling reconstruction and good governance, 

and (5) engaging regional states. The command 

also emphasized a “do no harm” approach to 

dealing with population. Barno, “Fighting ‘The 

Other War’,” pp. 34, 37–38; Fred Kaplan, The 

Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to 

Change the American Way of War (New York, 

NY: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 319.

48. U.S. Army Center for Military History, Enduring 

Voices, pp. 60–61, 170, 206.

49. In addition to the U.S.-led PRTs, there were also

PRTs operated by NATO partners, including 

the UK and Canada. As PRTs expanded and 

shifted south in 2006, more PRTs operated by 

allied nations appeared in southern Afghanistan. 

USAID, Provincial Reconstructions Teams 

in Afghanistan: An Interagency Assessment, 

June 2006, pp. 18–19. Barno, “Fighting “The 

Other War’,” p. 33; U.S. Army Center for Military 

History, Enduring Voices, pp. 60, 169–170, 

174–175.

50. Coll, Directorate S, p. 205; U.S. Army Center for

Military History, Enduring Voices, p. 175.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 239

51. State, Mission Performance Plan 2007, March 5, 

2005, p. 6.

52. SIGAR analysis of data provided by USAID in 

response to SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018;

USAID, “PRT Quick Impact Projects,” USAID 

website, accessed on May 25, 2017. 

53. GAO, Afghanistan Reconstruction, GAO-04-403,

June 2004, p. 18.

54. International Organization for Migration (IOM), 

Afghanistan: IOM’s Quick Impact projects program receives U.S. $32 million of additional 

funding, Relief Web, September 6, 2005.

55. GAO, Afghanistan Reconstruction, GAO-04-403,

June 2004, p. 18.

56. ISAF, ISAF Provincial Reconstruction Team 

(PRT) Handbook, Edition 4, March 2009, pp. 9, 

24.

57. USAID, Provincial Reconstructions Teams

in Afghanistan: An Interagency Assessment, 

June 2006, p. 8.

58. IOM, “Afghanistan Brochure,” March 2012, p. 16; 

USAID, “USAID Field Report Afghanistan,”

June 30, 2005. While ATI started in 2001, true 

stabilization activities did not begin until early 

2002, when OTI officials arrived in Afghanistan.

59. IOM, “Afghanistan Brochure,” March 2012, p. 16; 

USAID, “USAID Field Report Afghanistan,”

June 30, 2005; Social Impact Inc., USAID/OTI 

Afghanistan Program: Final Evaluation, 

prepared under contract for USAID, August 15, 

2005, pp. 29–30.

60. Social Impact Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, p. 30

61. Social Impact Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, p. 19

62. Vincent Fusco, “Eikenberry Takes Command 

of Coalition Forces in Afghanistan,” DOD 

News, May 4, 2005. In his book The Insurgents, 

journalist Fred Kaplan describes Eikenberry as 

being opposed to COIN and discontinuing many 

of Barno’s programs (Kaplan, The Insurgents, 

p. 322). However, SIGAR found little evidence to 

indicate a significant shift in policy or tactics between Barno and Eikenberry. Both Eikenberry’s 

ISAF counterpart, General David Richards, and 

Eikenberry’s subordinate commander for all of 

eastern Afghanistan, General Martin Schweitzer, 

told SIGAR the mission in 2006 was fundamentally a COIN mission, namely to connect the 

Afghan population with a legitimate Afghan 

government.

63. Martin Schweitzer, SIGAR interview, 

September 19, 2017.

64. Schweitzer, SIGAR interview, September 19, 

2017.

65. James Kunder, “USAID Assistance to

Afghanistan: Statement Before the House 

Committee on International Relations,” USAID, 

March 9, 2006.

66. Checchi and Company Consulting, Inc., Final

Report: Local Governance and Community 

Development Program (LGCD) Evaluation, prepared under contract for USAID, January 2009, 

p. 5.

67. Checchi and Co., Final Report: LGCD

Evaluation, p. 5.

68. Checchi and Co., Final Report: LGCD

Evaluation, p. 5.

69. The Danes made the same observation about the 

UK’s Helmand PRT prior to 2006. In fact, only in 

2008 did that PRT start integrating its political, 

security, and stabilization lines of effort. Nicole 

Ball, Sue Emmott, Maja Greenwood, Najib 

Murshed and Pablo Uribe, Afghanistan Lessons 

Identified: 2001–2014, International Lessons 

from Integrated Approaches in Afghanistan, 

Part II, Danish Institute for International 

Studies, 2016, pp. 29, 36.

70. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

January 25, 2017.

71. Kunder, “USAID Assistance to Afghanistan:

Statement Before the House Committee on 

International Relations,” March 9, 2006.

72. DOD, Directive 3000.05, Military Support 

for Stability, Security, Transition, and 

Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations, 

November 28, 2005, p. 2.

73. The White House, National Security

Presidential Directive/NSPD-44, December 7, 

2005, p. 5.

74. U.S. Army, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 

December 2006, p. i.

75. FM 3-07, Stability Operations, chapter 1, p. 4.

76. David Richards, “A Firm Foundation,” NATO

website, accessed on May 16, 2017.

77. “Afghanistan: Southward, ho!,” The Economist, 

November 3, 2005. Only after 2007 were ISAF 

and USFOR-A led by the same dual-hatted 

U.S. general. See also David Richards, “A Firm 

Foundation.” 

78. The PAG participants included President Karzai,

Minister of Foreign Affairs Spanta, Minister of 

Defense Wardak, Minister of Interior Muqbil, 

National Security Advisor Rassoul, Minister 

of Education Atmar, Minister of Information 

and Culture Khurram, Minister of Finance 

Ahadi, Director of NDS Saleh, Minister of Rural 

Rehabilitation and Development Zia, National 

Economic Advisor Naderi, ISAF, CFC-A, 

intelligence community and embassy reps from 

the United States, UK, Canada, New Zealand, 

and the EU and UNAMA. David Richards, “The 

Policy Action Group RRR Brief,” August 28, 

2006, p. 10. The ambassadors and their representatives from several allied nations also attended the PAG periodically, including reps from 

Canada, the Netherlands, the United States, and 

the UK. David Richards, “Informal Meeting with 

PAG International Members, Meeting Notes,” 

May 24, 2007, p. 1.

79. David Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26,

2017.

80. Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26, 2017.

81. Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26, 2017.

82. Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26, 2017.

83. Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26, 2017.

84. “Taking on the Taliban: NATO fights a battle 

against extremists, and plans subtler strategies,” 
240 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

The Economist, September 7, 2006. For an excellent account of Operation Medusa, see Graeme 

Smith, The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our 

War in Afghanistan (Toronto, Canada: Knopf, 

2013), pp. 55–91.

85. “Taking on the Taliban,” The Economist, 

September 7, 2006. 

86. Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26, 2017;

Smith, The Dogs Are Eating Them Now, p. 60.

87. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Post Operation Medusa 

Reconstruction Update,” Kabul 000480 cable,

February 12, 2007; Richards, SIGAR interview, 

September 26, 2017. 

88. Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26, 2017.

89. Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26, 2017.

90. Smith, The Dogs Are Eating Them Now, p. 90.

91. David Richards, “A Firm Foundation;” Der

Spiegel, “NATO Irritated by New American ISAF 

Commander,” March 19, 2007; “A Double Spring 

Offensive,” The Economist, February 22, 2007; 

Carlotta Gall, “American Takes Over Command 

of NATO Force in Afghanistan,” New York 

Times, February 5, 2007.

92. Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26, 2017.

93. Richards, SIGAR interview, September 26, 2017.

94. Shah Mahmood Miakhel, SIGAR interview,

February 7, 2017.

95. Farhad Massoom, SIGAR interview, March 10,

2017; Miakhel, SIGAR interview, February 7, 

2017; UK Department for International 

Development (DFID), Country Programme 

Evaluation Afghanistan, May 2009, p. 46.

96. DFID, “Country Programme Evaluation

Afghanistan,” May 2009, pp. xiv, 46.

97. Miakhel, SIGAR interview, February 7, 2017;

DFID, Country Programme Evaluation 

Afghanistan, May 2009, p. 46.

98. SIGAR, Afghanistan’s National Solidarity

Program Has Reached Thousands of Afghan 

Communities, but Faces Challenges that Could 

Limit Outcomes, SIGAR 11-8-AR, March 22, 

2011.

99. Jennifer Brick, Final Report: Investigating the

Sustainability of Community Development 

Councils in Afghanistan, Afghanistan Research 

and Evaluation Unit (AREU), February 2008, 

p. 1.

100. Government of Afghanistan, “Monthly Program 

Report: Qaws 1387 (21 November to 20

December 2008),” MRRD, December 2008, p. 3.

101. State, “The President’s Announcement on the

Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” State 

122731 cable, December 1, 2009.

102. Kunder, “USAID Assistance to Afghanistan:

Statement Before the House Committee on 

International Relations,” March 9, 2006.

103. State, Mission Performance Plan 2007, March 5, 

2005, p. 7.

104. Michael T. Flynn, “State of the Insurgency:

Trends, Intentions and Objectives,” 

December 22, 2009, p. 9. 

105. iCasualties.org, “U.S. Hostile Fatalities 

Afghanistan by Year,” iCasualties website, accessed on February 8, 2018.

106. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 322.

107. National Security Council, Afghanistan

Strategic Review, December 4, 2006.

108. National Security Council, Afghanistan

Strategic Review, December 4, 2006.

109. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan: Post Performance 

Management Plan 2011–2015, October 2010, 

annex VII, p. 5.

110. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Musa Qala Reconstruction 

Update Planning,” Kabul 000018 cable, January 2, 

2008; “Policing a Whirlwind: As foreign troops 

become more efficient, government is still the 

problem,” The Economist, December 13, 2007; 

Suhrke, When More Is Less, p. 113.

111. “Policing a Whirlwind,” The Economist, 

December 13, 2007.

112. Rohde and Sanger, “How a ‘Good War’ in 

Afghanistan Went Bad;” Coll, Directorate S, 

p. 330.

113. Iraq Body Count, “Documented Civilian Deaths 

from Violence,” Iraq Body Count website, 

accessed on March 28, 2018; Coll, Directorate 

S, p. 330; Michael T. Flynn, State of the 

Insurgency: Trends, Intentions and Objectives, 

December 22, 2009, p. 9.

114. Coll, Directorate S, pp. 332–333.

115. Coll, Directorate S, pp. 337, 340.

116. Coll, Directorate S, p. 341.

117. Barack Obama, “Against Going to War in Iraq:

Remarks by Illinois State Senator Barack 

Obama,” Organization for Action (OFA), OFA 

website, accessed on April 20, 2017.

118. Barack Obama, “Obama’s Remarks on Iraq and

Afghanistan,” New York Times, July 15, 2008; 

Athena Jones, “Obama defends ‘just’ war in 

Afghanistan,” NBC News, December 10, 2009.

119. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War 

Within the War for Afghanistan (New York, NY: 

Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), pp. 50–51.

120. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 51.

121. Abubakar Siddique, “U.S. ‘Super Envoy’ 

Appointment Sends Strong Signal to

Afghanistan, Pakistan,” Radio Free Europe/

Radio Liberty, January 23, 2009.

122. Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York, NY: 

Simon & Schuster, 2010), pp. 88–90.

123. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 89.

124. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 88–90; 

Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 53. 

125. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 53.

126. David Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16,

2017.

127. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 300.

128. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 296; Peter Bergen,

“How Petraeus changed the U.S. military,” CNN, 

November 11, 2012.

129. Julian E. Barnes, “Obama team works on 

overhaul of Afghanistan, Pakistan policy,” Los 

Angeles Times, February 11, 2009.

130. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “USAID/Afghanistan: The 

Way Forward, 2009–2014,” Kabul 000282 cable, 

February 9, 2009.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 241

131. Congressional Research Service (CRS), 

Troop Levels in the Afghan and Iraq Wars, 

FY 2001–FY 2012: Cost and Other Potential 

Issues, July 2, 2009, p. 1; Chandrasekaran, Little 

America, p. 50.

132. One U.S. official reported that McKiernan’s request for 30,000 more troops made it to Obama’s 

desk on his first day in office. Senior U.S. 

official, SIGAR interview, September 16, 2016; 

Chandrasekaran, Little America, pp. 50–51. 

With the 9,000 troops President Bush ordered 

in December 2008, the 17,000 troops President 

Obama ordered in February 2009, and the 4,000 

military trainers President Obama ordered 

in March 2009, McKiernan’s full 30,000 troop 

request was essentially fulfilled. 

133. Helene Cooper, “Putting Stamp on Afghan War, 

Obama Will Send 17,000 Troops,” New York 

Times, February 17, 2009. Chandrasekaran, 

Little America, pp. 51–52.

134. The White House, “Statement by the President 

on Afghanistan,” February 17, 2009.

135. The White House, White Paper of the

Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. 

Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, 

March 2009, p. 1.

136. The White House, White Paper of the

Interagency Policy Group’s Report, March 2009, 

p. 2.

137. The White House, White Paper of the

Interagency Policy Group’s Report, March 2009, 

p. 1.

138. Kaplan, The Insurgents, pp. 296, 301.

139. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 16, 2016; Chandrasekaran, Little 

America, p. 52.

140. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 183–184.

141. The White House, “Remarks by the President on 

a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,”

press release, March 27, 2009; Cooper, “Putting 

Stamp on Afghan War;” senior U.S. official, 

SIGAR interview, September 16, 2016.

142. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 114.

143. The White House, “Remarks by the President on 

a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,”

March 27, 2009.

144. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 16, 2016.

145. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 16, 2016; Coll, Directorate S, pp. 367, 

400.

146. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 59.

147. Robert Gates and Michael Mullen, “Press 

Conference with Secretary Gates and Adm.

Mullen on Leadership Changes in Afghanistan 

From the Pentagon,” press release, May 11, 2009.

148. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 302; Gates and

Mullen, “Press Conference with Secretary Gates 

and Adm. Mullen,” May 11, 2009.

149. Gates and Mullen, “Press Conference with 

Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen,” May 11, 2009;

Chandrasekaran, Little America, pp. 52–53; Tom 

Bowman and Mara Liasson, “Obama’s Afghan 

War Decision: A Team of Rivals,” National 

Public Radio, December 3, 2009.

150. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 20, 2017.

151. Stanley McChrystal, Military Nominations

Hearing, Senate Armed Services Committee,

(C-SPAN, 2009).

152. The counterinsurgency doctrine developed by 

Petraeus and his team in 2006 calls for a ratio

of 20 security forces for every 1,000 civilians. 

McChrystal’s response to a question during his 

confirmation hearing about ANDSF force targets 

suggests he was applying this simple approach: 

“I think we can literally just look at the size of 

Afghanistan and size of the population, and you 

can extrapolate out.” In his memoir, McChrystal 

writes that his team’s extrapolation—which 

factored in population size and local security 

conditions across the country—suggested 

Afghanistan would need a total of 400,000 security forces personnel, including 240,000 from 

the army and 160,000 from the police. Any surge 

of U.S. forces for Afghanistan was, according 

to him, meant to be a “bridge force” that would 

stand in while ANDSF was expanded. Stanley 

McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir

(New York, NY: Penguin, 2013), p. 345; FM 3-24,

Counterinsurgency, December 2006, chapter 

1, p. 13; McChrystal, Military Nominations 

Hearing, Senate Armed Services Committee.

153. Ian S. Livingston and Michael O’Hanlon, 

Afghanistan Index, Brookings Institution, 

September 30, 2012, pp. 4–5.

154. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 140.

155. Stanley McChrystal, Commander’s Initial 

Assessment, DOD, August 30, 2009, p. i; 

Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 59.

156. McChrystal, Commander’s Initial Assessment, 

p. i; Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 305.

157. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 306.

158. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 306; Woodward, 

Obama’s Wars, p. 150.

159. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 306.

160. McChrystal, Military Nominations Hearing, 

Senate Armed Services Committee.

161. McChrystal, Commander’s Initial Assessment, 

chapter 1, p. 2.

162. McChrystal, Commander’s Initial Assessment, 

chapter 1, p. 1.

163. McChrystal, Commander’s Initial Assessment, 

chapter 2, p. 6; Chandrasekaran, Little America, 

pp. 62–63.

164. Chandrasekaran, Little America, pp. 62–64;

Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 120.

165. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 120.

166. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “After the Taliban: High

Expectations in Helmand’s Nawa District,” Kabul 

002261 cable (declassified by State on April 28, 

2017, at SIGAR’s request), August 6, 2009.

167. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “After the Taliban: High

Expectations in Helmand’s Nawa District,” Kabul 

002261 cable.
242 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

168. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “After the Taliban: High

Expectations in Helmand’s Nawa District,” Kabul 

002261 cable.

169. Empirical Studies of Conflict Project analysis. Data from Andrew C. Shaver and Austin

L. Wright, “Data on Combatant Activity 

During Afghanistan War Advance Scientific 

Investigation of Insurgency,” Technical Report 

2017; Michael Flynn, Matt Pottinger, and Paul 

Batchelor, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making 

Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan, Center for 

New American Security, January 2010, p. 13. 

170. Flynn, Pottinger, and Batchelor, Fixing Intel, 

p. 13. 

171. Marc Chretien, SIGAR interview, July 22, 2016.

172. Kevin M. Hymel, Strykers in Afghanistan:

1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment in 

Kandahar Province 2009, Combat Studies 

Institute, US Army Combined Arms Center, 

2014, p. 87; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Search and 

Destroy: One Stryker battalion lost more men 

in Afghanistan than any other. Who was the 

gung-ho colonel in charge?” Slate, June 27, 2012; 

Christopher Torchia, “Battalion Among Hardest 

Hit in Afghan War,” Associated Press, May 30, 

2010.

173. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 161.

174. FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 2006, chapter 1,

p. 13; Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 70.

175. FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 2006, chapter

1, p. 13; Chandrasekaran, Little America, 

pp. 73–74.

176. Anne E. Kornblut, Scott Wilson, and Karen

DeYoung, “During marathon review of 

Afghanistan strategy, Obama held out for faster 

troop surge,” Washington Post, December 6, 

2009.

177. Kornblut, Wilson, and DeYoung, “During 

marathon review of Afghanistan strategy,” 

December 6, 2009.

178. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 16, 2016; Vali Nasr, The Dispensable 

Nation (New York, NY: First Anchor Books, 

2013), p. 21; Kornblut and DeYoung report that 

Obama himself was supposedly “taken with 

[Petraeus’] real-world experience.” Kornblut, 

Wilson, and DeYoung, “During marathon review 

of Afghanistan strategy,” December 6, 2009.

179. Mark Landler, “The Afghan War and the 

Evolution of Obama,” New York Times, 

January 1, 2017.

180. Holly Bailey, “Joe Biden, White House Truth 

Teller,” Newsweek, October 9, 2009. Kaplan, The 

Insurgents, p. 309.

181. Chandrasekaran, Little America, pp. 125–126.

Doug Lute also offered the president an equally 

sobering prediction about the difficulty of handing any initial success off to the Afghans. Coll, 

Directorate S, p. 395.

182. Coll, Directorate S, p. 404.

183. Douglas Lute, SIGAR interview, February 20,

2015. According to former acting SRAP Laurel 

Miller, the Obama administration had a “tendency to boil down the whole question of strategy 

in Afghanistan to how many troops we have in 

the country. But it’s pretty hard to get away from 

that fundamental question.” Susan Glasser, “The 

Trump White House’s War Within,” Politico, 

July 24, 2017.

184. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 311.

185. Kornblut, Wilson, and DeYoung, “During marathon review of Afghanistan strategy.” 

186. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 186–188.

187. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 312.

188. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 202, 259.

189. “[The military] made no secret of their view that 

without the vast ground force recommended by

Gen. McChrystal, the Afghan mission could end 

in failure and a return to power of the Taliban.” 

Alex Spillius, “White House angry at General 

Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan,” The 

Telegraph, October 5, 2009.

190. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

191. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “Iraq People 

and Economy,” CIA World Factbook, 2009; CIA, 

“Afghanistan People and Economy,” CIA World 

Factbook, 2009.

192. World Bank, “World Development Indicators,” 

2009.

193. World Bank, “World Development Health 

Indicators,” 2009.

194. CIA, “Afghanistan People and Economy;” CIA, 

“Iraq People and Economy.”

195. U.S. Embassy Kabul and ISAF/USFOR-A, “U.S. 

Embassy and ISAF/USFOR-A Integrated CivilianMilitary Afghanistan Communication Plan,”

March 26, 2010, p. 12; CIA, “Afghanistan People 

and Economy.” 

196. World Bank, “World Development Indicators,” 

2009.

197. For more information on the impact of illiteracy 

among Afghan security forces, see SIGAR,

Reconstructing the Afghan National Defense 

and Security Forces: Lessons from the U.S. 

Experience in Afghanistan, SIGAR 17-62-LL, 

September 2017, pp. 142–147.

198. Rick Nelson and Maren Leed, Iraq vs.

Afghanistan - A Surge is Not a Surge Is Not a 

Surge, CSIS, 2009.

199. Nelson and Leed, Iraq vs. Afghanistan; Colonel 

Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly 

Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New Press, 

2013), pp. 89–96; Austin Long, “The Anbar 

Awakening,” Survival, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 77–78.

200. In an interview with SIGAR, David Petraeus, one 

of the chief architects of the surge, said the differences between Afghanistan and Iraq were understood at the time. “There are many differences between Iraq and Afghanistan and I laid those 

out ahead of time: history of central government, 

literacy, government revenue, terrain, nature of 

society, infrastructure, enemy headquarters locations (inside Iraq, outside Afghanistan), rule of 

law, and ability to pressure the insurgent leaders. 

If the enemy has sanctuary you can’t compel that 

enemy. And I told Congress that we wouldn’t 

be able to flip Afghanistan the way we flipped 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 243

Iraq. I knew it was going to be a longer process.” 

Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017.

201. On September 4, Petraeus gave an interview to 

the Washington Post, in which he disparaged 

the counterterrorism approach under consideration by the White House and embraced 

“a fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.” Michael Gerson, “In 

Afghanistan, No Choice But to Try,” Washington 

Post, September 4, 2009. On September 21, a 

leaked copy of McChrystal’s Initial Assessment

appeared in the Washington Post under the 

headline “More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’” 

On October 1, McChrystal delivered a speech 

at a think tank in London, which was interpreted as a public appeal for more troops. In 

that speech, McChrystal rejected the counterterrorism option favored by Vice President 

Biden. Bob Woodward, “McChrystal: More 

Forces or ‘Mission Failure’,” Washington Post, 

September 21, 2009; Spillius, “White House 

angry at General Stanley McChrystal speech 

on Afghanistan;” Woodward, Obama’s Wars, 

pp. 266–267. 

202. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 311.

203. Kornblut, Wilson, and DeYoung, “During marathon review of Afghanistan strategy;” Woodward, 

Obama’s Wars, p. 253.

204. For example, Peter Orszag, the director of 

Office Management and Budget, wrote a memo

describing the $889 billion estimated cost of 

McChrystal’s plan over a 10-year period—a 

cost and timeline that Obama rejected during 

deliberations, reportedly saying, “I’m not doing 

10 years. I’m not doing a long-term nation-building effort. I’m not spending a trillion dollars 

on this. . . . That’s not in the national interest.” 

Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 251.

205. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 253.

206. The first alternative, which included 85,000 

troops, was considered unrealistic. The second

alternative, which entailed sending 20,000 troops 

with a training mission was, according to the 

military, insufficient to accomplish the mission 

(i.e., deny the Taliban the ability to overthrow 

the Afghan state). What remained were two very 

similar options: one involved 40,000 U.S. forces, 

the other 30,000–35,000 troops. Woodward, 

Obama’s Wars, pp. 273, 275, 279.

207. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017.

208. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 16, 2016.

209. Landler, “The Afghan War and the Evolution of 

Obama;” Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 279.

210. Kaplan, The Insurgents, pp. 316–317.

211. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 317.

212. Kornblut, Wilson, and DeYoung, “During marathon review of Afghanistan strategy;” Woodward, 

Obama’s Wars, pp. 326–328.

213. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 251–252, 271.

214. Coll, Directorate S, p. 407.

215. Obama, “Statement on United States Troop

Levels in Afghanistan,” December 1, 2009.

216. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 16, 2016.

217. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16,

2017; senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview, 

September 16, 2016. Bob Woodward documents extensive discussions about a surge 

lasting 18–24 months during NSC meetings on 

November 11 and 23, weeks before the strategy was announced, which would have given 

principals plenty of time to raise red flags about 

the dangers of such a compressed timeline. 

Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 271, 278, 291, 

294–295, 297. In contrast, accounts by journalist 

Steve Coll, a senior civilian official interviewed 

by SIGAR, and Stanley McChrystal all agree 

with General Petraeus that the first mention of 

a time-constrained strategy in any gathering of 

principals was on November 29, two days before 

the West Point speech, when the president 

presented his terms sheet. However, McChrystal 

also says that Secretary Gates had asked 

him “earlier” what he thought about the idea, 

although he does not specify if that conversation 

occurred earlier that same day, or days or weeks 

before the conversation with President Obama. 

In any case, McChrystal wrote, “I judged that the 

combination of our ability to expand secured 

areas over the next 18 months, and to increase 

Afghan security force capacity during that 

period, could allow us to reduce the force size 

with acceptable risk. If I’d felt like the decision 

to set a withdrawal date would have been fatal 

to the success of our mission, I’d have said so.” 

McChrystal, My Share of the Task, p. 357; Coll, 

Directorate S, p. 408.

218. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017.

219. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017;

Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 318.

220. Barnett Rubin, SIGAR interview, February 17,

2017.

221. State, Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional 

Stabilization Strategy, Office of the Special 

Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 

December 2009, p. 7.

222. State, Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional 

Stabilization Strategy, December 2009.

223. USAID official, SIGAR interview, October 7,

2016. 

224. Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder, Winning 

Hearts and Minds? Examining the 

Relationship between Aid and Security in 

Afghanistan, Feinstein International Center, 

Tufts University, January 2012, p. 26; Robert M. 

Gates, statement before the Senate Committee 

on Armed Services, hearing on “Department of 

Defense Authorization for Appropriations for 

Fiscal Year 2008,” February 6, 2007, p. 9.

225. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, 

pp. 7–8; Karl Eikenberry, “The Limits of 

Counterinsurgency Doctrine in Afghanistan: the 

Other Side of COIN,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 92, 

no. 5 (2013), pp. 66–67; Chandrasekaran, Little 

America, pp. 117–118.
244 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

226. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 18, 2016.

227. USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, September 27, 2016. For example, 

prior to clearing key terrain districts like Musa 

Qala in Helmand and Zhari in Kandahar, the 

Taliban were in firm control. They levied taxes, 

imposed conscription on the local population, limited women’s movements, made local 

radio broadcasts, required licenses for tasks 

such as irrigation system repair, and relied on 

shadow courts and checkpoints. Perhaps most 

importantly, the Taliban provided security to 

the local population, protecting them from 

predation by Afghan security forces and other 

power brokers, and they were perceived as less 

corrupt than the Afghan government. Displacing 

them required heavy initial force, followed by 

stabilization efforts to ease the population into 

a new order. See Thomas Donnelly and Gary 

Schmitt, “Musa Qala: Adapting to the Realities 

of Modern Counterinsurgency,” Small Wars 

Journal, September 5, 2008, electronic pp. 4–5, 8; 

U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Musa Qala Reconstruction 

Update Planning,” Kabul 000018 cable, January 2, 

2008; Jason Motlagh, “The Afghan War: Why the 

Kandahar Campaign Matters,” Time, October 18, 

2010; Carl Forsberg, The Taliban’s Campaign 

for Kandahar, Institute for the Study of War, 

December 2009, pp. 15–16, 30, 32–35.

228. Civ-mil planner at Embassy Kabul, SIGAR interview, November 4, 2016; senior State Department 

official, SIGAR interview, January 24, 2017; State, 

“Reflections on Afghanistan: Lessons for Future 

Conflict and Stabilization Operations,” CSO analysis, p. 7. S/CRS has since become State’s Bureau 

for Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO). 

Nina M. Serafino, Peacekeeping/Stabilization 

and Conflict Transitions: Background and 

Congressional Action on the Civilian Response/

Reserve Corps and other Civilian Stabilization 

and Reconstruction Capabilities, CRS, 

October 2, 2012, electronic p. 2.

229. State, “Reflections on Afghanistan: Lessons for 

Future Conflict and Stabilization Operations,”

p. 7; U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Scenesetter for 

CODEL McConnell,” Kabul 000803 cable, April 1, 

2009.

230. Civ-mil planner at Embassy Kabul, SIGAR 

interview, November 4, 2016; State, “Reflections 

on Afghanistan: Lessons for Future Conflict and 

Stabilization Operations,” pp. 6–7.

231. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Beyond 421 - Civilian 

Staffing Requirements for Afghanistan,” Kabul

001762 cable, July 6, 2009; Ariella Viehe, Jasmine 

Afshar, and Tamana Heela, Rethinking the 

Civilian Surge: Lessons from the Provincial 

Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan, Center 

for American Progress, December 2015, pp. 5–6.

232. Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, Integrated

Civilian-Military Campaign Plan, August 10, 

2009, p. 29; The White House, White Paper of 

the Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. 

Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, 

March 27, 2009; military planner, SIGAR interview, November 3, 2016; U.S. Embassy Kabul, 

“Scenesetter for CODEL McConnell,” Kabul 

000803 cable, April 1, 2009. 

233. Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, Integrated

Civilian-Military Campaign Plan, pp. v-vi, 5, 

16, 21, 23.

234. U.S Embassy Kabul, “Afghanistan Scenesetter 

for CODEL Inouye,” Kabul 003177 cable,

October 08, 2009; SIGAR, U.S. Civilian Uplift 

in Afghanistan is Progressing but Some 

Key Issues Merit Further Examination as 

Implementation Continues, SIGAR 11-2-

AR, October 26, 2010, p. ii; USAID, Lessons 

Learned: USAID Perspectives, pp. 7, 10; 

GAO, Afghanistan: Improvements Needed 

to Strengthen Management of U.S. Civilian 

Presence, GAO-12-285, Feb. 27, 2012, p. 11.

235. Ball, Emmott, Greenwood, Murshed and 

Uribe, International Lessons from Integrated

Approaches in Afghanistan, Part II, p. 38; 

Foreign and Commonwealth Office and 

Wilton Park, Capturing the Lessons from the 

Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team, 

December 3–5, 2014, pp. 9–10.

236. Civilian Strategy for Afghanistan: A Status 

Report in Advance of the London Conference,

Hearing Before the Senate Committee on 

Foreign Relations, 111th Cong., pp. 51–52 

(January 21, 2010) (statement of Richard 

Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for 

Afghanistan and Pakistan).

237. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, pp. 11–

13.

238. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Beyond 421 - Civilian 

Staffing Requirements for Afghanistan,” Kabul

001762 cable, July 6, 2009; Ambassador Karl 

Eikenberry, testimony before the Senate 

Foreign Affairs Committee, hearing on “The 

New Afghanistan Strategy: The View from 

the Ground,” December 9, 2009, p. 14; U.S. 

Embassy Kabul, “Key GIRoA Ministers Plan 

Sub-National Governance Interventions in 

South and East,” Kabul 002270 cable, August 7, 

2009; U. S. Embassy Kabul, “Afghanistan: 

Fine Tuning Civ-Mil Coordination Through 

National Level Working Groups,” Kabul 003908 

cable, December 7, 2009; State, “Winning in 

Afghanistan: A Message from Ambassador 

Eikenberry,” November 8, 2009, p. 3.

239. Civ-mil planner at Embassy Kabul, SIGAR interview, November 4, 2016.

240. State, “Reflections on Afghanistan: Lessons for 

Future Conflict and Stabilization Operations,”

p. 2.

241. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Key GIRoA Ministers Plan 

Sub-National Governance Interventions in South

and East,” Kabul 002270 cable, August 7, 2009.

242. Stephanie Kinney, “Interview of a USAID

Official in PRT Office,” USIP and Association for 

Diplomatic Studies and Training, September 11 

and 18, 2009, p. 16. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 245

243. Kinney, “Interview of a USAID Official in PRT

Office,” p. 16; U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Afghan 

Ministries Organize for Post-Conflict District 

Level Assistance,” Kabul 002383 cable, 

August 16, 2009.

244. Dennis J. Cahill, “The Civilian Uplift and Unified 

Action: Organizing for Stability Operations in

Regional Command–East,” PRISM, vol. 3, no. 2, 

p. 132; senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

November 18, 2016; McChrystal, Commander’s 

Initial Assessment, August 30, 2009, chapter 2, 

pp. 19–20; USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR 

interview, September 27, 2016.

245. MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan: 

Performance Management Plan FY 2012–2015, 

June 18, 2013, p. 5. 

246. McChrystal, Commander’s Initial Assessment, 

August 30, 2009, chapter 2, p. 20; DOD, Report 

on Progress Toward Security and Stability 

in Afghanistan, April 2010, p. 6; senior USAID 

official, SIGAR interview, November 23, 2016. 

The diversity of KTDs, from urban centers to 

sparsely populated districts, leaves ample room 

for disagreement about the criteria applied when 

choosing them. While most U.S. government 

sources point to population centers controlled or 

contested by the Taliban as the most important 

criteria, some sources indicate other factors, including proximity to key infrastructure, centers 

of economic productivity, and commerce routes. 

For example, most of the Ring Road in the 

south and east was prioritized as key terrain by 

McChrystal for these latter reasons, which are 

less often mentioned in government documents. 

See McChrystal, My Share of the Task, p. 331. 

247. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Afghan Ministries 

Organize for Post-Conflict District Level

Assistance,” Kabul 2383, August 16, 2009; U.S. 

Embassy Kabul, “Key GIRoA Ministers Plan SubNational Governance Interventions in South and 

East,” Kabul 002270 cable, August 7, 2009.

248. Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, Integrated

Civilian-Military Campaign Plan, 2009, pp. 3, 

18; Eikenberry, testimony before the Senate 

Foreign Affairs Committee, December 9, 2009, 

pp. 9–10. 

249. USAID, “Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) West, RFP

306-10-0034, Amendment No. 01,” awarded to 

AECOM, December 9, 2010, p. 5. 

250. Eikenberry, testimony before the Senate Foreign

Affairs Committee, December 9, 2009, pp. 9, 

10; State, Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional 

Stabilization Strategy, 2009, p. 3; Frances Z. 

Brown, Rethinking Afghan Local Governance 

Aid After Transition, USIP, August 2014, pp. 2–3; 

Cahill, “The Civilian Uplift and Unified Action: 

Organizing for Stability Operations in Regional 

Command–East,” p. 132. “District Support Teams 

(DST): The DST is a combined civilian and 

military action group which is responsible for 

integrating the activities of all elements in an assigned district. The DST is comprised of all USG 

civilian elements plus ISAF and OEF military 

forces operating in the district. The team is led 

by the USG civilian lead, the commanders of the 

primary military elements, and the ANSF mentor 

and partner team. The district level is primarily 

execution focused; however, it is responsible for 

jointly formulating a civ-mil plan for district support, assessing progress and stability in the area, 

allocating resources jointly, raising key issues 

to the provincial level as required, and engaging 

key international community and GIRoA partners.” Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, Integrated 

Civilian-Military Campaign Plan, 2009, p. 30.

251. International Relief and Development (IRD), 

Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Production 

(AVIPA) Plus Annual Report FY 2010, 

October 1, 2009 - September 30, 2010, prepared 

under contract for USAID, December 31, 

2010, p. ii; SIGAR, USAID Spent Almost $400 

Million on an Afghan Stabilization Project 

Despite Uncertain Results, But Has Taken 

Steps to Better Assess Similar Efforts, SIGAR 

12-8-AR, April 25, 2012, p. 3; MSI, Community 

Development Program: Final Performance 

Evaluation, prepared under contract for USAID, 

February 12, 2014, p. 8. Community Based 

Stabilization Grants was also realigned geographically for similar reasons as the others, but 

not until 2011. Creative Associates International, 

Community Based Stabilization Grants: Final 

Report, prepared under contract for USAID, 

July 2012, pp. 5, 8. FIRUP changed its name 

to the Community Development Program in 

September 2010. MSI, Community Development 

Program: Final Performance Evaluation, p. 4.

252. IRD, AVIPA Plus Annual Report FY 2010, p. ii; 

USAID Office of Inspector General, Audit of 

USAID/Afghanistan’s Afghanistan Vouchers 

for Increased Productive Agriculture (AVIPA) 

Program, Audit Report No. 5-306-10-008-P, 

April 20, 2010, pp. 3–4; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, November 23, 2016.

253. USAID, Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives, 

p. 10; USAID, “Approval of the Concept Paper

for the Third Party Monitoring and Evaluation 

IQC,” memorandum to Mission Director, 

September 20, 2010, p. 1; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, November 10, 2016; U.S. 

Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign Assistance 

for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 6.

254. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016.

255. USAID, “USAID Afghanistan: Our Work.”

256. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 3.

257. Brown, Rethinking Afghan Local Governance 

Aid After Transition, pp. 12–13. 

258. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

September 9, 2016. Programs did not always 

have explicit theories of change. In its desk 

review of stabilization resources, MISTI pointed 

out that this caused problems not just for 

evaluators assessing program effectiveness, but 

also for implementers responsible for selecting 

activities under each program. When a program’s 

theory of change is unclear, it becomes unclear 
246 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

what interventions it should sponsor or how 

their effectiveness should be measured. MSI, 

MISTI Task I: Desk Review of Stabilization 

Resources and References, prepared under 

contract for USAID, July 11, 2012, p. 11.

259. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 5; 

Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation 

of USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative 

in Afghanistan, prepared under contract for 

USAID, February 2016, p. 9. 

260. IRD, Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased

Production in Agriculture (AVIPA) Plus Final 

Report, September 1, 2008 – November 15, 

2011, prepared under contract for USAID, 

pp. 35–36; MSI, Community Development 

Program: Final Performance Evaluation, 

p. 4; U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign 

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 5. 

261. Checchi and Co., Final Report: ACAP Final

Evaluation, prepared under contract for USAID, 

January 13-March 12, 2011, pp. 4, 150.

262. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 8; 

MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, prepared under 

contract for USAID, September 2015, pp. 5, 24.

263. IRD, AVIPA Plus Final Report, pp. 2–3.

264. USAID, “Glossary of ADS Terms,” Partial

Revision April 30, 2014, p. 28.

265. Robert D. Lamb and Brooke Shawn, Political

Governance and Strategy in Afghanistan, 

Center for Strategic and International Studies, 

April 2012, p. 28. 

266. MSI, MISTI Task 1: Desk Review of

Stabilization Resources and References, 

prepared under contract for USAID, July 11, 

2012, pp. 6, 9, 14; Counterinsurgency Training 

Center-Afghanistan (CTC) and USAID, District 

Stability Framework, p. 87.

267. MSI, Community Outreach and Engagement 

for Stabilization Activity Planning and

Implementation: an Evaluation of Best 

Practices–Analytical Report, prepared under 

contract for USAID, May 29, 2013, p. 2.

268. CTC and USAID, District Stability Framework, 

p. 21; MSI, Community Outreach and 

Engagement, p. 11.

269. USAID, Tactical Conflict Assessment and

Planning Framework (TCAPF), August 27, 

2009, p. 4; CTC and USAID, District Stability 

Framework, pp. 118, 122; MSI, Community 

Outreach and Engagement, p. 2. 

270. CTC and USAID, District Stability Framework, 

p. 88; MSI, Community Outreach and 

Engagement, pp. 14–15.

271. CTC and USAID, District Stability Framework, 

p. 166; DAI, “Annual Report -Year Two: 

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative (East),” 

July 2011, prepared under contract for USAID, 

p. 5.

272. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

September 9, 2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, October 24, 2016; former USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1, 2017; Chemonics 

International Inc., Afghanistan Stabilization 

Initiative – South: Final Report, August 3, 2012, 

prepared under contract for USAID, pp. 6–7, 21; 

USAID officials, SIGAR interview, September 18, 

2011.

273. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016. According to a USAID desk 

review, RSSA was “a unified framework that is 

used to analyze where that particular district 

is on a stability continuum from unstable to 

stable. It relies on a matrix that demonstrates 

the characteristics of a district at each phase 

of the shape, clear, hold, and build continuum. 

These characteristics translate into the objectives against which civilian and military actors 

focus their efforts. For example, if a district 

is in the clear phase and one of the characteristics of the hold phase is that a legitimate 

local decision-making body is constituted, then 

stabilization efforts will focus on the objective 

of supporting the establishment of that local 

decision-making body.” MSI, MISTI Task 1: 

Desk Review of Stabilization Resources and 

References, p. 15.

274. The Local Stability Initiatives component of 

LGCD often consisted of cash-for-work programming and was concentrated in remote and insecure areas. Program documentation describes 

a remarkably short timeframe for implementation of just one to three weeks, hardly enough 

time for substantive consultation with local 

populations or leaders. Checchi and Co., Final 

Report: Local Governance and Community 

Development Program (LGCD) Evaluation,

January 2009, pp. 28–29. ASI-E created a guide 

to leveraging short-term employment to advance 

stabilization goals and to address sources of 

instability. This guide covers direct implementation of projects using local labor, and documents 

how such an approach can enable the program 

to work in less secure areas while minimizing 

the risk of corruption or protection payments 

to insurgent groups. DAI, “Use of Politically 

Leveraged Short-Term Employment Projects for 

Stabilization of Insurgent Controlled Areas,” n.d, 

internal program document, pp. 1–3.

275. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, prepared under 

contract for USAID, August 2011, p. xii.

276. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1,

2017.

277. IRD, AVIPA Plus Final Report, p. viii; MSI, 

Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 4; Secretary of State 

Hillary Clinton, testimony before the Senate 

Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, DC, 

hearing on “Afghanistan: Assessing the Road 

Ahead,” December 3, 2009, electronic pp. 4–5. 

278. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Using Cash for Work to

Support Stabilization and Governance Objectives 

in Southern Afghanistan,” Kabul 000666 cable, 

February 3, 2011; field director for an implementing partner, SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 247

279. Checchi and Co., Final Report Local

Governance and Community Development 

Program (LGCD) Evaluation, January 2009, 

p. 25; MSI, Community Development Program: 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 5–6.

280. MSI, Community Development Program: 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 5–6, 13; 

Rohullah Niazi, SIGAR interview, December 12, 

2016; DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, August 2011, 

pp. 3–4; Checchi and Co., Local Governance and 

Community Development Program (LGCD) 

Evaluation, January 2009, pp. 24–25, 28.

281. MSI, Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 17. The use of 

these cash-for-work activities was extensive. 

Cash-for-work projects registered 37,040 people 

for work across the country in just one month in 

March 2010. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “March 2010 

Update on Governance and Development Efforts 

in Afghanistan,” Kabul 001288 cable (declassified 

by State on April 28, 2017, at SIGAR’s request), 

April 13, 2010.

282. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 191.

283. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 194.

284. Chandrasekaran, Little America, pp. 37–39,

71–74; U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Scenesetter for 

CODEL McConnell,” Kabul 000803 cable, April 1, 

2009; Flynn, Pottinger, and Batchelor, Fixing 

Intel, p. 13. 

285. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016; Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, 

Rethinking the Civilian Surge, p. 9; State, 

“Winning in Afghanistan: A Message from 

Ambassador Eikenberry,” p. 3.

286. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 8, 2016; Crowley, SIGAR interview, 

August 3, 2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, November 10, 2016; military planner, 

SIGAR interview, November 3, 2016. 

287. State, “Winning in Afghanistan: A Message from

Ambassador Eikenberry,” p. 3.

288. Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, Rethinking the 

Civilian Surge, p. 73; Brown, The U.S. Surge 

and Afghan Local Governance, p. 14; senior 

USAID official, SIGAR interview, August 15, 

2016; civ-mil planner at Embassy Kabul, SIGAR 

interview, November 4, 2016.

289. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 10, 2016. There were also positive examples of civilian-military relationships and successful joint planning, such as on the Uruzgan 

PRT. However, as SIGAR has previously noted, 

these were contingent upon individual personalities, rather than formal structures. SIGAR, U.S. 

Civilian Uplift in Afghanistan is Progressing, 

SIGAR 11-2-AR, p. 14.

290. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016.

291. Former senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

February 2, 2017; military planner, SIGAR interview, November 3, 2016. 

292. Civ-mil planner at Embassy Kabul, SIGAR interview, November 4, 2016; senior USAID official,

SIGAR interview, August 15, 2016.

293. Andersen, Louise Riss, Afghanistan Lessons

Identified: 2001–2014, International Lessons 

from Integrated Approaches in Afghanistan, 

Part I, Danish Institute for International Studies, 

2016, p. 66; former USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1, 2017.

294. SIGAR and United States Institute of Peace, 

Lessons from the Coalition: International

Experiences from the Afghanistan 

Reconstruction, Conference Report, April 19–20, 

2016, p. 5; Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, Rethinking 

the Civilian Surge, p. 5. 

295. Stuart Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds? 

Examining the Relationship between Aid and 

Security in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, 

Feinstein International Center, 2011, p. 35; senior 

USAID official, SIGAR interview, November 10, 

2016. 

296. USAID official, SIGAR interview, December 21,

2016.

297. Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds in

Helmand, Feinstein International Center, 

April 2011, pp. 35–36; Suhrke, When More Is 

Less, p. 104.

298. William Hammink, USAID in Afghanistan: 

Challenges and Successes, USIP, December 2017, 

pp. 9–10; senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

November 18, 2016.

299. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

300. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 24, 2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, November 10, 2016.

301. Mark Moyar, Development in Afghanistan’s 

Counterinsurgency: A New Guide, ORBIS, 

March 2011, p. 16.

302. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 10, 2016.

303. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 24, 2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, November 10, 2016; Brown, The U.S. 

Surge and Afghan Local Governance, p. 14.

304. USAID, Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives, 

p. 12; Stabilization operations planner for RCEast, SIGAR interview, July 11, 2016.

305. Stabilization operations planner for RC-East, 

SIGAR interview, July 11, 2016.

306. USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016. Other sources contradict 

the idea that even entry criteria were well-defined and/or used in practice on ASI. A military 

report from Arghandab District in Kandahar 

in 2010 explains that OTI was willing to have 

ASI enter the district before the conditions 

set by other implementing partners had been 

met. These conditions were: sufficient security 

to allow freedom of movement for their local 

staff, the presence of a representative shura, 

and placing the Afghan government in the lead 

in planning and decisions as to which projects 

were implemented. Colonel Harry D. Tunnell, IV, 
248 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Memorandum, “Task Force Stryker Governance, 

Reconstruction, and Development: The First Six 

Months in Southern Afghanistan,” January 22, 

2010, p. 5. In fact a January 2010 draft of ASI 

entry criteria set a significantly lower, standard 

for “sufficient security,” including, among other 

criteria: “1) is there support by the military to operate in the area, and 2) will there be sustained 

access to the District Center? District Governor? 

Or other key Afghan leaders?” USAID, “Criteria 

for Engagement,” internal program document, 

January 2010. Along the same lines, a 2012 

monitoring and evaluation report of ASI calls 

into question whether OTI’s entry criteria were 

well defined or understood in the first place, recommending that entry and exit criteria for each 

area be well defined before entry and exit decisions are made. Altai Consulting, Afghanistan 

Stabilization Initiative Third Party Evaluation 

and Strategic Support: Final Report, June 2012, 

p. 33.

307. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program 

(ASOP): Final Report, prepared under contract 

for USAID, January 2012, p. 1.

308. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program 

(ASOP): Final Report, p. 5.

309. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program 

(ASOP): Final Report, pp. 3–4, 6.

310. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program 

(ASOP): Final Report, pp. 5, 30–31.

311. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program 

(ASOP): Final Report, p. 5.

312. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Update on Attacks Against 

Implementing Partners and Other Civilians

and Steps Being Taken,” Kabul 003482 cable, 

August 6, 2010.

313. USAID Office of Inspector General, Review

of Security Costs Charged to USAID Projects 

in Afghanistan, Memorandum to USAID 

Afghanistan, Review Report No. 5-306-10-002-S, 

September 29, 2010, p. 2.

314. U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 

Inquiry into the Role and Oversight of

Private Security Contractors in Afghanistan, 

September 28, 2010, pp. i, vi; Committee 

on Oversight and Government Reform 

Subcommittee on National Security and 

Foreign Affairs, Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and 

Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in 

Afghanistan, June 2010, pp. 2–3. 

315. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of 

ASI-East in Four Districts in Eastern

Afghanistan: Summary of Results from 

Khogyani, Marawara, Sayadabad, and Urgun 

Districts, prepared under contract for USAID, 

February 2012, p. 66. 

316. SIGAR, U.S. Civilian Uplift in Afghanistan 

is Progressing, SIGAR 11-2-AR, pp. 10, 11; 

Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, Rethinking the 

Civilian Surge, p. 43; Erickson et al., Lessons 

from the U.S. Civilian Surge in Afghanistan, 

2009–2014, Woodrow Wilson School of 

Public and International Affairs, January 2016, 

p. 18; senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

November 23, 2016. This challenge is not 

limited to Afghanistan. A recent review by the 

USAID Inspector General found that more than 

three-quarters of USAID staff surveyed about 

their work in Arab Spring countries reported 

that security and travel restrictions made monitoring their projects more difficult. USAID Office 

of Inspector General, Survey of USAID’s Arab 

Spring Challenges in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, 

and Yemen, Survey Report No. 8-100-15-001-S, 

April 30, 2015, p. 2.

317. USAID Office of Inspector General, Review of

Security Costs Charged to USAID Projects in 

Afghanistan, p. 4.

318. A Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future: 

Fixing the Crisis in Diplomatic Readiness:

Resources of U.S. Foreign Engagement, 

American Academy of Diplomacy and the Henry 

L. Stimson Center, October 2008, p. 3; CRS, 

Building an Interagency Cadre of National 

Security Professionals: Proposals, Recent 

Experience, and Issues for Congress, July 8, 

2008, p. 5; Erickson et al., Lessons from the U.S. 

Civilian Surge in Afghanistan, p. 7.

319. Erickson et al., Lessons from the U.S. Civilian

Surge in Afghanistan, pp. 6, 12.

320. GAO, Afghanistan: Improvements Needed 

to Strengthen Management of U.S. Civilian

Presence, GAO-12-285, p. 11. 

321. William Hammink, USAID in Afghanistan: 

Challenges and Successes, p. 9.

322. Erickson et al., Lessons from the U.S. Civilian

Surge in Afghanistan, pp. 13–14.

323. USAID official, SIGAR interview, October 7,

2016.

324. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

October 7, 2016.

325. John Acree, “Stabilization Success in 

Afghanistan: The Challenges Within,” PRISM, 

vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 109–110. 

326. Stephanie Kinney, “Interview of a USAID

Official in PRT Office,” USIP and Association for 

Diplomatic Studies and Training, September 11 

and 18, 2009, p. 17.

327. USAID official, SIGAR interview, December 21,

2016; SIGAR, U.S. Civilian Uplift in 

Afghanistan is Progressing, SIGAR 11-2-AR, 

p. 15.

328. Erickson et al., Lessons from the U.S. Civilian

Surge in Afghanistan, pp. 13–14.

329. Todd Greentree, “Bureaucracy Does its Thing,”

Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 36, no. 3 (2013), 

p. 342.

330. The majority of the people interviewed for the 

report were direct-hire State and USAID officials. Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, Rethinking the 

Civilian Surge, pp. 49, 55, 65. 

331. Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, Rethinking the 

Civilian Surge, p. 49.

332. USAID official, SIGAR interview, December 21,

2016; Erickson et al., Lessons from the U.S. 

Civilian Surge in Afghanistan, p. 20.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 249

333. UK Stabilisation Unit, Lessons on Lessons:

Why We Haven’t Learned Anything New for 68 

Years, 2014, p. 3.

334. Erickson et al., Lessons from the U.S. Civilian

Surge in Afghanistan, pp. 19–20; Viehe, Afshar, 

and Heela, Rethinking the Civilian Surge, 

p. 37. The problems created by short tours and 

frequent staff turnover were not unique to U.S. 

personnel. Both Danish and British reviews 

of lessons learned in Afghanistan have noted 

the same problem. Ball, Emmott, Greenwood, 

Murshed and Uribe, International Lessons from 

Integrated Approaches in Afghanistan, Part 

II, 2016, p. 55; UK Stabilisation Unit, Lessons on 

Lessons, p. 3.

335. Bob Crowley, SIGAR interview, August 3, 2016; 

SIGAR, U.S. Civilian Uplift in Afghanistan is 

Progressing, SIGAR 11-2-AR, p. 13.

336. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

October 7, 2016.

337. Civ-mil planner at Embassy Kabul, SIGAR interview, November 4, 2016.

338. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016; U.S. Embassy Kabul, “New 

Approach to the Delivery of U.S. Assistance 

to Afghanistan in Support of the President’s 

Strategy,” Kabul 001776 cable, July 8, 2009; 

SIGAR, U.S. Civilian Uplift in Afghanistan is 

Progressing, SIGAR 11-2-AR, pp. 14–15; USAID, 

“Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) West, RFP 306-10-

0034, Amendment No. 01,” p. 5.

339. U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 

Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to

Afghanistan: A Majority Staff Report, June 8, 

2011, p. 16.

340. Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq

and Afghanistan, Transforming Wartime 

Contracting: Controlling Costs, Reducing 

Risks, August 2011, p. 20.

341. USAID, Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives, 

p. 11.

342. The three main mechanisms employed by USAID 

to hire implementing partners are contracts,

cooperative agreements, and grants. These 

mechanisms are distinguished primarily by 

the amount of control or “involvement” that 

USAID exerts over their implementation after 

an award is made. In USAID’s own words, it 

“exercises a higher level of control over the 

partner” on a contract, “is substantially involved 

with the recipient” on a cooperative agreement, 

and “does not need substantial involvement” 

with a grant. The specific details of each award 

further determine USAID’s involvement in each 

program, in addition to the myriad of relevant 

federal regulations, primarily in the ADS, AIDAR, 

and FAR. USAID, “Grant and Contract Process,” 

last updated April 12, 2017, USAID website. 

343. Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, Rethinking the 

Civilian Surge, p. 22.

344. Acree, “Stabilization Success in Afghanistan: The 

Challenges Within,” p. 104.

345. Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, Rethinking the 

Civilian Surge, pp. 18, 46–47; SIGAR, U.S. 

Civilian Uplift in Afghanistan is Progressing, 

SIGAR 11-2-AR, p. 14. The same was true at 

lower levels of organization. For example, 

there was often only one USAID representative 

assigned to a military unit at the district level. 

USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016. According to a report by 

the Center for American Progress, a typical ratio 

was 4 civilians to 84 military personnel on PRTs. 

Viehe, Afshar, Heela, Rethinking the Civilian 

Surge, p. 5.

346. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Beyond 421-Civilian 

Staffing Requirements for Afghanistan,” Kabul

001762 cable, July 6, 2009; SIGAR, U.S. Civilian 

Uplift in Afghanistan is Progressing, SIGAR 

11-2-AR, pp. 3–4. Each senior civilian had a 

substantial number of staff at the regional platform level, or approximately 10–30. However, 

this number paled in comparison to the staff at 

the military regional command. DOD, Report 

on Progress Toward Security and Stability in 

Afghanistan, November 2010, p. 20. 

347. Erickson et al., Lessons from the U.S. Civilian

Surge in Afghanistan, 2009–2014, p. 19; 

Greentree, “Bureaucracy Does its Thing,” 

pp. 342–343.

348. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1,

2017. For a further exploration of the collocation and resulting partnership of the PRT and 

provincial officials, the collocation and natural 

partnership of the regional command and regional platform, and the power struggle between 

the two levels, see House of Commons Defence 

Committee, Operations in Afghanistan: Fourth 

Report of Session 2010–2012, Vol. 1, electronic 

pp. 96–97.

349. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 18, 2016.

350. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016.

351. The White House, National Security

Presidential Directive/NSPD-44, December 7, 

2005, p. 4.

352. U.S. Department of State and Broadcasting 

Board of Governors Office of Inspector

General, Inspection of the Bureau of Conflict 

and Stabilization Operations, ISP-I-14-06, 

March 2014, p. 2; State, “Civilian Response 

Operations,” July 14, 2008, retrieved from the 

State Department website archive.

353. The eight participating agencies were USAID, 

DOD, Department of Homeland Security, 

Department of Health and Human Services, 

Department of the Treasury, Department of 

Justice, Department of Commerce, and the 

Department of Agriculture. USAID, Building the 

Civilian Response Corps (CRC), n.d., p. 3.

354. John E. Herbst, “Stabilization and 

Reconstruction Operations: Learning from

the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) 

Experience,” testimony before the House 

Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and 

Investigations, October 30, 2007, pp. 5–6. USAID, 
250 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Building the Civilian Response Corps (CRC), 

p. 5.

355. Michael Miklaucic, SIGAR interview, February 1,

2017. For more information on the military reserve, see the Uniformed Services Employment 

and Reemployment Rights Act, Pub. L. No. 103-

353 (1994).

356. Miklaucic, SIGAR interview, February 1, 2017;

senior State Department official, SIGAR interview, February 1, 2017.

357. Senior State Department official, SIGAR interview, February 1, 2017.

358. Miklaucic, SIGAR interview, February 1, 2017;

senior State Department official, SIGAR interview, February 1, 2017.

359. State Department official, SIGAR interview,

January 12, 2017; senior State Department official, SIGAR interview, February 1, 2017.

360. U.S. Department of State and Broadcasting 

Board of Governors Office of Inspector

General, Inspection of the Bureau of Conflict 

and Stabilization Operations, ISP-I-14-06, 

March 2014, p. 5; USAID Office of Inspector 

General, Survey of USAID’s Office of Transition 

Initiatives, Memorandum to Acting Director, 

DCHA/OTI, October 13, 2006, p. 1.

361. SIGAR analysis of data provided by USAID in 

response to SIGAR data call, January 18, 2018.

362. Acree, “Stabilization Success in Afghanistan: The 

Challenges Within,” p. 108; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, November 10, 2016; USAID 

official, SIGAR interview, October 7, 2016; senior 

USAID official, SIGAR interview, August 15, 

2016.

363. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016; Gordon, Winning Hearts and 

Minds in Helmand, 2011, p. 35.

364. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

October 7, 2016.

365. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

366. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 10, 2016.

367. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016; SIGAR, Quarterly Report to 

the United States Congress, April 30, 2014, p. 5; 

Joint Staff, Joint and Coalition Operational 

Analysis (JCOA), Operationalizing Counter/

Anti-Corruption Study, February 28, 2014, pp. 1, 

12.

368. Acree, “Stabilization Success in Afghanistan: The 

Challenges Within,” p. 102.

369. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016.

370. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 109.

371. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, 

“U.S. Military Dismayed by Delays in 3 Key 

Development Projects in Afghanistan,” 

Washington Post, April 28, 2011. $10 million of 

this AVIPA money was spent in a single district 

in Helmand over just four to five months. U.S. 

Embassy Kabul, “The Fight for Marjah is Just 

Beginning,” Kabul 000763 cable (declassified 

by State on April 28, 2017, at SIGAR’s request), 

March 3, 2010.

372. The White House, White Paper of the

Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. 

Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, 

March 27, 2009, p. 2; USAID stabilization official, 

SIGAR interview, October 7, 2016.

373. USAID official, SIGAR interview, October 7,

2016.

374. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Alikozai Tribal Elders

Meet with Ambassador Crocker, Seek Further 

U.S. Support for Kandahar,” Kabul 000989 cable, 

May 4, 2012.

375. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 24, 2016.

376. Regional Command East (RC-E), Stability

Operations Reference Book, March 31, 2010, 

p. 10; Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts 

and Minds, p. 5. Academic research conducted 

across eight conflict-affected countries found 

that when using service delivery to improve 

perceptions of governance, more important 

than what is delivered is that the services be 

delivered through a consultative process with 

local communities. G. Sturge, R. Mallett, J. 

Hagen-Zanker, and R. Slater, Tracking livelihoods, service delivery and governance: panel 

survey findings, Secure Livelihoods Research 

Consortium, June 2017, pp. i, ix.

377. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation

of USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative 

in Afghanistan, p. 18; Checchi and Co., Final 

Report Local Governance and Community 

Development Program (LGCD) Evaluation, 

January 2009, p. 10.

378. RC-E, Stability Operations Reference Book, 

p. 10.

379. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, pp. 6–7.

380. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 6.

381. Dexter Filkins, “Afghan Offensive Is New War

Model,” New York Times, February 12, 2010.

382. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 138. Marjah

has since become a proper district in central 

Helmand Province.

383. Kaplan, The Insurgents, p. 330.

384. Jeffrey Dressler, Counterinsurgency in 

Helmand: Progress and Remaining Challenges, 

Institute for the Study of War, January 2011, 

pp. 10–12.

385. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016; Embassy Kabul and 

USFOR-A, Integrated Civilian-Military 

Campaign Plan, 2009, p. 22; Chandrasekaran, 

Little America, p. 124; Kaplan, The Insurgents, 

p. 331.

386. Kaplan, The Insurgents, pp. 330–331; Dexter

Filkins, “Afghan Offensive Is New War Model,” 

New York Times, February 12, 2010.

387. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 143; Brown,

The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local Governance,

p. 6; Kaplan, The Insurgents, pp. 331–332.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 251

388. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 15, 2016.

389. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, November 18, 2016.

390. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016.

391. Chandrasekaran, Little America, pp. 164–166;

Coll, Directorate S, pp. 397, 491.

392. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 10, 2016; Brown, The U.S. Surge and 

Afghan Local Governance, p. 14. The British 

intervention in Helmand has been similarly 

criticized. Stuart Gordon’s study has this to say 

about DFID’s role in Helmand: “It is possible to 

criticize the . . . nature of the DFID Afghanistan 

program as essentially too technocratic and apolitical. . . . The absence of an effective strategic 

conflict analysis that cast light on the distorting 

effects of the political economy of conflict, particularly within Afghanistan’s Pashtun provinces, 

reduced the imperative to focus more on issues 

of political legitimacy and governance at the 

sub-national level.” Gordon, Winning Hearts 

and Minds in Helmand, pp. 34–35.

393. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 10, 2016.

394. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016.

395. Adam Smith International, Diagnostic of the

District Delivery Program, November 3, 2010, 

p. 6. 

396. Adam Smith International, Diagnostic of the

District Delivery Program, p. 6; AECOM, 

Afghanistan Social Outreach Program (ASOP): 

Final Report, pp. 1, 3, 7.

397. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Nawa: Assassinations 

Cast a Pall Over Recent Gains,” Kabul 003727

cable (declassified by State on April 28, 2017, 

at SIGAR’s request), November 18, 2009; Rod 

Nordland, “Taliban Aim at Officials in a Wave of 

Killings,” New York Times, June 10, 2010, p. 5; 

Dawood Azami, “Kandahar: Assassination capital 

of Afghanistan,” BBC World Service, October 29, 

2012, p. 5.

398. Rod Nordland, “Taliban Aim at Officials in a

Wave of Killings,” New York Times, June 10, 

2010; Michael Hastings, “King David’s War,” 

Rolling Stone, February 2, 2011, p. 11.

399. Azami, “Kandahar: Assassination capital 

of Afghanistan,” p. 4; U.S. Embassy Kabul,

“Afghanistan: The Challenge of Sub-National 

Governance, Part 2: Provincial and District Level 

Constraints,” Kabul 002279 cable, June 10, 2010.

400. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “March 2010 Update 

on Governance and Development Efforts in

Afghanistan,” Kabul 001288 cable (declassified 

by State on April 28, 2017, at SIGAR’s request), 

April 13, 2010. 

401. Sibghatullah, SIGAR interview, December 5,

2016.

402. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Afghanistan: The 

Challenge of Sub-National Governance, Part 2:

Provincial and District Level Constraints,” Kabul 

002279 cable, June 10, 2010; Ghulam Haider, 

SIGAR interview, January 26, 2017. 

403. Barna Karimi, SIGAR interview, January 16,

2017. 

404. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Afghanistan: The 

Challenge of Sub-National Governance, Part 2,”

Kabul 002279 cable; Miakhel, SIGAR interview, 

February 7, 2017; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, November 23, 2016; former USAID 

official, SIGAR interview, June 1, 2017.

405. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 6.

406. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 15, 2016; Checchi and Co., 

Performance Evaluation: District Delivery 

Program (DDP), prepared under contract for 

USAID, April 9, 2012, pp. 13, 21.

407. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 15, 2016.

408. Checchi and Co., Performance Evaluation:

District Delivery Program (DDP), pp. 18, 23.

409. Carl Forsberg, Counterinsurgency in

Kandahar: Evaluating the 2010 Hamkari 

Campaign, Institute for the Study of War, 

December 2010, pp. 13, 17, 36, 38.

410. Task Force Stryker, Interim Report-The First 

Six Months: Governance, Reconstruction, 

and Development, January 1, 2010, pp. 2–3, 12; 

Colonel Harry D. Tunnell IV, Memorandum, Task 

Force Stryker Governance, Reconstruction, 

and Development: The First Six Months in 

Southern Afghanistan, January 22, 2010, pp. 2, 

4, 7; Chandrasekaran, Little America, pp. 153–

155, 157–159; USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

November 15, 2017; Chretien, SIGAR interview, 

July 22, 2016.

411. Chretien, SIGAR interview, July 22, 2016.

412. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 161.

413. Crowley, SIGAR interview, August 3, 2016; 

former USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

October 18, 2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, October 24, 2016.

414. Carl Forsberg, Politics and Power in Kandahar, 

Institute for the Study of War, April 2010, 

p. 27; Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds 

in Helmand, pp. 3–4; Matthieu Aikins, “Last 

Stand in Kandahar,” The Walrus, pp. 11, 16; U.S. 

Embassy Kabul, “Alikozai Tribal Elders Meet 

with Ambassador Crocker,” Kabul 000989 cable; 

Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance, 

p. 227.

415. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Alikozai Tribal Elders

Meet with Ambassador Crocker,” Kabul 000989 

cable; Andrew Wilder and Stuart Gordon, 

“Money Can’t Buy America Love,” Foreign 

Policy, December 1, 2009; Fishstein and Wilder, 

Winning Hearts and Minds, pp. 29–30.

416. Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds in

Helmand, p. 6; DAI, Preliminary Impact 

Assessment of ASI-East in Four Districts in 

Eastern Afghanistan, p. 84.

417. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 30.
252 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

418. Forsberg, Politics and Power in Kandahar, 

April 2010, p. 22; Fishstein and Wilder, Winning 

Hearts and Minds, p. 30. According to Anand 

Gopal, in one well-known example in Kandahar’s 

Maiwand District, ISAF was duped into killing 

what turned out to be allies of the government 

and coalition, alienating the two largest tribes 

in the area. Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among 

the Living: America, the Taliban, and the 

War Through Afghan Eyes (New York, NY: 

Metropolitan Books), pp. 103–107, 110–115.

419. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 3; Forsberg, Politics and Power 

in Kandahar, p. 6; SIGAR, Corruption in 

Conflict: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in 

Afghanistan, SIGAR 16-58-LL, September 2016, 

p. 11; Wilder and Gordon, “Money Can’t Buy 

America Love.” This problem is in no way unique 

to Afghanistan. The Special Inspector General 

for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) found that that 

country’s “institutions of government were undermined by the widespread association of political elites with corrupt activities.” SIGIR, Hard 

Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, 

February 2, 2009, p. 211.

420. Radha Iyengar, Jacob Shapiro, and Stephen

Hegarty, Lessons Learned from Stabilization 

Initiatives in Afghanistan: A Systematic 

Review of Existing Research, RAND working 

paper, July 2017, p. 28. Another study conducted 

by Tufts University’s Feinstein International 

Center found that while respondents did report 

some short-term benefits of aid projects, “not 

only were projects not winning people over 

to the government side, but perceptions of 

the misuse and abuse of aid resources were 

in many cases fueling the growing distrust of 

the government, creating enemies, or at least 

generating skepticism regarding the role of the 

government and aid agencies.” Fishstein and 

Wilder, Winning Hearts and Minds, p. 3. Finally 

a report by the U.S. military found that “corruption directly threatens the validity and legitimacy 

of the Afghan state.” JCOA, Operationalizing 

Counter/Anti-Corruption Study, p. 1.

421. Lamb and Shawn, Political Governance and

Strategy in Afghanistan, p. 28; UN Office on 

Drugs and Crime, Corruption in Afghanistan: 

Bribery as Reported by the Victims, 

January 2010, p. 4.

422. Andersen, Afghanistan Lessons Identified: 

2001–2014, Part I, p. 36.

423. U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 

Inquiry into the Role and Oversight of

Private Security Contractors in Afghanistan, 

September 28, 2010, p. i; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, August 15, 2016.

424. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1,

2017; DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment 

of ASI-East in Four Districts in Eastern 

Afghanistan, p. 66; Aram Roston, “How the U.S. 

Funds the Taliban,” Nation, November 11, 2009, 

p. 12; Committee on Oversight and Government 

Reform Subcommittee on National Security 

and Foreign Affairs, Warlord, Inc., p. 37–39; 

USAID Office of Inspector General, Review of 

Security Costs Charged to USAID Projects in 

Afghanistan, p. 4; Lamb and Shawn, Political 

Governance and Strategy in Afghanistan, p. 28.

425. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 2. A Danish government-funded 

report on lessons learned in Afghanistan came to 

the same conclusion: “The idea that the civilian 

development organisations could somehow be 

flown in to build and hold areas that the military 

had cleared was fundamentally flawed and disregarded the fact that aid organisations work in 

a process-related manner with local ownership 

and capacity building.” Andersen, Afghanistan: 

Lessons Identified 2001–2014, Part I, p. 66.

426. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 349.

427. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 348–349, 358–361.

428. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 18, 2016.

429. Eikenberry, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency

Doctrine in Afghanistan,” pp. 61, 64.

430. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 16, 2016. For a similar account of 

these turf wars between NSC staff and the 

agencies involved, see Coll, Directorate S, 

pp. 510–512.

431. “Lisbon Summit Declaration,” NATO,

November 20, 2010; Peter Baker and Rod 

Norland, “U.S. Plan Envisions Path to Ending 

Afghan Combat,” New York Times, November 14, 

2010.

432. Allen, SIGAR interview, November 2, 2016.

433. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Update on Our New 

Governance Orientation: Progress Achieved and

Next Steps,” Kabul 002674 cable, May 7, 2011. 

434. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Implementing a New 

Governance Orientation,” Kabul 000742 cable,

February 8, 2011; former USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, November 15, 2016.

435. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Refining our Governance 

Orientation in Light of Transition: Strengthening 

Afghan Capacity to Spend Resources Effectively 

and Accountably Through Existing Systems 

and Institutions, at Three Key Levels of 

Government,” Kabul 004017 cable, December 16, 

2010.

436. “Afghanistan: The London Conference: Afghan 

Leadership, Regional Cooperation, International

Partnership,” communiqué of the London 

Conference, January 28, 2010, p. 5.

437. Sibghatullah, SIGAR interview, December 5,

2016.

438. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Placing Governance and 

Development on a Sustainable Footing,” Kabul

001555 cable, May 8, 2011; former USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, November 15, 2016.

439. Rajiv Shah, Administrator’s Stabilization 

Guidance, memorandum, January 2011, pp. 1–3.

440. USAID, Administrator’s Sustainability

Guidance for USAID in Afghanistan, June 2011, 

p. 1.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 253

441. White House Office of the Press Secretary,

“Remarks by the President on the Way Forward 

in Afghanistan,” June 22, 2011, p. 2.

442. Secretary Hillary Clinton, testimony before the 

Senate Foreign Relations, hearing on “Evaluating

Goals and Progress in Afghanistan and 

Pakistan,” June 23, 2011, p. 3.

443. Acree, “Stabilization Success in Afghanistan: The 

Challenges Within,” pp. 116–117; senior USAID 

official, SIGAR interview, November 10, 2016.

444. Acree, “Stabilization Success in Afghanistan: The 

Challenges Within,” pp. 102–103.

445. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016.

446. Senior State Department official, email to 

SIGAR, February 7, 2017.

447. Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, Rethinking the 

Civilian Surge, p. 30.

448. U.S. Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, CivilMilitary Strategy Framework, March 2012, p. 4.

449. Robert D. Lamb and Brooke Shawn, “Is the 

Revised COIN Manual Backed by Political Will?” 

CSIS, February 6, 2014.

450. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Implementing a New 

Governance Orientation,” Kabul 000742 cable,

February 8, 2011.

451. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 10, 2016.

452. USAID, “Kandahar Food Zone,” awarded to 

IRD, July 13, 2013, Cooperative Agreement

No. AID-306-A-13-00008; Social Impact, 

Final Performance Evaluation of USAID/

OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, p. ii.

453. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 7. The U.S. government’s goal 

circa 2010 had been much more limited: to 

create the appearance of “visible, effective, and 

honest governance,” by implementing projects to 

fill the gap left by the Afghan government. U.S. 

Embassy Kabul, “Afghanistan Scenesetter for 

CODEL Inouye,” Kabul 003177 cable, October 8, 

2009.

454. Chandrasekaran, “U.S. Military Dismayed 

by Delays in 3 Key Development Projects in

Afghanistan;” USAID, “Stability in Key Areas 

(SIKA) West,” awarded to AECOM International 

Development, Contract No. AID-306-C-12-00004, 

January 29, 2012; USAID, “Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA) East,” awarded to AECOM 

International Development, Contract No. 

AID-306-C-12-00002, December 7, 2011; USAID, 

“Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) North,” awarded 

to Development Alternatives, Inc., Contract No. 

AID-306-C-12-00003, March 14, 2012; USAID, 

“Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) South,” awarded 

to AECOM International Development, Contract 

No. AID-307-C-12-00005, April 10, 2012.

455. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016; MSI, Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA) Program Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 36. 

456. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 1; DAI, Local 

Governance and Community Development: 

Final Report, August 2011, p. xii; stabilization 

implementing partner deputy chief of party, 

SIGAR interview, August 30, 2016. To a more 

limited degree, the SIKAs were also designed 

to link the district to the provincial level. For 

example the SIKA-W contract contains the 

following language: “SIKA-West should focus on 

institutional development of District Entities in 

the long term while helping Provincial governments, especially relevant line departments such 

as the Department of Rural Rehabilitation and 

Development (RRD) and other key provincial 

line departments deliver specific outcomes in the 

short term to support them.” USAID, “Stability in 

Key Areas (SIKA) West,” p. 15.

457. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 7–9, 20, 27.

458. CTC and USAID, District Stability Framework, 

p. 5; SIGAR, USAID Spent Almost $400 Million, 

SIGAR 12-8-AR, p. 8. 

459. MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan, FY 2012–2015, 

June 18, 2013, p. 1.

460. U.S. Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, CivilMilitary Strategic Framework, March 2012, 

p. 4; U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Implementing a New 

Governance Orientation,” Kabul 000742 cable, 

February 8, 2011.

461. MSI, Community Outreach and Engagement, 

pp. 5, 18–19.

462. Stabilization implementing partner deputy chief 

of party, SIGAR interview, August 30, 2016; Karl 

McQuillan, SIGAR interview, July 21, 2016.

463. McQuillan, SIGAR interview, July 21, 2016; U.S.

Embassy Kabul, “Lessons Learned from District 

Delivery Program Assessments,” Kabul 001420 

cable, April 10, 2010; Brown, The U.S. Surge and 

Afghan Local Governance, p. 7.

464. Karimi, SIGAR interview, January 16, 2017.

465. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 7; Brown, Rethinking Afghan 

Local Governance Aid After Transition, pp. 5–7.

466. Stabilization implementing partner deputy chief 

of party, SIGAR interview, August 30, 2016.

467. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 7; Checchi and Co., Final 

Report Local Governance and Community 

Development Program (LGCD) Evaluation, 

January 2009, p. 15.

468. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, pp. 7–8. Under the broader umbrella of subnational governance reform, USAID 

and other actors have supported a number of 

programs dating back more than a decade to 

increase the role of the provinces in budgeting. 

Aarya Nijat et al., Subnational Governance in 

Afghanistan, AREU, July 2016, p. 2; The Asia 

Foundation, An Assessment of Sub-National 

Governance in Afghanistan, April 2007, p. 43. 

That such efforts were ongoing as recently as 

2017 demonstrates they have yet to achieve their 

goals. Haidarshah Omid, “Provincial Budget 
254 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Policy Rolled Out in Four Ministries,” Tolo News, 

April 18, 2017.

469. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 15, 2016. In fact, program evaluations 

for ATI in 2005 and LGCD in 2009 had already 

come to the same conclusion about the need 

to focus first on building functionality at the 

provincial level. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/

OTI Afghanistan Program: Final Evaluation, 

August 15, 2005, p. 25; Checchi and Co., Final 

Report Local Governance and Community 

Development Program (LGCD) Evaluation, 

January 2009, p. 15. 

470. Checchi and Co., Performance Evaluation:

District Delivery Program (DDP), p. 12; 

U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Update on Our New 

Governance Orientation: Progress Achieved 

and Next Steps,” Kabul 002674 cable, May 7, 

2011; USAID suspended spending on DDP in 

March 2012 before cancelling the program altogether. Adam Smith International, Diagnostic 

of the District Delivery Program, p. 1; Tamas, 

SIGAR interview, July 13, 2016. 

471. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016.

472. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation

of USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative 

in Afghanistan, p. 6; MSI, Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA) Program Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 2. 

473. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016.

474. Gulla Jan Ahmadzai, SIGAR interview,

February 15, 2017.

475. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, pp. 9–10.

476. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 2; USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview, September 9, 

2016.

477. Caerus Associates, The Stability Analysis

Methodology in Afghanistan: an Evaluation 

of Best Practices & a Recommended Method–

Analytical Report, prepared under contract 

for USAID, October 6, 2013, p. 15; MSI, 

Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 2; Social Impact, 

Final Performance Evaluation of USAID/

OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, p. vi.

478. MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan Update, FY

2012–2015, May 2014, MISTI, p. 16.

479. MSI, Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, pp. 1, 23.

480. Allen, SIGAR interview, November 2, 2016.

481. State, “Reflections on Afghanistan: Lessons for 

Future Conflict and Stabilization Operations,”

p. 2.

482. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 2.

483. CRS, Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance,

Security, and U.S. Policy,” RL30588, 

December 17, 2017, p. 35; Viehe, Afshar, and 

Heela, Rethinking the Civilian Surge, p. 8; U.S. 

Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, Civil-Military 

Strategic Framework, Revision 2, August 2013, 

p. 4; SIGAR and USIP, Report on International 

Symposium on Monitoring and Management 

in Insecure Environments: Applying Best 

Practices to Afghanistan, June 18, 2014, p. 7. 

For example, the implementing partner expatriates managing SIKA South were relocated to 

Kabul from Kandahar halfway into the contract due to deteriorating security there. MSI, 

Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 7. In one CDP case, 

it was unclear to program evaluators whether 

site visits to certain projects were taking place 

at all. MSI, Community Development Program: 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 23.

484. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 10; 

USAID, Afghanistan: Performance Management 

Plan, Afghanistan Implementation Plan for 

Transition 2015–2018, August 24, 2015, p. 26.

485. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 2.

486. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 10; 

MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan, FY 2012–2015, 

June 18, 2013, p. 10. 

487. U.S. Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, CivilMilitary Strategic Framework, March 2012, 

p. 4; U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Implementing a New 

Governance Orientation,” Kabul 000742 cable, 

February 8, 2011.

488. FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 2006, chapter 1,

p. 27. 

489. The SIKA contracts instructed the programs to 

work through “District Entities,” listing CDCs,

DDAs, and ASOP DCCs as potential partners, 

but left it up to each implementing partner to 

determine which of these to engage with. See, 

for example, USAID, “Stability in Key Areas 

(SIKA) East,” pp. 15, 19. As a result, each program approached these partnerships differently. 

They also left it up to the implementing partners 

to determine what processes they would use to 

engage these entities, calling for the programs to 

“work within the already established frameworks of the District Entities to build GIROA 

capacity” and instructing them that their work 

should “not result in parallel institutions or processes.” Nevertheless, the implementing partners 

found the existing structures were not suitable 

for all of their needs and created new structures. 

For example, SIKA-East added additional stakeholders to the DDAs, creating what it called the 

DDA+. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA)-East 

Mid-Term Performance Evaluation, prepared 

under contract for USAID, November 2014, 

pp. 32, 38. Similarly, CCI created project shuras, 

cohesion jirgas, and project oversight committees as means of engaging with communities. 

Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation 

of USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 255

in Afghanistan, prepared under contract for 

USAID, May 15, 2014, p. 9.

490. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

October 7, 2016.

491. MSI, Community Cohesion Initiative: Midterm Evaluation Report, p. 15; Niazi, SIGAR

interview, December 12, 2016.

492. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, September 2015, 

p. 27; Frances Z. Brown, email to SIGAR, 

November 8, 2017. Sometimes disregarding the 

wishes of the Afghan government had disastrous results, such as when all of the 69 tractors 

purchased by AVIPA and distributed in Kandahar 

against the wishes of the provincial governor 

went missing. SIGAR, Alert 13-2, June 27, 2013, 

p. 3; Wesa, SIGAR interview, January 7, 2017. 

493. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 27.

494. According to John Acree, “As the RC-S [civilian 

platform] representative began his presentation entitled ‘Region Stabilization Approach: 

Supporting Civilian Stabilization Resources 

Spring and Summer 2011,’ the Assistant Chief 

of Mission abruptly interrupted the presenter, 

thanked him for his hard work, and summarily stopped the discussion regarding the RC-S 

stabilization plan. The ambassador then stated 

to the audience that stabilization was finished 

and that we were now working toward transition. After the conference, the RC-S presenter 

expressed his astonishment at this news, adding 

that his commander refused to recognize or even 

utter the term transition.” Acree, “Stabilization 

Success in Afghanistan: The Challenges Within,” 

p. 114.

495. Stabilization implementing partner chief of party,

SIGAR interview, August 15, 2016.

496. Caerus Associates, The Stability Analysis

Methodology in Afghanistan, pp. 4–5; MSI, 

USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan Update, FY 

2012–2015, May 2014, p. 19.

497. MSI, Kandahar Food Zone: Mid-Term

Performance Evaluation, prepared under contract for USAID, March 2015, p. 7.

498. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 10, 2016.

499. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1,

2017; Caerus Associates, The Stability Analysis 

Methodology in Afghanistan, p. 23; USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview, September 9, 

2016. NATO had agreed that the transition to 

Afghan leadership would be complete by 2014 

at its 2010 summit in Lisbon. CRS, Afghanistan: 

Post-Taliban Governance, Security, and U.S. 

Policy, RL30588, December 17, 2017, p. 26.

500. Stabilization implementing partner deputy chief 

of party, SIGAR interview, August 30, 2016.

501. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation of

USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, p. iii.

502. Resilience was defined by CCI as “the capabilities of groups or communities to cope with

internal or external stresses and disturbances 

as a result of social, political and environmental change.” CCI defined cohesion as a community’s “ability to resolve issues, determine 

and pursue common goals, and communicate 

effectively within the community and with 

various government entities.” Social Impact, 

Final Performance Evaluation of USAID/

OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, pp. 11, 42.

503. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

September 9, 2016.

504. USAID, Community Cohesion Initiative: Final 

Report, 2015, p. 3.

505. USAID official, SIGAR interview, August 12,

2016.

506. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 24, 2016.

507. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation of

USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, p. 14.

508. Forbes, “The Significance of Taliban Shari`a

Courts in Afghanistan,” CTC Sentinel, vol. 6. 

no. 5, May 2013, pp. 14–15; Frank Ledwidge, 

“Justice and Counter-Insurgency in Afghanistan: 

a Missing Link,” RUSI Journal, vol. 154, no. 

1, March 26, 2009, pp. 6–7; Gordon, Winning 

Hearts and Minds in Helmand, p. 46; 

Hedayatullah Babakarkheil, SIGAR interview, 

December 29, 2016.

509. USAID, Counter-Insurgency Programming: A

Meta Evaluation, May 2010, p. 39.

510. USAID, Community Cohesion Initiative: Final 

Report, p. 8.

511. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program 

(ASOP): Final Report, pp. 3–4, 7, 22.

512. Gulab Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017;

Babakarkheil, SIGAR interview, December 29, 

2016.

513. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program 

(ASOP): Final Report, pp. 4, 6, 22.

514. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 20.

515. MSI, Stability in Key Areas - North: Mid-Term

Performance Evaluation, prepared under contract for USAID, July 17, 2014, pp. 3, 34.

516. MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan: 

Performance Management Plan, Fiscal Years 

2012–2015, USAID, June 18, 2013, p. 5. A performance management plan is “a roadmap for monitoring, evaluation, and learning from program 

performance.” USAID, “PMP – Performance 

Management Plan,” USAID Project Starter website.

517. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Using Cash for Work to

Support Stabilization and Governance Objectives 

in Southern Afghanistan,” Kabul 000666 cable, 

February 3, 2011.

518. MSI, Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, pp. 2, 4; USAID, 

“Factsheet: Community Development Project,” 

December 2012. 

519. AECOM, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) East 

Final Report, prepared under contract for 
256 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

USAID, 2015, pp. ix, 5, 14; MSI, Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA) North Midterm Performance 

Evaluation, prepared under contract for USAID, 

July 17, 2014, pp. 6, 18.

520. Government of the Islamic Republic of 

Afghanistan and Government of the United

States of America, “Memorandum of 

Understanding: Supporting the Jobs for Peace 

Process,” December 17, 2015, pp. 1–2.

521. Andersen, Afghanistan Lessons Identified: 

2001–2014, Part I, p. 45.

522. Charles Johnson, Jr., testimony before the

Senate Subcommittee on State, Foreign 

Operations, and Related Programs, Committee 

on Appropriations, hearing on “Afghanistan 

Development: USAID Continues to Face 

Challenges in Managing and Overseeing U.S. 

Development Assistance Programs,” GAO-10-

932T, p. 8.

523. U.S. Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, CivilMilitary Strategy Framework, March 2012, p. 4.

524. SIGAR, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

Programs: After 16 Months and $47 Million

Spent, USAID Had Not Met Essential Program 

Objectives, SIGAR 13-16-AR, July 2013, p. 3. 

Despite the requirement that the SIKAs all use 

the Kandahar Model, in reality their adoption 

of it was mixed. Rather than working through 

the existing DDA structure, each of the SIKAs 

took a different approach to working with the 

Afghan government, including working with an 

expanded version of the DDA, referred to as the 

DDA+. SIGAR, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

Programs: After 16 Months and $47 Million 

Spent, USAID Had Not Met Essential Program 

Objectives, SIGAR 13-16-AR, July 2013, p. 10; 

MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA)-East: MidTerm Evaluation, prepared under contract with 

USAID, November 2014, pp. 25, 32, 38. Further, 

CCI, which was not contractually required to 

use the Kandahar Model, used aspects of it, such 

as direct implementation. USAID, Community 

Cohesion Initiative: Annual Report, 

October 2013–September 2014, prepared under 

contract for USAID, p. 9.

525. Michael Shurkin, Subnational Governance

in Afghanistan, RAND National Defense 

Institute, p. 11; Andrew Beath, Fontini 

Christia, and Ruben Enikolopov; “The 

National Solidarity Programme: Assessing the 

Effects of Community-Driven Development 

in Afghanistan,” International Peacekeeping, 

August 6, 2015, p. 302.

526. SIGAR, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

Programs, SIGAR 13-16-AR, p. 3; MSI, Stability 

in Key Areas-West: Mid-Term Evaluation, prepared under contract for USAID, March 28, 2014, 

pp. 19–20.

527. USAID, “Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) North,” 

awarded to DAI, AID- 306-C-12-00003, March 14,

2012, p. 16; USAID, “Stability in Key Areas 

(SIKA) West,” p. 14; USAID, “Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA) East,” p. 18; USAID, “Stability in 

Key Areas (SIKA) South,” pp. 18–19.

528. SIGAR, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

Programs, SIGAR 13-16-AR, p. ii.

529. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Governor Wesa Updated

on Kandahar Food Zone Planning,” Kabul 

000878 cable, March 4, 2013; DAI, Final Report 

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative–East 

(ASI-EAST), prepared under contract for 

USAID, September 2012, p. 30; DAI, “Use of 

Politically Leveraged Short-Term Employment 

Projects,” p. 3; Tooryalai Wesa, SIGAR interview, 

January 7, 2017.

530. DAI, “Use of Politically Leveraged Short-Term

Employment Projects,” pp. 3–5.

531. Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize, Jacomina P. de 

Regt, Stephen Spector, Local and Community 

Driven Development: Moving to Scale in Theory 

and Practice, World Bank, 2010, pp. 11, 14, 32, 

48, 218.

532. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

pp. 27–28.

533. Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds in

Helmand, p. 53; SIGAR, Stability in Key Areas 

(SIKA) Programs, SIGAR 13-16-AR, p. 10; Social 

Impact, Final Performance Evaluation of 

USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, pp. vii, 30.

534. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Using Cash for Work to

Support Stabilization and Governance Objectives 

in Southern Afghanistan,” Kabul 000666 cable, 

February 3, 2011.

535. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 18.

536. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 31. 

537. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5: 

September 28-November 3, 2014, prepared under contract for USAID, Apr. 28, 2015, pp. 325–

326. 

538. Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017.

539. Ashraf Nasiri, SIGAR interview, December 11,

2016.

540. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 

5, pp. 326; MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

Program Final Performance Evaluation, 

pp. 4–5.

541. DAI, “Use of Politically Leveraged Short-Term

Employment Projects,” pp. 2–3; Forsberg, 

Politics and Power in Kandahar, pp. 7, 27; U.S. 

Embassy Kabul, “Alikozai Tribal Elders Meet 

with Ambassador Crocker,” Kabul 000989 cable.

542. SIGAR, Corruption in Conflict, pp. 19–20; senior

USAID official, December 11, 2015; Lamb and 

Shawn, Political Governance and Strategy 

in Afghanistan, p. 28; Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017; Wesa, SIGAR interview, 

January 7, 2017.

543. Lamb and Shawn, Political Governance and

Strategy in Afghanistan, p. 28.

544. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 28,

2016; Haider, SIGAR interview, January 26, 2017.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 257

545. Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds in

Helmand, p. 5. 

546. Wesa, SIGAR interview, January 7, 2017; former 

USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1, 2017.

547. Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017.

548. Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds in

Helmand, pp. 44–45.

549. DAI, “Use of Politically Leveraged Short-Term

Employment Projects,” pp. 1–4. 

550. MSI, Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 15. 

551. Forsberg, Politics and Power in Kandahar, 

p. 27.

552. Saad Mustafa, Tobias Bock, and Mark Pyman,

“Fighting Corruption in Conflict Areas,” in 

Effective Civil-Military Interaction in Peace 

Operations: Theory and Practice, edited by 

Gerard Lucius and Sebastian Rietjens, (The 

Hague: Springer, 2016), p. 211; Jean-Christophe 

Boucher and Kim Richard Nossal, The Politics of 

War: Canada’s Afghanistan Mission, 2001–

2014 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017), p. 34.

553. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Using Cash for Work,”

Kabul 000666 cable; MSI, Community 

Development Program: Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 3.

554. DAI, “Use of Politically Leveraged Short-Term

Employment Projects,” p. 3.

555. MSI, Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 3.

556. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

June 1, 2017; DAI, Final Report Afghanistan 

Stabilization Initiative – East (ASI-EAST), 

p. 43; DAI, “Use of Politically Leveraged ShortTerm Employment Projects,” p. 4.

557. Senior USAID official, December 11, 2015.

558. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 24.

559. USAID, Community Cohesion Initiative: 

Annual Report October 2013–September 2014, 

p. 1; USAID, Community Cohesion Initiative: 

Final Report, p. 11; MSI, Community Outreach 

and Engagement, p. 5.

560. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1,

2017; DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, August 2011, p. 77.

561. SIGAR, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

Programs, SIGAR 13-16-AR, p. 9.

562. SIGAR, Corruption in Conflict, p. 66.

563. SIGAR, Contracting with the Enemy, SIGAR

13-14-AR, p. 3. 

564. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation

of USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative 

in Afghanistan, p. 13; MSI, Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA) Program Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 5; senior OTI official, SIGAR 

interview, August 12, 2016.

565. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 4–5.

566. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 27–28.

567. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation of

USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, p. 13; MSI, Stability in Key Areas 

- West: Mid-Term Evaluation, p. 26; Safiullah 

Baran, SIGAR interview, February 18, 2017.

568. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 8; MSI, Stability in Key Areas-North: MidTerm Performance Evaluation, p. 29.

569. GAO, Afghanistan: U.S. Efforts to Vet NonU.S. Vendors Need Improvement, GAO-11-355, 

June 2011, p. 20.

570. SIGAR, Corruption in Conflict, p. 67.

571. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Assessing the Role 

of the National Solidarity Program in USG

Strategy,” Kabul 008380 cable, December 5, 

2011; Andrew Beath, Fontini Christia, and Ruben 

Enikolopov, Randomized Impact Evaluation of 

Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Programme, 

World Bank, 2013, p. 2.

572. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Assessing the Role of the 

National Solidarity Program in USG Strategy,” 

Kabul 008380 cable, December 5, 2011. The 

rationale for community ownership, in the words 

of the ASI-E final report, was that “communities 

that feel a sense of ownership for an activity 

will protect it from threats, will implement it 

according to plan, and will see the benefits of 

engaging with the moderate leadership that 

facilitates the activity.” DAI, Final Report 

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative–East: 

June 2009–September 2012, prepared under 

contract for USAID, September 2012, p. 43. The 

central importance of community ownership of 

projects was a key finding of OTI’s survey of lessons learned from its work in counterinsurgency 

environments across the globe. USAID, CounterInsurgency Programming: A Meta Evaluation, 

May 2010, p. 38.

573. For example, the study, the results of which

were shared with U.S. officials before it was 

published, found that it increased the number 

of villages with functioning village councils 

and improved perceptions of a wide range of 

government figures. Andrew Beath, Fontini 

Christia, and Ruben Enikolopov, and Shahim 

Ahmad Kabuli, Randomized Impact Evaluation 

of Phase II of Afghanistan’s National Solidarity 

Programme (NSP): Estimates of Interim 

Program Impact from First Follow-Up Survey, 

World Bank, July 8, 2010, p. v. 

574. Andrew Beath, Fontini Christia, and Ruben 

Enikolopov, Winning Hearts and Minds 

Through Development?, World Bank, July 2012, 

p. 3.

575. Adam Smith International, Diagnostic of the

District Delivery Program, pp. 6–7. 

576. Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Slip-Sliding on a Yellow 

Brick Road: Stabilization Efforts in Afghanistan,” 

Stability: International Journal of Security 

and Development, vol. 1, no. 1 (2012), p. 12.

577. Adam Smith International, Diagnostic of the

District Delivery Program, p. 9. Checchi and 

Co., Performance Evaluation: District Delivery 

Program (DDP), p. 1.
258 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

578. Adam Smith International, Diagnostic of the

District Delivery Program, pp. 6, 10, 17.

579. Tamas, SIGAR interview, July 13, 2016; Checchi 

and Co., Performance Evaluation: District 

Delivery Program (DDP), pp. 15–17.

580. Asia Foundation, An Assessment of SubNational Governance in Afghanistan, p. 6; 

Miakhel, SIGAR interview, February 7, 2017; 

Massoom, SIGAR interview, March 10, 2017.

581. USAID, Afghanistan Stabilization Program 

Scope of Work, pp. 3–5.

582. Shah Mahmood Miakhel, “A Brief Overview 

of the Afghanistan Stabilization Program: A

National Program to Improve Security and 

Governance,” Afghanistan Analysts Network 

(AAN), July 9, 2012, pp. 3, 4.

583. Ehsan Zia, SIGAR interview, January 30, 2017.

584. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Majority 

Staff, Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to

Afghanistan, S.Prt. 112-21, June 8, 2011, p. 26. 

585. USAID, response to SIGAR data call, January 14, 

2014, p. 28; SIGAR, Quarterly Report, January 30,

2014, p. 124. The U.S. government had set aside 

as much as 47% of its overall contribution to 

ARTF for NSP as recently as 2012. This was 

almost the entirety of the amount that it could 

preference. In addition, when SIGAR asked 

USAID to provide an assessment of NSP’s 

High Risk Strategy, which was meant to allow 

the NSP operating model to be adjusted for 

contested environments, USAID responded 

that that information was not available. USAID, 

response to SIGAR data call, December 30, 2013 

and January 7, 2014; SIGAR, Quarterly Report, 

January 30, 2014, p. 118; World Bank officials, 

SIGAR interview, May 22, 2010.

586. USAID Office of the Inspector General, 

“USAID Planning and Monitoring Gaps Weaken 

Accountability for Results Through the 

Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund,” Audit 

Report 8-306-17-004-9, p. 11.

587. Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, Randomized 

Impact Evaluation of Afghanistan’s National 

Solidarity Programme, 2013, p. 3. 

588. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 52.

589. SIGAR, Afghanistan’s National Solidarity

Program, SIGAR 11-8-AR, p. 7.

590. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 28,

2016; Haider, SIGAR interview, January 26, 2017. 

While USAID uses the term implementing partner, NSP used the term facilitiating partner for 

the same concept.

591. Ahmed Humayun, Andrew Exum, and John Nagl, 

A Pathway to Success in Afghanistan: The

National Solidarity Program, Center for New 

American Security (CNAS), March 2009, p. 3; 

Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, Randomized 

Impact Evaluation of Afghanistan’s National 

Solidarity Programme, 2013, p. 2.

592. Hamish Nixon, Subnational State-building in

Afghanistan, AREU, April 2008, p. 52.

593. Ehsan Zia, SIGAR interview, January 30, 2017.

594. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 6; State, “The President’s 

Announcement on the Way Forward in 

Afghanistan and Pakistan,” State 122731 cable, 

December 1, 2009.

595. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Assessing the Role of the 

National Solidarity Program in USG Strategy,” 

Kabul 008380 cable, December 5, 2011. Many 

of the CDCs that had been established in the 

heavily contested provinces of Kandahar and 

Helmand fell into disuse as the security situation 

deteriorated. State Department official, SIGAR 

interview, May 23, 2010.

596. Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, “The National

Solidarity Programme,” p. 306; Beath, Christia, 

and Enikolopov, Winning Hearts and 

Minds Through Development, pp. 2, 9. More 

broadly, evaluations of CDD efforts in many 

countries have highlighted its mixed or poor 

results in insecure environments. See, for 

example, Elizabeth King, “A Critical Review of 

Community-Driven Development Programmes 

in Conflict-Affected Contexts,” International 

Rescue Committee and UKAID, March 2013.

597. Ball et al., Afghanistan Lessons Identified:

2001–2014, Part II, p. 42; MSI, Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA) Program Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 40.

598. Ehsan Zia, SIGAR interview, January 30, 2017. A

third-party evaluator found that LGCD was much 

more effective during the Hamkari campaign 

in Kandahar at the end of the program when it 

required communities to directly petition their 

government representatives to request projects. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, August 2011, p. xiv.

599. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 7. 

600. Nixon, Subnational State-building in 

Afghanistan, p. 38; Brown, The U.S. Surge and 

Afghan Local Governance, p. 6. It is important 

to note that NSP also had to carve out flexibility 

in its approach to enable implementation in less 

secure areas, where NSP implementing partner 

staff was limited. This flexibility included 

more rapid project identification, approval, 

and grant disbursement. World Bank, “Annex 

G–Implementation in Insecure Areas,” 2009, 

pp. 1–2.

601. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 7. 

602. Caerus Associates, The Stability Analysis

Methodology in Afghanistan, p. 26; Beath, 

Christia, and Enikolopov, Randomized 

Impact Evaluation of Afghanistan’s National 

Solidarity Programme, 2013, p. viii.

603. World Bank, “Afghanistan’s National Solidarity 

Program: Overview and Challenges,” World Bank 

website, accessed on May 31, 2017. 

604. Caerus Associates, The Stability Analysis

Methodology in Afghanistan, p. 26; MSI, 

Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 45; USAID stabiliza-
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 259

tion contractor, SIGAR interview, September 27, 

2016.

605. IRD, KFZ Annual Report: Quarterly Report 

July 1–September 2015, prepared under 

contract for USAID, September 23, 2015, p. 9; 

USAID, “Kandahar Food Zone Program (KFZ),” 

USAID website, accessed on March 17, 2018.

606. In 2017, USAID was the largest donor to the 

World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust 

Fund, which funds the Citizens’ Charter. USAID, 

“Afghanistan Complex Emergency: Fact Sheet #4 

Fiscal Year (FY) 2017,” September 30, 2017, p. 5. 

Like NSP, the Citizens’ Charter is not explicitly 

a stabilization program, but it has similar goals 

of strengthening service delivery as a means of 

improving the legitimacy of the Afghan government. World Bank, “Request for Expressions of 

Interest for Consultancy as Facilitating Partners 

Under the Citizens’ Charter Afghanistan Project,” 

July 2016, p. 1.

607. World Bank, “Project Appraisal Document for

the Citizens’ Charter Afghanistan Project,” 

October 6, 2016, p. 14.

608. Mark S. Martins, “The Commander’s Emergency

Response Program,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 

Issue 37, Second Quarter (2005), p. 47.

609. Martins, “The Commander’s Emergency

Response Program,” p. 49; Egel et al., Investing 

in the Fight: Assessing the use of the 

Commander’s Emergency Response Program 

in Afghanistan, RAND Corporation, 2016, 

pp. 48–49.

610. Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for 

Defense and for the Reconstruction of Iraq and

Afghanistan, 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-106, § 1110 

(2003).

611. DOD, DOD Financial Management Regulation: 

Commander’s Emergency Response Program, 

April 2005, chapter 27, pp. 3–5. 

612. Perito, The U.S. Experience with Provincial 

Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan, p. 2.

613. The full list of permissible projects in the 

FMR mirrored the categories found in earlier

guidance: (1) water and sanitation, (2) food 

production and distribution, (3) agriculture, 

(4) electricity, (5) healthcare, (6) education, (7) 

telecommunications, (8) economic, financial, 

and management improvements, (9) transportation, (10) rule of law and governance, (11) 

irrigation, (12) civic cleanup activities, (13) civic 

support vehicles, (14) repair of civic and cultural 

facilities, and (15) “other urgent humanitarian or 

reconstruction projects.” DOD, DOD Financial 

Management Regulation: Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, April 2005, chapter 27, pp. 3–5.

614. DOD, DOD Financial Management Regulation: 

Commander’s Emergency Response Program,

September 2005, chapter 27, p. 5. 

615. DOD, DOD Financial Management Regulation: 

Commander’s Emergency Response Program,

September 2005, chapter 27, p. 4.

616. The inherent flexibility of CERP and the authority of local commanders was reflected in

the 2009 FMR, which stipulated that CERP was 

“designed to enable local commanders in Iraq 

and Afghanistan to respond to urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction requirements 

within their areas of responsibility by carrying 

out programs that will immediately assist the 

indigenous population. As used here, reconstruction does not limit efforts to restore previous 

conditions/structure in Afghanistan. Also, as 

used here, urgent is defined as any chronic or 

acute inadequacy of an essential good or service 

that, in the judgment of a local commander, calls 

for immediate action.” DOD, DOD Financial 

Management Regulation: Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, January 2009, 

chapter 27, p. 4.

617. U.S. Army Audit Agency, Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, November 16, 

2010, p. 4; SIGAR, Quarterly Report, October 30, 

2017, p. 225.

618. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, pp. 82–84.

619. DOD, DOD Financial Management Regulation: 

Commander’s Emergency Response Program, 

January 2009, chapter 27, pp. 5–6.

620. The number of CERP projects increased 

during the surge, with 77 percent of projects in

Afghanistan implemented in the FY 2010 to FY 

2013 timeframe. Although broadly similar before 

and after the surge, there were also changes in 

the relative number of projects and obligations 

within CERP categories in the post-2009 period, 

with increases in the number of agriculture 

projects and compensation payments for battle 

damage, and decreases in education, healthcare, 

rule of law and governance, and “urgent humanitarian or reconstruction” projects. There was 

also a shift in CERP projects and spending from 

eastern Afghanistan to southern Afghanistan, 

particularly in FY 2010 to FY 2011. Egel et al., 

Investing in the Fight, pp. 81–84, 87.

621. SIGAR, Increased Visibility, Monitoring, and 

Planning Needed for Commander’s Emergency 

Response Program in Afghanistan, SIGAR 09-5-

AR, September 9, 2009, p. i; U.S. Embassy Kabul 

and USFOR-A, Integrated Civilian-Military 

Campaign Plan, 2009, p. 7; former senior 

USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, June 30, 

2016.

622. An ISAF strategy document states, “By using 

CERP funding appropriately we . . . neutralize

insurgent networks.” That view of CERP as 

an offensive tool was also reflected in the title 

of the CERP guidance document “Money as a 

Weapon System.” ISAF Joint Command (IJC), 

CERP Strategy in Afghanistan (DRAFT), 

August 29, 2010, p. 2; USFOR-A, Money as a 

Weapon System–Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), 

December 2009.

623. As ISAF’s draft CERP strategy states, “Our every

action must help secure, mobilize, and support 

the Afghan people and their government to defeat the insurgency and establish effective governance and development.” IJC, CERP Strategy in 

Afghanistan (DRAFT), p. 2.
260 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

624. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, pp. 87–88.

625. National Defense Authorization Act for 

Fiscal Year 2011, Pub. L. No. 111-383, § 1217 

(2011); SIGAR, Fiscal Year 2011 Afghanistan 

Infrastructure Fund Projects Are behind 

Schedule and Lack Adequate Sustainment 

Plans, SIGAR 12-12-AR, July 30, 2012, p. 1.

626. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, p. 37. 

627. In January 2009, the FMR was amended to restrict the use of “bulk CERP” for large-scale projects. Projects in Afghanistan over $2 million required CENTCOM approval. The FMR noted that 

“small-scale” projects were those costing less 

than $500,000, and that not many projects should 

cost more than that. The increasing emphasis 

on smaller-scale projects stretches back to at 

least 2005 when Congress set clearer guidelines 

on project size. DOD, Financial Management 

Regulation DOD 7000.14-R, January 2009, chapter 27, p. 4; Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, 

pp. 26–27.

628. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, pp. 88–89.

629. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, p. 84.

630. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, p. 82.

631. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, p. 84.

632. SIGAR analysis of CERP data from DOD, 

Office of Undersecretary of Defense for

Policy (OUSD-P), in response to SIGAR data 

calls, January 2014, April 2014, July 2015, and 

October 2017.

633. SIGAR analysis of CERP data from OUSD-P,

in response to SIGAR data calls, January 2014, 

April 2014, July 2015, and October 2017.

634. The end of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan in 

December 2014 also marked the start of the

NATO-led Resolute Support mission. DOD, 

Report on Progress Toward Security and 

Stability in Afghanistan, November 2013, p. 5, 

21; “Afghanistan’s security forces take over from 

NATO,” The Guardian, June 18, 2013; NATO, 

“Transition ceremony kicks off Resolute Support 

Mission,” NATO website, December 28, 2014.

635. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, p. 84.

636. Consolidated and Further Continuing 

Appropriations Act, 2015, electronic p. 169;

Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, electronic p. 151; Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017, 

electronic p. 154. For annual CERP appropriations, see SIGAR, Quarterly Report, October 30, 

2017, pp. 254–255.

637. FM 3-07, Stability Operations, 2008, chapter 4,

p. 13.

638. USFOR-A, Money as a Weapon System–

Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), May 2009, p. 106; 

USFOR-A, Money as a Weapon System–

Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), December 2009, p. 92.

639. USFOR-A, Money as a Weapon System–

Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), December 2009, p. 4. 

Even this limited guidance on developing and 

implementing measures of effectiveness was 

removed in the 2011 MAAWS-A. Moreover, this 

language confused the concepts of measures 

of performance as distinct from measures of 

effectiveness. 

640. USFOR-A, Money as a Weapon System–

Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), December 2009, pp. 4, 

92–94.

641. Former senior USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, July 18, 2016.

642. IJC, “CERP Strategy in Afghanistan (DRAFT),” 

August 29, 2010, p. 2.

643. U.S. Army Audit Agency, Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, p. 7.

644. IJC, “CERP Strategy in Afghanistan (DRAFT),” 

August 29, 2010, p. 1.

645. U.S. Army Audit Agency, Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, pp. 10–11.

646. USFOR-A, Money as a Weapon System–

Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), February 2011, 

pp. 71–72.

647. Stabilization operations planner for RC-East, 

SIGAR interview, July 11, 2016; former senior 

USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, June 30, 

2016.

648. Former senior USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, June 30, 2016.

649. Stabilization operations planner for RC-East, 

SIGAR interview, July 11, 2016.

650. Former senior USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, July 18, 2016.

651. Former senior USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, July 18, 2016.

652. Civil affairs officer in eastern Afghanistan, 

SIGAR interview, June 27, 2016. The U.S. Army 

Audit Agency was also told in interviews that the 

development of baselines and improved impact 

evaluations would have required additional staff. 

Regardless, the agency recommended developing baselines for literacy, insurgent activity, 

and perceptions of the Afghan government. 

Each of those is a major undertaking, even in 

a peacetime scenario. U.S. Army Audit Agency, 

Commander’s Emergency Response Program, 

pp. 7, 11.

653. Civil affairs officer in eastern Afghanistan, 

SIGAR interview, June 27, 2016; former senior 

USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, June 30, 

2016.

654. Civil affairs officer in eastern Afghanistan, 

SIGAR interview, June 27, 2016.

655. USFOR-A, Money as a Weapon System–

Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), March 2012, pp. 120–

121.

656. Travers Child, “Hearts and Minds Cannot

Be Bought: Ineffective Reconstruction in 

Afghanistan,” The Economics of Peace and 

Security Journal, vol. 9, no. 2 (2014), pp. 43-49.

657. Tiffany Chou, “Does Development Assistance

Reduce Violence? Evidence from Afghanistan,” 

The Economics of Peace and Security Journal, 

vol. 7, no. (2012), p. 5.

658. Berman et al., “Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought: 

The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq,”

Journal of Political Economy, electronic 

pp. 1, 4–5; Eli Berman, Joseph Felter, Jacob 

Shapiro, and Erin Troland, “Modest, Secure, and 

Informed: Successful Development in Conflict 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 261

Zones,” National Bureau of Economic Research 

working paper 18674, 2013.

659. Greg Adams, “Honing the Proper Edge: CERP 

and the Two-Sided Potential of Military-Led 

Development in Afghanistan,” The Economics 

of Peace and Security Journal, vol. 10, no. 2 

(2015), pp. 53-60.

660. Ryan J. Novotny, The “Road” to Success: 

Importance of Construction on Reconstruction 

in Conflict-Affected States, Naval Postgraduate 

School, 2011. 

661. Renard Sexton, “Aid as a Tool against

Insurgency,” American Political Science 

Review, vol. 10, no. 4 (2016), pp. 731-749.

662. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight: Assessing the

use of the Commander’s Emergency Response 

Program in Afghanistan, pp. 201–202.

663. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 6.

664. Stabilization operations planner for RC-East, 

SIGAR interview, July 11, 2016.

665. SIGAR, Increased Visibility, Monitoring, and 

Planning Needed for Commander’s Emergency 

Response Program, SIGAR 09-5-AR, p. 3.

666. U.S. Army Audit Agency, Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, p. 13.

667. Former senior USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, June 30, 2016.

668. U.S. Army Audit Agency, Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, pp. 13–14.

669. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, pp. 46–47, 56.

670. IJC, CERP Strategy in Afghanistan (DRAFT), 

August 29, 2010, p. 2.

671. SIGAR, Afghanistan’s Road Infrastructure:

Sustainment Challenges and Lack of Repairs 

Put U.S. Investment at Risk, SIGAR 17-11-AR, 

October 2016, p. iii.

672. Senior civil affairs officer, SIGAR interview, 

July 12, 2016.

673. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017.

674. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

675. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

676. Former senior USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, July 18, 2016; senior civil affairs officer, 

SIGAR interview, July 12, 2016; civil affairs 

officer, SIGAR interview, January 8, 2015.

677. Former senior USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, July 18, 2016.

678. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016. As one informant said, “The 

whole premise of building up confidence in the 

Afghan government by tying them to CERP projects was difficult because they all knew where 

the money was coming from.” Former senior 

USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, June 30, 

2016.

679. McQuillan, SIGAR interview, July 21, 2016;

USAID official, SIGAR interview, August 12, 

2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

August 15, 2016; Nagl, Exum, and Humayun, 

A Pathway to Success in Afghanistan; Beath, 

Christia, and Enikolopov, Winning Hearts and 

Minds Through Development, July 2012.

680. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, pp. 98, 100, 

123, 128.

681. Senior civil affairs officer, SIGAR interview, 

July 12, 2016.

682. Martin Schweitzer, SIGAR interview, 

September 19, 2017; senior civil affairs officer, 

SIGAR interview, July 12, 2016.

683. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, p. 146.

684. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, p. 146–147.

685. U.S. Army Audit Agency, Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, p. 9.

686. U.S. Army Audit Agency, Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, p. 5.

687. GAO, Actions Needed to Improve Oversight and 

Interagency Coordination for the Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program in Afghanistan, 

GAO-09-615, May 2009, p. 7; DOD Inspector 

General, Management Improvements Needed in 

Commander’s Emergency Response Program 

in Afghanistan, DODIG-2012-023, November 21, 

2011, p. 9; U.S. Army Audit Agency, 

Commander’s Emergency Response Program, 

p. 12.

688. Stabilization operations planner for RC-East, 

SIGAR interview, July 11, 2016.

689. DOD, “Quadrennial Defense Review Report,” 

February 6, 2006, pp. 5, 45; Samuel Simpson,

“Restructuring Civil Affairs for Persistent 

Engagement,” School of Advanced Military 

Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff 

College, 2010, p. 19; Dennis J. Cahill, SIGAR 

interview, March 8, 2017.

690. Cahill, SIGAR interview, March 8, 2017.

691. Senior civil affairs officer, SIGAR interview, 

July 12, 2016; USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

December 21, 2016.

692. Senior civil affairs officer, SIGAR interview, 

July 12, 2016. 

693. U.S. Army Audit Agency, Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program, p. 16.

694. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, pp. 57–58.

695. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, pp. 70–71; U.S. 

Army Audit Agency, Commander’s Emergency 

Response Program, p. 15.

696. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, pp. 56–57.

697. Former senior USFOR-A official, SIGAR interview, June 30, 2016.

698. Egel et al., Investing in the Fight, p. 71.

699. USFOR-A, Money as a Weapon System–

Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), February 2011, p. 2.

700. USFOR-A, Money as a Weapon System–

Afghanistan (MAAWS-A), March 2012, p. iii.

701. Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force–

Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A), Village Stability 

Operations and Afghan Local Police: BottomUp Counterinsurgency, April 1, 2011, p. 7.

702. CJSOTF-A, Village Stability Operations and

Afghan Local Police, pp. 7–8; CFSOCC-A VSO 

briefing on June 11, 2010, cited in Rebecca 

Zimmerman et al., If You’ve Seen One VSP, 

You’ve Seen One VSP: Understanding Best 

Practices in Village Stability Operations, 
262 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Commander’s Initiatives Group, CFSOCC-A, 

2010, p. 20.

703. Former CFSOCC-A official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016; CJSOTF-A, Village Stability 

Operations and Afghan Local Police: BottomUp Counterinsurgency, pp. 62, 68

704. CJSOTF-A, Village Stability Operations and

Afghan Local Police, p. 11.

705. CJSOTF-A, Village Stability Operations and

Afghan Local Police, p. 11.

706. CJSOTF-A, Village Stability Operations and

Afghan Local Police, p. 14.

707. CJSOTF-A, Village Stability Operations and

Afghan Local Police, p. 16.

708. CJSOTF-A, Village Stability Operations and

Afghan Local Police, p. 21.

709. Donald Bolduc, “The Future of Afghanistan,” 

Special Warfare, vol. 24, no. 4 (2011), pp. 24, 

26; former CFSOCC-A official, SIGAR interview, August 3, 2016. District Augmentation 

Teams (DAT) were one- to three-man teams 

established at the district level. They were 

meant to assist the VSPs with governance and 

development support. The personnel on DATs 

were either SOF personnel or Af-Pak Hands. 

Provincial Augmentation Teams (PAT) were 

one- to three-man teams at the provincial level 

who provided governance and development 

support to the DATs and SOF teams. They 

were often collocated with conventional units. 

Not every province with a VSO had a PAT. The 

VSNCC [Village Stability National Coordination 

Center] was a group of 15–20 SOF and civil 

affairs personnel commanded by a colonel that 

liaised with ISAF and Afghan ministries. “Village 

Stability Operations in Afghanistan,” SOF News, 

August 21, 2016; former CFSOCC-A official, 

SIGAR interview, August 15, 2016.

710. Former CFSOCC-A official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

711. The Center for Naval Analyses reported in 2014 

that ANA leadership did not want to support

the ALP: “Interviewees in theater told us that 

the Chief of the ANA General Staff does not 

want the ANASF to be formally associated 

with the ALP program, in part due to the ALP’s 

past record of human rights abuses. Therefore, 

it does not appear that the government of 

Afghanistan intends for the ANASF to continue 

raising ALP after 2014.” Jonathan Schroden 

et al., Independent Assessment of the Afghan 

National Security Forces, Center for Naval 

Analyses, January 24, 2014, p. 138; JCOA, Village 

Stability Operations and Afghan Local Police: 

A Case Study, 2012, p. 9; Bolduc, “The Future of 

Afghanistan,” pp. 24, 28.

712. JCOA, Village Stability Operations and Afghan

Local Police, p. 6; Seth Jones, “Community 

Defense in Afghanistan,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 

vol. 57, no. 2 (2010), p. 10.

713. Although the total number of Pashtuns in the 

ANDSF met “minimal” requirements, recruiting

in the Pashtun heartland in southern Afghanistan 

was a significant challenge. In 2010, only 3 

percent of ANA recruits came from the southern 

provinces. “ANSF Monthly Progress Report,” 

CSTC-A, November 15, 2010, pp. 7–8. Austin 

Long and Andrew Radin, “Enlisting Islam for 

an Effective Afghan Police,” Survival: Global 

Politics and Strategy, vol. 54, no. 2 (2012), 

p. 120.

714. Col. Bradley Moses, SIGAR interview, October 6,

2016. Evidence of that vulnerability can be found 

in State cables, including a declassified cable 

from late 2009 that describes how an ASOP 

shura leader was abducted and killed a day after 

participating in an ASOP workshop in Helmand. 

The day after the assassination, “only seven 

members attended the Community Council’s regularly-scheduled weekly meeting, and their discussion during the meeting focused solely on security concerns. . . . Several requested weapons.” 

U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Nawa: Assassinations 

Cast a Pall Over Recent Gains,” Kabul 003727 

cable (declassified by State on April 28, 2017, at 

SIGAR’s request), November 18, 2009.

715. Joe L’Etoile, Transforming the Conflict in 

Afghanistan: Village Stability Operations/

Afghan Local Police and Bottom-up Population 

Mobilization, ORBIS, 2011, p. 5. Jonathan 

Goodhand and Aziz Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding in 

Afghanistan, USIP, 2014, p. 14.

716. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 15.

717. Mathieu Lefèvre, The Afghanistan Public

Protection Program and the Local Defense 

Initiatives, Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2012, 

p. 1.

718. The first class of AP3 recruits graduated in 

March 2009. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Scenesetter

for CODEL McConnell,” Kabul 000803 cable, 

April 1, 2009; Zimmerman et al., If You’ve Seen 

One VSP, p. 6; Lefèvre, The Afghanistan Public 

Protection Program, p. 2.

719. According to Halim Fidai, the former governor of Wardak province, the U.S. and Afghan

governments disagreed about the best definition 

of “local” and the implications for security force 

vetting. Fidai says the Afghans preferred to have 

the program and vetting conducted at the provincial level where, according to him, the Afghan 

government would be able to hold representatives accountable for ALP members they approved. Fidai did not explain how or why those 

individuals would be held accountable when so 

many other Afghan officials acted with impunity. 

Halim Fidai, SIGAR interview, January 10, 2017.

720. Moses, SIGAR interview, October 6, 2016;

Lefèvre, The Afghanistan Public Protection 

Program, p. 2.

721. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 20.

722. Lefèvre, The Afghanistan Public Protection 

Program, p. 2. Mark Moyar, “Village Stability 

Operations and the Afghan Local Police,” Joint 

Special Operations University, vol. 14, no. 7 

(2014), p. 9. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 263

723. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 14; 

Lefèvre, The Afghanistan Public Protection 

Program, p. 3.

724. Edward Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 

2017; Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and 

the Afghan Local Police,” p. 9.

725. Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017; 

Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 9.

726. Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017.

727. Jones, “Community Defense in Afghanistan,” 

p. 10; JCOA, Village Stability Operations and 

Afghan Local Police, p. 3.

728. Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017.

729. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 12; 

Lefèvre, The Afghanistan Public Protection 

Program, p. 3.

730. Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017.

731. JCOA, Village Stability Operations and Afghan

Local Police, p. 3.

732. Mark Brown, “Village Stability Operations:

An Historical Perspective from Vietnam to 

Afghanistan,” Small Wars Journal (2013), 

pp. 1–4.

733. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, pp. 11–12.

734. Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017.

735. Bolduc, “The Future of Afghanistan,” p. 24.

736. Bolduc, “The Future of Afghanistan,” p. 24.

737. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 12.

738. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 11.

739. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 15; Moses, 

SIGAR interview, October 6, 2016. The nature 

of these trends suggests there May have been 

unknown changes in operations as CDI became 

VSO; General Reeder could not recall a single 

attack on the initial 11 CDI sites, but by the time 

VSPs were increasing in number in mid-2010, 

they were clearly being attacked by insurgents. 

Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017.

740. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 11.

741. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 11; Goodhand and 

Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, Local Militias, and 

Statebuilding, p. 12.

742. Bolduc, “The Future of Afghanistan,” p. 23; 

Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 12.

743. A November 2010 DOD report to Congress said 

President Karzai authorized the establishment

of the ALP in August 2010. Brigadier General 

Donald Bolduc reported Karzai signed the 

decree authorizing ALP in September 2010. 

DOD, Report on Progress Toward Security 

and Stability in Afghanistan, November 2010, 

p. 9; Bolduc, “The Future of Afghanistan,” p. 24; 

DODIG, Assessment of U.S. Government and 

Coalition Efforts to Develop the Afghan Local 

Police, DODIG-2012-109, 2012, p. 23.

744. Zimmerman et al., If You’ve Seen One VSP, p. 8.

745. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 10.

746. Carmen Gentile, “In Afghanistan, Special Units 

do the Dirty Work,” USA Today, November 10, 

2011; Scott Mann, SIGAR interview, August 5, 

2016.

747. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017;

Mann, SIGAR interview, August 5, 2016.

748. Allen, SIGAR interview, November 2, 2016;

International Crisis Group, The Future of the 

Afghan Local Police, June 4, 2015, p. ii.

749. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 16; Gentile, 

“In Afghanistan, Special Units do the Dirty 

Work,” p. 16.

750. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 13; DODIG, 

Assessment of U.S. Government and Coalition 

Efforts to Develop the Afghan Local Police, p. 2.

751. Human Rights Watch, Just Don’t Call It a 

Militia: Impunity, Militias, and the “Afghan 

Local Police,” p. 24.

752. DODIG, Assessment of U.S. Government 

and Coalition Efforts to Develop the Afghan

Local Police, p. 71; Goodhand and Hakimi, 

Counterinsurgency, Local Militias, and 

Statebuilding, pp. 21–22.

753. Afghanistan Independent Human Rights 

Commission, From Arbaki to Local Police:

Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Concerns, 

2012, p. 22; Human Rights Watch, Just Don’t Call 

It a Militia, pp. 70–71; DOD Press Briefing, Col. 

Johnson and Governor Fidai, 2010.

754. DODIG, Assessment of U.S. Government and 

Coalition Efforts to Develop the Afghan Local

Police, p. 71. 

755. DODIG, Assessment of U.S. Government and 

Coalition Efforts to Develop the Afghan Local

Police, p. 63; Human Rights Watch, Just Don’t 

Call It a Militia, p. 49.

756. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, pp. 21–22.

757. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 22.

758. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 22.

759. Allen, SIGAR interview, November 2, 2016;

Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 11.

760. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 51; DOD, Progress 

Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan, 

October 2011, p. 68.

761. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 51; Moses, SIGAR interview, October 6, 2016.

762. DOD, Report on Progress Toward Security and

Stability in Afghanistan, July 2013, p. 98.

763. DOD, Report on Progress Toward Security and

Stability in Afghanistan, December 2012, p. 81.
264 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

764. DOD, Report on Progress Toward Security and

Stability in Afghanistan, December 2012, p. 81.

765. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, pp. 29, 35.

766. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Kunduz: Illegal Armed 

Groups Increase Risks for Election,” Kabul

000660 cable, February 19, 2013.

767. Mann, SIGAR interview, August 5, 2016;

Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017.

768. Mann, SIGAR interview, August 5, 2016.

769. Mann, SIGAR interview, August 5, 2016.

770. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017.

771. JCOA, Village Stability Operations and Afghan

Local Police, p. 9.

772. Moses, SIGAR interview, October 6, 2016; Mann,

SIGAR interview, August 5, 2016.

773. Afghan Hand for VSO, SIGAR interview,

September 7, 2016.

774. Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017; 

Moses, SIGAR interview, October 6, 2016. 

775. Mann, SIGAR interview, August 5, 2016.

776. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017;

former CFSOCC-A official, SIGAR interview, 

August 15, 2016.

777. Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017; 

Moses, SIGAR interview, October 6, 2016.

778. DOD, Report on Progress Toward Security and

Stability in Afghanistan, October 2011, p. 69.

779. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017;

Mann, SIGAR interview, August 5, 2016.

780. JCOA, Village Stability Operations and Afghan

Local Police, p. 12; Moyar, “Village Stability 

Operations and the Afghan Local Police,” p. 25.

781. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 25.

782. DOD official, SIGAR interview, October 28, 2016.

783. DOD official, SIGAR interview, October 28, 2016.

784. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017. In

his memoir, Daniel Green, an advisor to VSO 

in Uruzgan in 2012, provides limited anecdotal 

evidence that the SEALs he supported were 

effective implementers of VSO, despite their traditional focus on direct action. Daniel R. Green, 

In the Warlords’ Shadow: Special Operations 

Forces, the Afghans, and Their Fight against 

the Taliban (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 

2017), pp. 115–116.

785. DOD official, SIGAR interview, October 20, 2016.

786. DOD official, SIGAR interview, October 20, 2016.

787. DOD advisor, SIGAR interview, December 19, 

2017; DOD advisor, SIGAR interview, 

December 14, 2017; DOD advisor, SIGAR interview, December 15, 2017.

788. Petraeus, SIGAR interview, August 16, 2017.

789. Jan Osburg et al., “Assessing Locally Focused 

Stability Operations,” RAND, 2014, p. 16.

790. Bolduc, “The Future of Afghanistan,” p. 26.

791. Former CFSOCC-A official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016; Moses, SIGAR interview, 

October 6, 2016; Moyar, “Village Stability 

Operations and the Afghan Local Police,” p. 17.

792. Moses, SIGAR interview, October 6, 2016.

793. Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017; 

CJSOTF-A, Village Stability Operations and 

Afghan Local Police, pp. 11–12; Zimmerman et 

al., If You’ve Seen One VSP, pp. 13–14; Moyar, 

“Village Stability Operations and the Afghan 

Local Police,” p. 17.

794. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 23.

795. Mann, SIGAR interview, August 5, 2016;

Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 22.

796. Reeder, SIGAR interview, October 26, 2017.

797. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, pp. 22.

798. Kate Clark, “Update on the Afghan Local Police: 

Making sure they are armed, trained, paid, and

exist,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, July 5, 

2017. 

799. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, pp. 29–30, 35.

800. International Crisis Group, The Future of the

Afghan Local Police, p. 13.

801. Goodhand and Hakimi, Counterinsurgency, 

Local Militias, and Statebuilding, p. 15; 

International Crisis Group, The Future of the 

Afghan Local Police, p. 13.

802. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 51.

803. Bolduc, “The Future of Afghanistan,” p. 24.

804. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 64.

805. DOD, Report on Progress Toward Security and

Stability in Afghanistan, December 2012, p. 80.

806. DOD, Report on Progress Toward Security and

Stability in Afghanistan, July 2013, pp. 97–98.

807. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 51.

808. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 57.

809. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” pp. 64–65.

810. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 65.

811. “Q&A: Brigadier General Edward M. Reeder 

Jr,” Special Warfare, vol. 24, no. 4 (2011), p. 21; 

Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 58.

812. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 65.

813. DODIG, Assessment of U.S. Government 

and Coalition Efforts to Develop the Afghan

Local Police, p. iv; Goodhand and Hakimi, 

Counterinsurgency, Local Militias, and 

Statebuilding, p. 16.

814. Jefferson Marquis et al., Assessing the Ability

of the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs to 

Support the Afghan Local Police, RAND, 2016, 

p. 22.

815. Moyar, “Village Stability Operations and the 

Afghan Local Police,” p. 67.

816. DOD, NSOCC-A response to SIGAR, April 7, 

2014.

817. Clark, “Update on the Afghan Local Police.”

818. UNAMA, Afghanistan Midyear Report 2014: 

Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 

July 2014, p. 46.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 265

819. UNAMA, Afghanistan Midyear Report 2014: 

Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 

July 2014, p. 36.

820. Afghanistan Independent Human Rights 

Commission, From Arbaki to Local Police:

Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Concerns, 

Spring 1391 (2012), pp. 5–6.

821. UNAMA, Afghanistan Midyear Report 2014: 

Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 

July 2014, p. 47.

822. UNAMA, Afghanistan Annual Report 2015: 

Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 

February 2016, p. 68.

823. Fazal Muzhary, “How to replace a bad ALP

Commander: in Shajoy, success and now 

calamity,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, 

September 21, 2016. 

824. UNAMA, Afghanistan Annual Report 2015: 

Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 

February 2016, p. 67.

825. UNAMA, Protection of Civilians in Armed 

Conflict: Annual Report 2016, February 2017, 

pp. 96–97; UNAMA, Afghanistan Annual 

Report 2015: Protection of Civilians in Armed 

Conflict, February 2016, p. 67. 

826. UNAMA, Afghanistan Midyear Report 2014: 

Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 

July 2014, p. 48; UNAMA, Afghanistan Annual 

Report 2015: Protection of Civilians in Armed 

Conflict, February 2016, pp. 67–68; UNAMA, 

Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict: 

Annual Report 2016, February 2017, p. 96; 

UNAMA, Protection of Civilians in Armed 

Conflict: Annual Report 2017, February 2018, 

p. 49.

827. Mujib Mashal, “U.S. Plan for New Afghan Force 

Revives Fears of Militia Abuses,” New York 

Times, September 15, 2017. 

828. Output: A tangible, immediate, and intended 

product or consequence of an activity within

USAID’s control. Examples of outputs include 

people fed, personnel trained, better technologies developed, and new construction. USAID, 

“Glossary of ADS Terms,” April 30, 2014, p. 186.

829. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 5.

830. As Andrew Natsios, former USAID 

Administrator, has written about at length, 

focusing on measurable outputs to the detriment 

of more abstract outcomes can have dangerous programmatic implications. In his words, 

“Those development programs that are most 

precisely and easily measured are the least 

transformational, and those programs that are 

most transformational are the least measurable.” 

The emphasis within USAID and other donors, 

such as the World Bank, on more measureable 

outcomes over less measureable outcomes 

tends to favor the direct delivery of goods and 

services (for example, distributing food aid and 

humanitarian assistance after a disaster, doing 

immunizations, distributing bed nets to control 

malaria, building of schools and roads), over 

the more critical, but also more difficult, task of 

building local, self-sustaining institutions (for 

example, the training of staff, construction of 

business systems, and development of regular 

organizational procedures, institutional cultures, 

and reform). Andrew Natsios, The Clash of the 

Counter-Bureaucracy and Development, Center 

for Global Development, July 2010, pp. 1, 4, 

37–38.

831. MSI, An Inventory and Review of Countering 

Violent Extremism and Insurgency Monitoring 

Systems, prepared under contract for USAID, 

December 10, 2012, p. v; U.S. Mission to 

Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign Assistance for 

Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 5.

832. Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds in

Helmand, p. 42; UK Stabilisation Unit, 

Responding to Stabilisation Challenges in 

Hostile and Insecure Environments: Lessons 

Identified by the UK’s Stabilisation Unit, 

November 2010, pp. 1–2.

833. Ben Connable, Embracing the Fog

of War: Assessments and Metrics in 

Counterinsurgency, RAND, 2012, pp. iii, xviii, 

81.

834. Connable, Embracing the Fog of War, pp. xviiixix.

835. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 4.

836. Social Impact, USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, August 15, 2005, 

p. 28.

837. The White House, Memorandum to the National

Security Council on the Presidential Policy 

Directive/PPD-6, “U.S. Global Development 

Policy,” September 22, 2010, p. 6. USAID then 

adopted an agency-wide evaluation policy 

in January 2011. USAID, USAID Evaluation 

Policy: Year One, February 2012, p. 2. DOD, 

which spends $8–10 billion per year on direct 

assistance to more than 180 countries, had no 

evaluation policy at all until it released DOD 

Instruction 5132.14, covering security cooperation programs, in 2017. Diana Ohlbaum, “You’ve 

Come a Long Way Baby: Evaluations at USAID,” 

Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, 7 

April 2016; DOD, DOD Instruction 5132.14, 

Assessment, Monitoring, and Evaluation 

Policy for the Security Cooperation Enterprise, 

January 13, 2017. Even at USAID, evaluating 

impact remains rare. A study of USAID evaluations conducted between 2011 and 2014 found 

that only 3 of the 609 were impact evaluations, 

with the rest being other types of efforts, such as 

midterm and final evaluations. MSI, Evaluation 

Utilization at USAID, February 23, 2016, p. 6.

838. See, for example, U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, 

U.S. Foreign Assistance for Afghanistan, 

annex VII, p. 10; USAID, Community Cohesion 

Initiative Quarterly Report April–June 2013, 

prepared under contract for USAID, p. 1; USAID, 

Community Cohesion Initiative: Final Report, 

pp. 1–2; MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and 

Impact Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, 

Wave 5, pp. 27, 213.
266 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

839. See, for example, Jan Osburg et al., Assessing

Locally Focused Stability Operations, RAND, 

p. 11; U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign 

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 11; 

MSI, An Inventory and Review of Countering 

Violent Extremism and Insurgency Monitoring 

Systems, pp. 46–47.

840. See, for example, MSI, MISTI Stabilization

Trends and Impact Evaluation Survey: 

Analytical Report, Wave 5, April 28, 2015, p. 3; 

MSI, An Inventory and Review of Countering 

Violent Extremism and Insurgency Monitoring 

Systems, pp. 46–47; USAID, Counter-Insurgency 

Programming: A Meta Evaluation, May 2010, 

p. 33.

841. See, for example, USAID, Counter-Insurgency 

Programming: A Meta Evaluation, May 2010, 

p. 33; MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

Program Final Performance Evaluation, 

p. 30; Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds 

in Helmand, p. 10; MSI, MISTI Stabilization 

Trends and Impact Evaluation Survey: 

Analytical Report, Wave 5, p. 23.

842. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 11; 

MSI, Monitoring & Evaluation in Postconflict 

Settings, prepared under contract for USAID, 

March 15, 2006, pp. 3–4; MSI, MISTI Task 1: 

Desk Review of Stabilization Resources and 

References, July 11, 2012, pp. 10–11.

843. Jan-Rasmus Böhnke and Christoph Zürcher,

“Aid, Minds, and Hearts: The Impact of Aid 

in Conflict Zones,” Conflict Management and 

Peace Science, vol. 30, no. 5 (2013), p. 415; 

MSI, Monitoring & Evaluation in Postconflict 

Settings, pp. 3–4; Gordon, Winning Hearts and 

Minds in Helmand, p. 5; MSI, MISTI Task 1: 

Desk Review of Stabilization Resources and 

References, p. 10.

844. Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds in

Helmand, p. 54; Civ-mil planner at Embassy 

Kabul, SIGAR interview, November 4, 2016.

845. USAID, Planning and Monitoring 

Environmental Compliance in Non-Permissive

Environments, n.d., p. 17; MSI, Monitoring & 

Evaluation in Postconflict Settings, p. 4; USAID, 

Lessons Learned: Monitoring and Evaluation 

in Complex, High-Threat Environments, 

April 2010, p. 1.

846. Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds in

Helmand, 2011, p. 10; Connable, Embracing 

the Fog of War, p. 54; UK Stabilisation Unit, 

Monitoring and Evaluation of Conflict and 

Stabilisation Interventions, What Works Series, 

October 2015, p. 11. 

847. Connable, Embracing the Fog of War, p. 54; MSI, 

Community Outreach and Engagement, p. 13.

848. USAID, Lessons Learned: Monitoring 

and Evaluation in Complex, High Threat

Environments, p. 2; MSI, An Inventory and 

Review of Countering Violent Extremism 

and Insurgency Monitoring Systems, pp. v, 

46–47; Osburg et al., Assessing Locally Focused 

Stability Operations, p. xvi; UK Stabilisation 

Unit, Monitoring and Evaluation of Conflict 

and Stabilisation Interventions, pp. 11–12.

849. MSI, Monitoring & Evaluation in Postconflict 

Settings, p. 2; UK Stabilisation Unit, Monitoring 

and Evaluation of Conflict and Stabilisation 

Interventions, p. 11.

850. The absence of reliable census data, maps, and 

disaggregated aid data created myriad challenges even before taking into consideration the 

logistical challenges of working in an insecure 

environment with very limited infrastructure. 

Böhnke and Zürcher, “Aid, Minds, and Hearts,” 

2013, p. 415. Polling was often conducted in 

public spaces, inhibiting frankness for fear of 

personal safety. In an environment where the 

presence of outsiders was often seen as an 

opportunity to attract more funding, respondents likely made their responses more positive 

or negative in order to attract more programming. Gordon, Winning Hearts and Minds 

in Helmand, p. 10. Security concerns also 

restricted where information could be safely 

collected and forced evaluators to rely on local 

surveyors with supervision. Beath, Christia, 

and Enikolopov, Winning Hearts and Minds 

Through Development, p. 13; MSI, Stability in 

Key Areas (SIKA) Program Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 2.

851. MSI, An Inventory and Review of Countering 

Violent Extremism and Insurgency Monitoring 

Systems, p. v; USAID, Lessons Learned: 

Monitoring and Evaluation in Complex, 

High Threat Environments, p. 2; Osburg et al., 

Assessing Locally Focused Stability Operations, 

p. xvi. SIGAR has previously reported on the importance of triangulation through multiple levels 

of accountability in M&E in Afghanistan. SIGAR 

and USIP, Report on International Symposium 

on Monitoring and Management in Insecure 

Environments, p. 12.

852. This system was designed to supplement 

implementing partner reporting with reporting from the following additional sources: (1) 

direct observation by U.S. government sources, 

(2) USAID implementing partners (3) Afghan 

government sources, (4) local organizations and 

beneficiaries, and (5) third-party contractors 

hired explicitly to conduct monitoring and evaluation. The USAID Afghanistan Mission only documented one project activity to which the model 

was successfully applied. USAID OIG, Audit of 

USAID/Afghanistan’s Strategy for Monitoring 

and Evaluating Programs Throughout 

Afghanistan, F-306-16-001-P, December 10, 2015, 

pp. 1–2.

853. According to a survey of 127 awards conducted by the USAID OIG, the CORs/Agreement

Officer Representatives (C/AORs) were unable 

to conduct site visits on 74 percent of those 

programs. Further, some C/AORs considered 

visits to a partner’s office to be site visits. USAID 

OIG, Audit of USAID/Afghanistan’s Strategy 

for Monitoring and Evaluating Programs 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 267

Throughout Afghanistan, F-306-16-001-P, 

December 10, 2015, p. 2.

854. USAID Afghanistan, Mission Order 201.05, 

September 20, 2017, pp. 7–8.

855. Connable, Embracing the Fog of War, p. 161; 

Berman et al., “Modest, Secure, and Informed,” 

p. 513; Renard Sexton, “Aid as a Tool against 

Insurgency,” p. 737; MSI, MISTI Stabilization 

Trends and Impact Evaluation Survey, 

Analytical Report, Wave 5, p. 337; MSI, An 

Inventory and Review of Countering Violent 

Extremism and Insurgency Monitoring 

Systems, p. 58.

856. Jan Osburg et al., Assessing Locally Focused

Stability Operations, p. 9.

857. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 

5, p. 13; Connable, Embracing the Fog of War, 

p. 165.

858. MSI, MISTI Task 1: Desk Review of

Stabilization Resources and References, p. 12; 

Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 6.

859. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation

of USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative 

in Afghanistan, p. 25; DAI, Local Governance 

and Community Development: Final Report, 

August 2011, p. xx; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, August 15, 2016. SIGAR previously 

documented USAID’s failure to comply with 

the Office of Management and Budget Circular 

A-16, issued in 1990, requiring agencies to issue 

guidance for the collection and reporting of 

geospatial data. SIGAR also documented the 

problems caused by poor data collection with 

regard to evaluations of USAID’s work, as did 

RAND’s Peer Review of MISTI. SIGAR, USAID’s 

Measuring Impacts of Stabilization Initiatives: 

Program Generally Achieved Its Objectives 

but USAID’s Lack of Geospatial Data and 

Standards Affected its Implementation, SIGAR 

17-10-AR, October 26, 2016, pp. 11–14; Daniel 

Egel and Peter Glick, Peer Review of the MISTI 

Survey and Evaluation Methodology, RAND, 

September 2014, p. 2.

860. USAID, response to SIGAR data call, January 24, 

2017; Egel and Glick, Peer Review of the MISTI 

Survey, pp. 14–15.

861. USAID, response to SIGAR data call, January 24, 

2017.

862. SIGAR, USAID’s Measuring Impacts of

Stabilization Initiatives, SIGAR 17-10-AR, 

p. 12. Data quality issues were also observed by 

evaluations of individual programs. For example, 

MISTI found the data quality and accuracy of 

SIKA East’s activity tracker were questionable, 

with frequent changes to project status, start and 

end dates, and deletions or additions of projects 

not on previous trackers. MSI, Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA)-East Mid-Term Performance 

Evaluation, p. 41.

863. SIGAR, USAID’s Measuring Impacts of

Stabilization Initiatives, SIGAR 17-10-AR, p. ii.

864. USAID Afghanistan, “Admin Notice 2017-0070: 

Data Quality and Verification Process Training,” 

July 20, 2017; USAID Afghanistan, “Admin Notice 

2017-0111: Afghan Info Indicator Clean Up 

Process,” October 10, 2017. 

865. USAID Afghanistan, “GIS/GPS Guidance for 

Program Managers and Implementing Partners,”

version 5, August 2016.

866. MSI, MISTI Task 1: Desk Review of

Stabilization Resources and References, 

p. 10; UK Stabilisation Unit, Monitoring and 

Evaluation of Conflict and Stabilisation 

Interventions, p. 10.

867. Connable, Embracing the Fog of War, p. 191; 

MSI, Monitoring & Evaluation in Postconflict 

Settings, p. 2. A USAID study on the role of PRTs 

in Afghanistan found the agency’s reporting 

during the war in Vietnam, under the CORDS 

program, faced similar pressures to report 

good news and subsequent distortions. USAID, 

Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives, p. 5, 

endnote 11.

868. UK Stabilisation Unit, Monitoring and

Evaluation of Conflict and Stabilisation 

Interventions, p. 11.

869. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

870. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, August 2011, p. xx.

871. MSI, An Inventory and Review of Countering 

Violent Extremism and Insurgency Monitoring 

Systems, pp. v, 46.

872. USAID, “Approval of the Concept Paper for the 

Third Party Monitoring and Evaluation IQC,”

pp. 2, 3.

873. John Agoglia, Michael Dziedzic, Barbara Sotirin, 

Measuring Progress in Conflict Environments

(MPICE): A Metrics Framework, developed 

by PKSOI, USIP, and the U.S. Army Corps of 

Engineers, 2010, pp. x, xi. 

874. Chandrasekaran, “U.S. Military Dismayed 

by Delays in 3 Key Development Projects in

Afghanistan.”

875. MSI, An Inventory and Review of Countering 

Violent Extremism and Insurgency Monitoring 

Systems, pp. 20, 28, 34.

876. USAID, “Approval of the Concept Paper for the 

Third Party Monitoring and Evaluation IQC,”

pp. 2–3, 5.

877. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 11. 

The same can be said about the military’s effort 

to assess the effectiveness of counterinsurgency, which is “a poorly understood process.” 

Connable, Embracing the Fog of War, p. xxi.

878. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 1.

879. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 3.

880. MSI, An Inventory and Review of Countering 

Violent Extremism and Insurgency Monitoring 

Systems, pp. 46–47.
268 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

881. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 2.

882. The 2014 version of the Stab-U PMP clarifies 

that “while inputs and outputs at the project and

activity levels are often similar to traditional 

development projects, stability operations identify and implement activities with the distinctly 

different objective of diminishing or eliminating 

[sources of instability], defined as local issues 

that: 1) decrease support for [the Afghan government], 2) increase support for antigovernment 

elements; and, 3) disrupt the normal functioning 

of society. Tracking developmental activity 

outcomes such as improved water supply, access 

to jobs, more productive agriculture, and access 

to quality education is important to demonstrate 

that projects are producing desired results. 

However, these output measures are secondary 

to progress in areas (i.e., outcomes) such as 

increased public support for [the Afghan government] and its institutions and increased levels of 

community cohesion and area resiliency, which 

are thought to deny insurgents the possibility 

of drawing support from the local populace.” 

MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan Update, FY 

2012–2015, May 2014, pp. 12–13.

883. Christoph Zürcher, “What Do We (Not) Know 

About Development Aid and Violence?: A 

Systemic Review,” World Development, Vol. 98, 

2017, pp. 508, 519.

884. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 4.

885. Senior OTI official, SIGAR interview, August 12,

2016.

886. Tamas, SIGAR interview, July 13, 2016; SIGAR, 

USAID’s Measuring Impacts of Stabilization 

Initiatives, SIGAR 17-10-AR, p. 10. The military 

experienced similar challenges resulting from 

the lag between programming and detectable 

impact. Retired Maj. Gen. Karl McQuillan told 

SIGAR that impact from a CERP project was not 

usually felt until after the unit that implemented it had rotated out and a new unit arrived. 

McQuillan, SIGAR interview, July 21, 2016.

887. Iyengar, Shapiro, and Hegarty, Lessons Learned 

from Stabilization Initiatives in Afghanistan, 

pp. 6, 9.

888. MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan Update, FY

2012–2015, May 2014, p. 7. These challenges 

are not limited to Afghanistan. The mission’s 

Independent Monitoring Unit in Pakistan, a 

$71 million, five-year effort, suffered from 

similar shortcomings. The USAID OIG found 

the mission could not explain how it had used 

the majority of the M&E recommendations it 

had received to manage its portfolio. USAID 

OIG, Audit of USAID/Pakistan’s Independent 

Monitoring and Evaluation Program, Audit 

Report No. G-391-13-003-P, October 28, 2013, 

pp. 1, 5. 

889. Ashraf Nasiri, SIGAR interview, December 11,

2016.

890. USAID, ADS Chapter 201: Program Cycle 

Operational Policy, Updated September 7, 2016, 

pp. 128–129; USAID response to SIGAR data call, 

March 1, 2018. A 2016 USAID report also found 

the Afghanistan Mission was the only one systemically tracking evaluation recommendations 

and utilization across its entire portfolio. MSI, 

Evaluation Utilization at USAID, February 23, 

2016, p. 141.

891. These include inflexible budgets and awards that 

do not allow for adaptation, lack of staff time to

respond effectively and follow up on evaluation 

findings, lack of demand for evidence-based 

program design from senior leadership, and 

lack of incentive to use scarce resources for 

M&E, learning, and adapting. Lugar Center and 

Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, From 

Evidence to Learning: Recommendations to 

Improve U.S. Foreign Assistance Evaluation, 

November 2017, p. 9. 

892. George Ingram, “Gayle Smith: USAID has Gotten 

Real about Evaluation,” Brookings Institution,

April 1, 2016.

893. Natsios, The Clash of the Counter-Bureaucracy

and Development, p. 35.

894. USAID, Office of Transition Initiatives,

1994–2009, 2009, p. 11; MSI, MISTI Task 1: 

Desk Review of Stabilization Resources and 

References, p. 2.

895. UK Stabilisation Unit, Responding to

Stabilisation Challenges in Hostile and 

Insecure Environments, p. 11.

896. Hammink, USAID in Afghanistan, p. 13.

897. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation

of USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative 

in Afghanistan, p. 11. In a similar vein, a 2005 

evaluation of OTI’s first Afghanistan program, 

the Afghanistan Transition Initiative, found that 

program played a major role in ensuring the 

success of the 2002 emergency Loya Jirga, after 

UNDP found itself unable to do so. Only approximately half of that program’s activities involved 

community infrastructure, rather than other 

types of programming such as capacity building 

at the ministerial level or election support. Social 

Impact, USAID/OTI Afghanistan Program: 

Final Evaluation, August 15, 2005, pp. 7, 8, 9, 

34. Similarly, LGCD supported national-level 

programming, including support to a local news 

network to hire and train journalists, to expand 

Pashto-language radio coverage to enable the 

government to better engage the population, 

and to produce radio programming to combat 

youth radicalization. DAI, Local Governance 

and Community Development: Final Report, 

August 31, 2011, pp. 71.

898. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation

of USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative, 

p. 14.

899. Joint Chiefs of Staff, JP 3-07, Stability, 

August 3, 2016, p. x. 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 269

900. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 10, 2016.

901. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1,

2017.

902. MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan Update, FY

2012–2015, May 2014, p. 16; former USAID 

official, SIGAR interview, June 1, 2017.

903. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation

of USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative 

in Afghanistan, pp. 27–28; USAID, Lessons 

Learned: Monitoring and Evaluation in 

Complex, High Threat Environments, p. 1.

904. MSI, MISTI Task 1: Desk Review of

Stabilization Resources and References, p. 9; 

former USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1, 

2017.

905. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation of

USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, p. 28.

906. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 3; Christoph Zürcher, “What Do 

We (Not) Know about Development Aid and 

Violence,” p. 512; Sexton, “Aid as a Tool against 

Insurgency,” p. 731; MSI, MISTI Stabilization 

Trends and Impact Evaluation Survey, 

Analytical Report, Wave 5, p. 3.

907. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 6.

908. SIGAR, Quarterly Report, January 30, 2016,

pp. 117–118.

909. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 217.

910. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

pp. 325–326. A 2005 final evaluation of ATI and 

the final evaluation of the SIKA programs found 

instances of a similar erosion of confidence in 

the government when popular expectations 

exceeded the programs’ ability to help the government deliver on them. In other words, sometimes the more exposure the population has to 

their government, the worse their perception of 

that government May become. Social Impact, 

USAID/OTI Afghanistan Program: Final 

Evaluation, pp. 40–41, 46; MSI, Stability in 

Key Areas (SIKA) Program Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 20.

911. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 47.

912. Berman et al., “Modest, Secure, and Informed,” 

p. 515.

913. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 

5, p. 14. However, a former senior USAID 

official noted that only a small fraction of the 

communities studied by MISTI were controlled 

by the Taliban. Larry Sampler, “USAID Afghan 

Programs,” New York Times, December 29, 2015.

914. Christoph Zürcher, “What Do We (Not) Know 

about Development Aid and Violence,” p. 508.

915. Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, Winning 

Hearts and Minds Through Development, p. 2.

916. Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, Randomized 

Impact Evaluation of Afghanistan’s National 

Solidarity Programme, 2013, p. 63; Jan Böhnke, 

Jan Koehler, and Christoph Zürcher, “Assessing 

the Impact of Development Cooperation 

in Northeast Afghanistan: Approaches and 

Methods,” Freie Universitat Berlin, 43, 

February 2013, p. 39; Iyengar, Shapiro, and 

Hegarty, Lessons Learned from Stabilization 

Initiatives in Afghanistan, p. 8.

917. Böhnke and Zürcher, “Aid, Mind and Hearts: 

The Impact of Aid in Conflict Zones,” Research 

in International and Global Studies seminar series, University of California at Irvine, 

November 5, 2010, p. 27. 

918. Iyengar, Shapiro, and Hegarty, Lessons Learned 

from Stabilization Initiatives in Afghanistan, 

p. 8.

919. Böhnke and Zürcher, “Aid, Mind and Hearts,” 

2010, pp. 27.

920. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 2.

921. Gulla Jan Ahmadzai, SIGAR interview,

February 15, 2017; USAID officials, SIGAR interview, September 18, 2011. 

922. U.S. stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

September 13, 2016.

923. State, “Reflections on Afghanistan: Lessons for 

Future Conflict and Stabilization Operations,”

p. 2; senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

October 24, 2016; USAID officials, SIGAR interview, September 18, 2011.

924. The social capital questions covered the community’s ability to solve internal and external 

problems and how often villages worked together. The questions about informal leaders covered 

whether local leaders considered citizens’ interests and women’s interests, whether they were 

able to secure funds for projects, and whether 

they inspired confidence, were responsive, 

and were able to get things done. MSI, MISTI 

Stabilization Trends and Impact Evaluation 

Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, p. 215.

925. USAID, Community Cohesion Initiative: Final 

Report, pp. 1–2. 

926. USAID, Community Cohesion Initiative: Final 

Report, p. 1.

927. DAI, Final Report: Afghanistan Stabilization 

Initiative-East, pp. 29–30.

928. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave, 

pp. 6, 340.

929. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 1.

930. Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, “The National

Solidarity Programme,” p. 311.

931. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 11, 348–349.

932. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 4; USAID sta-
270 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

bilization official, SIGAR interview, September 9, 

2016.

933. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

pp. 10, 12.

934. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 349.

935. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 355.

936. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 329.

937. Nijat et al., Subnational Governance in

Afghanistan, p. 44.

938. Böhnke and Zürcher, “Aid, Mind and Hearts,” 

2010, p. 27.

939. Egel and Glick, Peer Review of the MISTI

Survey, p. 39.

940. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 5.

941. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 4.

942. Most stabilization projects were “one-time 

distributions or events that did not foster lasting

systems or take future operations and maintenance needs into account.” Brown, Rethinking 

Afghan Local Governance Aid After Transition, 

p. 5. 

943. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 15.

944. Iyengar, Shapiro, and Hegarty, Lessons Learned 

from Stabilization Initiatives in Afghanistan, 

p. 8.

945. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Using Cash for Work,”

Kabul 000666 cable, February 3, 2011.

946. Iyengar and Shapiro, Afghanistan Stabilization

Program: A Summary of Research and Key 

Outcome Trends, ESOC, prepared under contract for USAID, April 11, 2017, p. 12.

947. Iyengar, Shapiro, and Hegarty, Lessons Learned 

from Stabilization Initiatives in Afghanistan, 

p. 7; Iyengar and Shapiro, Afghanistan 

Stabilization Program: A Summary of 

Research and Key Outcome Trends, p. 2.

948. Chou, “Does Development Assistance Reduce 

Violence? Evidence from Afghanistan,” p. 5; Egel 

et al., Investing in the Fight, p. xxii; Adams, 

“Honing the Proper Edge,” p. 53.

949. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation of

USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, pp. vii, 18; former USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, June 1, 2017. A five-year study 

on the relationship between service delivery 

and state legitimacy in eight conflict-affected 

countries found this relationship is much less 

linear than state-building efforts like the one 

in Afghanistan historically assumed. The study 

found there is no clear relationship between 

improvements in people’s access to or satisfaction with services and improvements in their 

perceptions of government. However, the study 

did find a relationship between civic participation and accountability (for example, being 

consulted about services, community meetings, 

and knowledge of grievance mechanisms) and 

positive perceptions of government. Sturge, 

Mallett, Hagen-Zanker, and Slater, Tracking livelihoods, service delivery and governance: panel 

survey findings, Secure Livelihoods Research 

Consortium, June 2017, pp. viii, ix. 

950. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 47.

951. SIGAR, Corruption in Conflict, pp. 11–12, 77;

U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Alikozai Tribal Elders 

Meet with Ambassador Crocker,” Kabul 000989 

cable; Wilder and Gordon, “Money Can’t Buy 

America Love;” U.S. Senate Committee on 

Armed Services, Inquiry into the Role and 

Oversight of Private Security Contractors in 

Afghanistan, p. i; Lamb and Shawn, Political 

Governance and Strategy in Afghanistan, p. 28; 

DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 66; senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

August 15, 2016; Viehe, Afshar, and Heela, 

Rethinking the Civilian Surge, p. 41. 

952. State, USAID, and DOD, “Sustainable Stability:”

A Feasible Future for U.S. Stabilization Efforts, 

2017; USIP and PKSOI, Guiding Principles for 

Stabilization and Reconstruction, p. 15.

953. Lute, SIGAR interview, February 20, 2015.

954. Military planner, SIGAR interview, November 3, 

2016.

955. Military planner, SIGAR interview, November 3, 

2016.

956. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 16, 2016.

957. Allen, SIGAR interview, November 2, 2016.

958. Nasr, The Dispensable Nation, p. 28.

959. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 8, 2016; USAID, Lessons Learned: 

USAID Perspectives, p. 13; CRS, Building 

an Interagency Cadre of National Security 

Professionals: Proposals, Recent Experience, 

and Issues for Congress, July 8, 2008, p. 5. 

Coalition partners likewise recognized the 

immense difficulty of finding the right people for 

the right positions, particularly in the numbers 

necessary to staff a stabilization mission. UK 

Stabilisation Unit, Responding to Stabilisation 

Challenges in Hostile and Insecure 

Environments, p. 3; Ball et al., Afghanistan 

Lessons Identified: 2001–2014, Part II, p. 65. 

960. Sibghatullah, SIGAR interview, December 5,

2016.

961. Fidai, SIGAR interview, January 10, 2017.

According to former Deputy Minister for MRRD 

Tariq Esmati, timelines at the program level 

were not particularly realistic either: “Programs 

were designed for two to three years, while the 

situation at the village level needed a 10-year 

program. . . . Nobody was thinking beyond 

two years.” Tariq Esmati, SIGAR interview, 

December 12, 2016.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 271

962. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 13, 2016. A Danish government-commissioned study about lessons from Afghanistan 

for future interventions in fragile and conflict 

affected states came to the same conclusion: 

“If the efforts are to make a positive difference, 

a significantly longer time horizon is needed 

than the two to three years that are typically 

considered to be ‘long term’ in the context of 

stabilization.” Andersen, Afghanistan Lessons 

Identified: 2001–2014, Part I, p. 9.

963. MSI, An Inventory and Review of Countering 

Violent Extremism and Insurgency Monitoring 

Systems, p. 40; USAID, “Theory of Change 

Activity–Stabilization Summit II,” undated event 

handout; Egel and Glick, Peer Review of the 

MISTI Survey, p. 36.

964. USAID, “Stabilization Fact Sheet;” State, 

Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional

Stabilization Strategy, February 24, 2010, p. 19.

965. Former senior USFOR-A official, SIGAR 

interview, July 18, 2016; MSI, Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA) Program Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 3; IRD, AVIPA Plus Final Report, 

September 1, 2008–November 15, 2011, pp. 35–

36; Dressler, Counterinsurgency in Helmand, 

p. 37.

966. IRD, AVIPA Plus Final Report, September 1, 

2008–November 15, 2011, p. viii; MSI, 

Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 4.

967. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 3–4, 32; 

MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact 

Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 

5, p. 16; MSI, MISTI Task 1: Desk Review 

of Stabilization Resources and References, 

p. 25; senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

August 15, 2016; MSI, Community Development 

Program: Final Performance Evaluation, p. 15; 

Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 47.

968. Dressler, Counterinsurgency in Helmand, p. 37.

969. Chretien, SIGAR interview, July 22, 2016.

The system and database was the Biometric 

Automated Toolset and Handheld Interagency 

Identity Detection Equipment (BATS-HIIDE).

970. Wesa, SIGAR interview, January 7, 2017.

971. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

972. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Using Cash for Work,”

Kabul 000666 cable, February 3, 2011.

973. See, for example, Eli Berman et al., “Do Working

Men Rebel: Insurgency and Unemployment in 

Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines,” Journal 

of Conflict Resolution, vol. 55, no. 4, p. 496; 

Rebecca Holmes et al., What is the evidence on 

the impact of employment creation on stability 

and poverty reduction in fragile states: a systematic review, Overseas Development Institute, 

May 2013, p. 22; Mercy Corps, Does Youth 

Employment Build Stability: Evidence from an 

Impact Evaluation of Vocational Training in 

Afghanistan, January 2015, p. 20; Christopher 

Cramer, Unemployment and Participation in 

Violence, World Bank, November 16, 2010, p. 2; 

Antonio Giustozzi and Niamatullah Ibrahimi, 

Thirty Years of Conflict: Drivers of AntiGovernment Mobilization in Afghanistan, 

1978–2011, AREU, January 2012, pp. 31–32; 

Berman et al., “Modest, Secure and Informed,” 

p. 515. Other types of economic interventions 

May be more effective. For example, one recent 

study from Kandahar suggests that a combination of vocational training and cash transfers 

reduced support for political violence six to 

nine months later, but providing only one or 

the other did not. Mercy Corps, Can Economic 

Interventions Reduce Violence? Impacts of 

Vocational Training and Cash Transfers 

on Youth Support for Political Violence in 

Afghanistan, February 2018.

974. FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 2006, chapter 1, 

p. 3.

975. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, testimony before

the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, hearing 

on “The New Afghanistan Strategy: The View 

from the Ground,” December 9, 2009, electronic 

p. 8.

976. Andrew Exum, Hearts and Minds in

Afghanistan: Explaining the Absence of 

Victory, French Institute of International 

Relations (IFRI), 2011, p. 7; Sarah Ladbury, 

Testing Hypotheses on Radicalisation in 

Afghanistan: Why Do Men Join the Taliban 

and Hizb-I Islami?: How Much Do Local 

Communities Support them?, 2009, p. 7.

977. Giustozzi and Ibrahimi, Thirty Years of Conflict, 

p. 32. Ambassador Eikenberry often observed, 

for example, that “wherever the roads end, 

that’s where the Taliban begins,” a sentiment 

explicitly embraced by President Bush. NPR, 

Interview with Karl Eikenberry, November 20, 

2006; President George W. Bush, “Remarks on 

the Global War on Terror,” American Enterprise 

Institute, February 15, 2007.

978. Karimi, SIGAR interview, January 16, 2017.

Secretary of State Clinton likewise wrote, “If 

the government in Kabul could build more 

credibility with its citizens, deliver services, and 

administer justice fairly and effectively, it would 

help undercut the appeal of insurgency.” Hillary 

Clinton, Hard Choices (New York, NY: Simon & 

Shuster, 2014), p. 156.

979. Antonio Giustozzi, “Hearts, Minds, and 

the Barrel of a Gun: The Taliban’s Shadow 

Government,” PRISM, vol. 3, no. 2, p. 80; Florian 

Weigand. “Afghanistan’s Taliban–Legitimate 

Jihadists or Coercive Extremists?” Journal of 

Intervention and Statebuilding, vol. 1, no. 3, 

p. 375; Carl Forsberg, The Taliban’s Campaign 

for Kandahar, p. 33; USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, December 7, 2016.

980. Wais Barmak, SIGAR interview, January 17, 

2017; Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017; 

Safiullah Baran, SIGAR interview, February 18, 

2017; Crowley, SIGAR interview, August 3, 2016. 

One academic study suggests that providing aid 
272 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

in environments where insurgents could freely 

coerce communities only made the population 

less able and likely to ally with the government, 

given the retribution they faced for doing so. 

Christoph Zürcher, “What Do We (Not) Know 

About Development Aid and Violence,” p. 516. A 

U.S. Embassy Kabul cable, recently declassified 

at SIGAR’s request, documented this dynamic 

in Marjah in May 2010, shortly after clearing 

operations there. Fifty-nine percent of residents 

interviewed believed the Taliban would return 

to Marjah after Operation Moshtarak concluded, 

and 71 percent wanted ISAF forces to leave. 

Another declassified cable notes that some 

of the population of Nawa planned to refrain 

from voting because they were waiting to see 

whether the security improvements brought 

about by ISAF and Afghan forces would last. 

U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Marjah: Reports of Civilian 

Exodus Exaggerated, but Security Constrains 

Residents and Officials,” State cable 001644 

(declassified by State on April 28, 2017, at 

SIGAR’s request), May 7, 2010; U.S. Embassy 

Kabul, “After the Taliban: High Expectations 

in Helmand’s Nawa District,” Kabul 002261 

cable (declassified by State on April 28, 2017, at 

SIGAR’s request), August 7, 2009.

981. Other scholars have gone one step further to 

argue that improving service delivery is not even

necessary to defeat an insurgency, and instead, 

counterinsurgents need only accommodate local 

elites and apply enough brute force to coerce 

both communities and insurgents. See, for 

example, Jaqueline L. Hazelton, “The ‘Hearts and 

Minds’ Fallacy,” International Security, vol. 42, 

no. 1 (2017), pp. 80–113. 

982. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 16, 2016. According to research 

by Antonio Giustozzi, by 2009 Taliban judges 

were present in most districts where the group 

operated, and the Taliban judiciary was highly 

institutionalized. Antonio Giustozzi, “Hearts, 

Minds, and the Barrel of a Gun,” p. 74.

983. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 18, 2016.

984. The study also found that poor service delivery 

can undermine people’s perceptions of government and be destabilizing when the rules and 

patterns of resource distribution are perceived 

to be unfair. Sturge, Mallett, Hagen-Zanker, and 

Slater, Tracking livelihoods, service delivery 

and governance: panel survey findings, p. viii.

985. Eikenberry, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency

Doctrine in Afghanistan: the Other Side of 

COIN,” pp. 66–67; Thomas P. Cavanna, Hubris, 

Self-Interest, and America’s Failed War in 

Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 

2015), p. 135.

986. Astri Suhrke, “Exogenous State-building: the 

contradictions of the international project in

Afghanistan,” in Rule of Law in Afghanistan, 

ed. Whit Mason and Martin Krygier (Cambridge, 

UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 9, 

13–14. Granted, as Suhrke notes, under the 

circumstances, options were limited, and service 

delivery was the only pitch the coalition could 

help the government make as a basis for its legitimacy. Invoking Islam was politically untenable, 

and invoking nationalism to address outsider 

threats was counterproductive, as the coalition 

was the outsider and most likely candidate for 

nationalistic ire. Suhrke, When More Is Less, 

p. 153.

987. Esmati, SIGAR interview, December 12, 2016.

988. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 20; Farid 

Mamundzai, SIGAR interview, December 29, 

2016; Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, “The 

National Solidarity Programme,” p. 310.

989. Brown, The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local 

Governance, p. 4.

990. SIGAR, Corruption in Conflict, p. 4.

991. Frances Z. Brown, “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, 

Again,” The American Interest, vol. 8, no. 2 

(2012), pp. 39-40.

992. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 62.

993. Chandrasekaran, Little America, pp. 165–166;

Eikenberry, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency 

Doctrine in Afghanistan: the Other Side of 

COIN,” pp. 68–70; Coll, Directorate S, pp. 397, 

491.

994. Chretien, SIGAR interview, July 22, 2016;

Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 168.

995. Ehsan Zia, SIGAR interview, January 30, 2017.

996. Chretien, SIGAR interview, July 22, 2016.

997. Mujib Mashal, “After Karzai,” The Atlantic, July/

August 2014.

998. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 13, 2016.

999. Chandrasekaran, Little America, pp. 46,

139–140; Mashal, “After Karzai;” U.S. Embassy 

Kabul, “Karzai Visit to Helmand,” Kabul 004187 

cable (declassified by State on April 28, 2017, at 

SIGAR’s request), January 13, 2010. 

1000. State, “Reflections on Afghanistan: Lessons for 

Future Conflict and Stabilization Operations,”

p. 4.

1001. Scott Horton, “Afghanistan: Six Questions for 

Thomas Barfield,” Harper’s, May 21, 2010.

1002. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 59.

1003. Nasr, The Dispensable Nation, p. 20; stabilization implementing partner chief of party, SIGAR 

interview, August 15, 2016; senior U.S. official, 

SIGAR interview, September 13, 2016; senior 

USAID official, SIGAR interview, December 4, 

2016.

1004. Vanda Felbab-Brown, SIGAR interview, 

January 13, 2017.

1005. MSI, Community Outreach and Engagement, 

p. 27; Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts 

and Minds, p. 59; Massoom, SIGAR interview, 

March 10, 2017.

1006. Mamundzai, SIGAR interview, December 29,

2016.
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 273

1007. MSI, Community Outreach and Engagement, 

p. 38; Caerus Associates, The Stability Analysis 

Methodology in Afghanistan, pp. 25–26.

1008. A 2016 study commissioned by the Danish 

government on lessons learned in Afghanistan

came to the same conclusion: “Based on the 

experience of Afghanistan this study suggests 

that future stabilization interventions should 

take their starting point in the local context and 

from there seek to outline a possible political 

process that can lead the country away from 

fragility and toward stability. Only on the basis 

of such an analysis can meaningful decisions be 

made about the specific combination of international instruments and the degree to which 

these instruments need to go hand-in-hand in the 

field in order to succeed.” Likewise, the study 

found that a key lesson was that transforming 

political development in fragile states is much 

harder and takes much longer than had been 

assumed, and that future efforts should be much 

less ambitious. Andersen, Afghanistan Lessons 

Identified: 2001–2014, Part I, pp. 10, 82–83.

1009. Karimi, SIGAR interview, January 16, 2017.

See also, Vanda Felbab-Brown et al., “Second 

Wind: Taliban Coercion and Governance in 

Afghanistan,” in Militants, Criminals, and 

Warlords: The Challenge of Local Governance 

in an Age of Disorder, (Washington: Brookings 

Institution Press, 2018), pp. 39–42.

1010. Giustozzi, “Hearts, Minds, and the Barrel of a 

Gun: The Taliban’s Shadow Government,” p. 80; 

Weigand, “Afghanistan’s Taliban–Legitimate 

Jihadists or Coercive Extremists?,” p. 375; 

Forsberg, The Taliban’s Campaign for 

Kandahar, p. 33; USAID official, SIGAR interview, December 7, 2016; former DOD advisor, 

SIGAR interview, April 20, 2017; senior U.S. 

official, SIGAR interview, September 16, 2016.

1011. USAID official, SIGAR interview, October 7,

2016.

1012. Mamundzai, SIGAR interview, December 29,

2016; Karimi, SIGAR interview, January 16, 

2017; Wesa, SIGAR interview, January 7, 2017; 

Massoom, SIGAR interview, March 10, 2017; 

Latif Nasiri, SIGAR interview, March 20, 2017; 

USAID official, SIGAR interview, October 7, 

2016; senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview, 

September 16, 2016; Anthony H. Cordesman, The 

Afghan War: Reshaping American Strategy and 

Finding Ways to Win, CSIS, 2016, p. 40; Forbes, 

“The Significance of Taliban Shari`a Courts in 

Afghanistan,” p. 14; Giustozzi and Ibrahimi, 

Thirty Years of Conflict, p. 60; Woodward, 

Obama’s Wars, p. 243; Vanda Felbab-Brown et 

al., “Second Wind,” in Militants, Criminals, and 

Warlords, p. 41.

1013. Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017.

1014. Rubin, SIGAR interview, February 17, 2017. One

former USAID official likewise observed, “The 

simplest thing the Taliban was providing was dispute resolution and we built everything else. We 

built courthouses instead of mobile conflict resolution mechanisms. We didn’t understand what 

was needed.” Former USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, October 18, 2016. More recently, State, 

USAID, and DOD have cautioned against “promoting formal national and criminal justice-focused institutions based on Western domestic 

experiences,” and stressed the importance of 

supporting informal justice mechanisms, “such 

as local, tribal, religious, or other non-government justice institutions.” State, USAID, and 

DOD, Stabilization Assistance Review, p. 15.

1015. Noah Coburn, Informal Justice and the

International Community in Afghanistan, 

USIP, 2013, p. 15.

1016. Coburn, Informal Justice and the International 

Community in Afghanistan, p. 86; M. 

Cherif Bassiouni and Daniel Rothenberg, “An 

Assessment of Justice Sector and Rule of Law 

Reform in Afghanistan and the Need for a 

Comprehensive Plan,” in The Rule of Law in 

Afghanistan, 2007, pp. 16, 36; Suhrke, When 

More Is Less, p. 200. There were contentious 

debates among Afghan officials, donors, and civil 

society about the wisdom of promoting TDR, the 

norms of which regularly led to human rights violations. As often occurred during the reconstruction, there was tension between short- and longterm efforts to stabilize these areas, as short-term 

gains often created long-term problems. 

1017. State, U.S. Government Rule of Law Strategy 

for Afghanistan, September 2009, p. 1; Coburn, 

Informal Justice and the International 

Community in Afghanistan, p. 31.

1018. Giustozzi, “Hearts, Minds, and the Barrel of a 

Gun,” p. 78.

1019. Mamundzai, SIGAR interview, December 29,

2016; Miakhel, SIGAR interview, February 7, 

2017.

1020. Former senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

1021. Rubin, SIGAR interview, February 17, 2017.

1022. SIGAR, Rule of Law in Afghanistan: U.S. 

Agencies Lack a Strategy and Cannot Fully

Determine the Effectiveness of Programs 

Costing More Than $1 Billion, SIGAR 15-68-AR, 

July 2015, pp. 30–34. Total informal rule of law 

spending May be closer to $50 million, as the $47 

million Afghanistan Rule of Law Program only 

partially focused on informal rule of law. 

1023. State, U.S. Government Rule of Law Strategy 

for Afghanistan, p. 9. It is worth noting that 

one of ASOP’s central objectives was to resolve 

community disputes through TDR, but ASOP 

was technically a $35 million governance program, not a Rule of Law program. Likewise CCI 

and SIKA conducted TDR training and activities, 

though only for a fraction of their projects.

1024. Sibghatullah, SIGAR interview, December 5,

2016.

1025. SIGAR, Rule of Law in Afghanistan, SIGAR 15-

68-AR, p. 17.

1026. State, U.S. Government Rule of Law Strategy 

for Afghanistan, p. 2.

1027. Sayara Research, Performance Evaluation

of the Rule of Law Stabilization–Informal 
274 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

Component Program, prepared under contract 

for USAID, May 2014, pp. 6, 49–50; Checchi and 

Co., Final Evaluation Report: Rule of Law 

Stabilization Program–Informal Component, 

prepared under contract for USAID, April 2014, 

pp. 35–36.

1028. For more on the program’s mixed results and

the evolution of rule of law programming 

in Afghanistan more broadly, see Geoffrey 

Swenson, “Why U.S. Efforts to Promote Rule 

of Law in Afghanistan Failed,” International 

Security, vol. 42, no 1 (Summer 2017), pp. 114–

151.

1029. USAID, “Fact Sheet: Rule of Law Stabilization 

Program–Informal Justice Sector Component,”

October 1, 2013. Specifically, the program actually employed sharia to emphasize the suitability 

of TDR to resolve civil aspects of disputes (usually involving some kind of financial restitution 

or “restorative” justice), but also emphasized 

the importance of referring criminal aspects of 

disputes that might involve punishment to the 

formal justice system. (According to political 

anthropologist Noah Coburn, “Informal justice 

mechanisms tend to apply restorative justice, 

as opposed to the retributive or punitive justice 

decisions obtained through most formal court 

proceedings.”) It was exactly the kind of hybrid 

effort recommended by UNDP, the World Bank, 

and USIP. See Coburn, Informal Justice and 

the International Community in Afghanistan, 

2013, p. 11; Suhrke, When More Is Less, pp. 213–

217. 

1030. Safiullah Baran, SIGAR interview, February 18,

2017.

1031. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016.

1032. Stabilization implementing partner deputy chief 

of party, SIGAR interview, August 30, 2016; 

USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016; USAID stabilization official, 

SIGAR interview, October 7, 2016; senior USAID 

official, SIGAR interview, November 10, 2016.

1033. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 24, 2016.

1034. MSI, MISTI Task 1: Desk Review of

Stabilization Resources and References, p. 14; 

Caerus Associates, The Stability Analysis 

Methodology in Afghanistan, pp. 23–24; 

Barmak, SIGAR interview, January 17, 2017; 

Esmati, SIGAR interview, December 12, 2016.

1035. MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan Update, FY

2012–2015, May 2014, pp. 21–22.

1036. MSI, Community Outreach and Engagement, 

pp. 3, 22; stabilization implementing partner deputy chief of party, SIGAR interview, August 30, 

2016.

1037. Stabilization implementing partner chief of party,

SIGAR interview, August 15, 2016; stabilization 

implementing partner deputy chief of party, 

SIGAR interview, August 30, 2016.

1038. Rubin, SIGAR interview, February 17, 2017.

1039. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 3–4; 

MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan Update, FY 

2012–2015, May 2014, p. 17. 

1040. Mamundzai, SIGAR interview, December 29,

2016.

1041. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 47; Ashraf Nasiri, SIGAR interview, 

December 11, 2016; Fidai, SIGAR interview, 

January 10, 2017; Mamundzai, SIGAR interview, 

December 29, 2016; Esmati, SIGAR interview, 

December 12, 2016.

1042. Brown, Rethinking Afghan Local Governance 

Aid After Transition, p. 5; stabilization implementing partner deputy chief of party, SIGAR 

interview, August 30, 2016; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, October 24, 2016.

1043. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, pp. 3, 31–34.

1044. USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016.

1045. Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, Randomized 

Impact Evaluation of Afghanistan’s National 

Solidarity Programme, 2013, pp. 71–73. 

Perceived economic well-being also increased 

in NSP villages. Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, 

Winning Hearts and Minds Through 

Development, p. 15.

1046. Caerus Associates, The Stability Analysis

Methodology in Afghanistan, p. 27.

1047. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

September 9, 2016; military planner, SIGAR interview, November 3, 2016; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, November 18, 2016.

1048. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 18, 2016; Ashraf Nasiri, SIGAR interview, December 11, 2016; Babakarkheil, SIGAR 

interview, December 29, 2016; Esmati, SIGAR 

interview, December 12, 2016.

1049. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

September 9, 2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, October 24, 2016.

1050. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

September 9, 2016; Mamundzai, SIGAR interview, December 29, 2016.

1051. This was especially true given that “extending 

the reach” often amounted to a government

official making a single visit to a community 

and assuming this would establish an enduring 

government linkage with that community. For 

more, see Brown, Rethinking Afghan Local 

Governance Aid After Transition, pp. 8–10.

1052. USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview,

September 9, 2016.

1053. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 18, 2016.

1054. Jabar Naimee, SIGAR interview, March 6, 2017.

1055. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 29; USAID 

stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, October 24, 2016; stabilization 

implementing partner deputy chief of party, 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 275

SIGAR interview, August 30, 2016; USAID official, SIGAR interview, August 12, 2016.

1056. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 18, 2016.

1057. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 13, 2016; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, November 10, 2016.

1058. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 18, 2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, October 24, 2016; senior USAID 

official, SIGAR interview, November 18, 2016; 

Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 238–239.

1059. The White House, White Paper of the

Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. 

Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, 

March 2009, p. 2.

1060. Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, Integrated

Civilian-Military Campaign Plan, 2009, pp. 3, 

11; Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 107.

1061. Nasr, The Dispensable Nation, p. 26.

1062. State, “The President’s Announcement on the

Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Text 

of the Speech, Fact Sheet and Questions and 

Answers,” State 123222 cable, December 2, 2009.

1063. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 18, 2016.

1064. State, Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional 

Stabilization Strategy, February 24, 2010.

1065. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 18, 2016; U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, 

U.S. Foreign Assistance for Afghanistan, annex 

VII, p. 10. By 2012, the embassy also released 

a gender strategy to “mainstream gender 

concerns into all policies and programs” and 

promote “gender equitable programming” across 

all portfolios. U.S. Embassy Kabul, Gender 

Strategy, Interagency Gender Working Group, 

September 2012, pp. 2, 10.

1066. State, Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional 

Stabilization Strategy, February 24, 2010, p. 7.

1067. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 18, 2016.

1068. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 1, 27.

1069. State, “Reflections on Afghanistan: Lessons for 

Future Conflict and Stabilization Operations,”

p. 4; Felbab-Brown, “Slip-Sliding on a Yellow 

Brick Road: Stabilization Efforts in Afghanistan,” 

p. 11.

1070. Chretien, SIGAR interview, July 22, 2016.

1071. USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016.

1072. McQuillan, SIGAR interview, July 21, 2016;

Massoom, SIGAR interview, March 10, 2017.

1073. USAID official, SIGAR interview, August 12,

2016.

1074. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

1075. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 191.

1076. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016.

1077. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

January 25, 2017.

1078. The White House, White Paper of the

Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. 

Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, 

March 2009, p. 2.

1079. Embassy Kabul and USFOR-A, Integrated

Civilian-Military Campaign Plan, 2009, p. vi; 

McChrystal, Commander’s Initial Assessment, 

chapter 2, pp. 19–20.

1080. A 2016 Danish government-funded study on 

lessons learned from the effort in Afghanistan

noted that the myriad challenges posed by working in such insecure areas raised the question 

whether more would have been achieved if the 

stabilization effort had been focused in more 

secure areas. Andersen, Afghanistan Lessons 

Identified: 2001–2014, Part I, p. 57.

1081. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 29–30.

1082. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 18, 2016; stabilization implementing 

partner deputy chief of party, SIGAR interview, 

August 30, 2016; Barmak, SIGAR interview, 

January 17, 2017; Esmati, SIGAR interview, 

December 12, 2016; Fishstein and Wilder, 

Winning Hearts and Minds, pp. 42–43.

1083. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 28,

2016.

1084. Stabilization implementing partner deputy chief 

of party, SIGAR interview, August 30, 2016; 

USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, September 27, 2016; MSI, Stability in Key 

Areas (SIKA) Program Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 3; Fishstein and Wilder, Winning 

Hearts and Minds, p. 37. 

1085. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 13, 2016.

1086. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

1087. McQuillan, SIGAR interview, July 21, 2016;

Barmak, SIGAR interview, January 17, 2017; 

Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017.

1088. USAID, OTI Afghanistan Strategy: 2012–2015, 

June 2013; David Axe, “U.S. Tests ‘Ink Spot’ 

Strategy in Afghanistan,” Washington Times, 

November 12, 2009.

1089. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, November 18, 2016; Mangal, SIGAR 

interview, March 3, 2017. For a discussion of the 

competing theories that advocate for focusing 

on the least stable areas first versus expanding 

ink spots from semi-stable areas, see ISAF, 

ISAF Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) 

Handbook, Edition 4, March 2009, pp. 16–17.

1090. See, for example, Douglas Saltmarshe and 

Abhilash Medhi, Local Governance in 

Afghanistan: A View from the Ground, AREU, 

June 2011, pp. 39–40.

1091. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 2; USAID 

stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016; USAID stabilization official, 

SIGAR interview, October 7, 2016.
276 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

1092. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

October 24, 2016.

1093. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 13, 2016.

1094. Crowley, SIGAR interview, August 3, 2016; 

USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016.

1095. Eli Berman, Joseph Felter, and Jacob Shapiro,

“Constructive COIN: How Development Can 

Fight Radicals,” Foreign Affairs, June 1, 2010.

1096. Former DOD advisor, SIGAR interview, April 20, 

2017.

1097. Joel Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1098. Nasr, The Dispensable Nation, p. 26; McQuillan, 

SIGAR interview, July 21, 2016; Crowley, SIGAR 

interview, August 3, 2016; USAID official, SIGAR 

interview, August 12, 2016.

1099. USAID official, SIGAR interview, October 7,

2016.

1100. USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, September 27, 2016; senior USAID official, 

SIGAR interview, November 10, 2016; senior 

USAID official, SIGAR interview, November 18, 

2016.

1101. Barmak, SIGAR interview, January 17, 2017;

Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017. For 

more on the deterioration of security since 

transition began, see Thomas Ruttig, “More 

violent, more widespread: Trends in Afghan 

security in 2017,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, 

January 29, 2018. 

1102. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 150.

1103. Forsberg, Politics and Power in Kandahar, 

p. 23.

1104. Civ-mil planner at Embassy Kabul, SIGAR interview, November 4, 2016.

1105. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 48; Babakarkheil, SIGAR interview, 

December 29, 2016; Miakhel, SIGAR interview, 

February 7, 2017.

1106. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017. There 

were also, however, examples of how a solid understanding of local political dynamics enabled 

programs to be more effective. Recognizing the 

district governor’s corruption and ties to the 

insurgency’s shadow government was one of 

the main drivers of the insurgency in Sayadabad 

District of Wardak Province, ASI-E chose to partner with traditional elders in the area instead. 

DAI, Final Report: Afghanistan Stabilization 

Initiative-East, pp. 29–30.

1107. USAID stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016.

1108. See, for example, Jacob Kipp, Lester Grau, Karl 

Prinslow, and Don Smith, “The Human Terrain 

System: A CORDS for the 21st Century,” Military 

Review, September/October 2006; Clifton Green, 

“Turnaround: The Untold Story of the Human 

Terrain System,” Joint Forces Quarterly, Third 

Quarter, 2015.

1109. See, for example, Vanessa Gezari, “The Human

Terrain System Sought to Transform the Army 

from Within,” Newsweek, August 16, 2013; 

Vanessa Gezari, The Tender Soldier: A True 

Story of War and Sacrifice, (New York: Simon 

& Schuster, 2013); Christopher J. Lamb et al., 

Human Terrain Teams: An Organizational 

Innovation for Sociocultural Knowledge in 

Irregular Warfare, (Washington, DC: Institute of 

World Politics Press, 2013).

1110. See, for example, Michael Davies, “The 

Truth About Human Terrain Teams: An 

Evidence-Based Response to Gian Gentile,” 

E-International Relations, 2013; Christopher 

Sims, “Academics in Foxholes: the Life and 

Death of the Human Terrain System,” Foreign 

Affairs, February 4, 2016; Ryan Evans, “The 

Seven Deadly Sins of the Human Terrain 

System,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, 

2015; Christopher Lamb et al., “The Way Ahead 

for Human Terrain Teams,” Joint Forces 

Quarterly, Third Quarter, 2013; David B. 

Edwards, “COIN as a Cultural System,” Small 

Wars Journal, 2010.

1111. One of the most well-known clarion calls for 

the military to better understand this kind

of information is found in Flynn, Pottinger, 

and Batchelor, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for 

Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan, 

January 2010. Other programs were established 

to assist in the effort, including the Atmospherics 

Program-Afghanistan (APA), which ran from 

2009 to 2014 and sent Afghan contractors into 

communities to document the contents of sermons in mosques and routine conversations held 

in public spaces. APA provided an atmospheric 

or “talk-of-the-town” perspective that anecdotally highlighted local perceptions about the 

Afghan government, Afghan forces, the coalition, 

insurgent groups, and similar topics. According 

to Mike Williams, the former director of the CivMil Integration Program at ISAF headquarters 

from 2012–2013, APA employed more than 600 

Afghan contractors at a time. These contractors 

lived and worked in almost every province and 

wrote nearly 150,000 reports at an approximate 

cost of $150 million. The unclassified reports 

were then geotagged, uploaded to a database, 

and distributed to the coalition. Mike Williams, 

SIGAR interview, February 27, 2018.

1112. Nasr, The Dispensable Nation, p. 21.

1113. Former USAID official, SIGAR interview,

January 25, 2017.

1114. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

January 25, 2017.

1115. Karimi, SIGAR interview, January 16, 2017.

1116. U.S. Army officer, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment,

SIGAR interview, May 5, 2017.

1117. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

November 23, 2016.

1118. Eikenberry, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency

Doctrine in Afghanistan: the Other Side of 

COIN,” p. 64.

1119. USAID, Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives, 

p. 12; McQuillan, SIGAR interview, July 21, 2016; 

USAID official, SIGAR interview, August 12, 

2016; USAID stabilization official, SIGAR interview, September 9, 2016; senior U.S. official, 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 277

SIGAR interview, September 13, 2016; USAID 

stabilization contractor, SIGAR interview, 

September 27, 2016; USAID stabilization official, 

SIGAR interview, October 7, 2016; senior USAID 

official, SIGAR interview, October 24, 2016; 

Military planner, SIGAR interview, November 3, 

2016; senior USAID official, SIGAR interview, 

November 18, 2016; Massoom, SIGAR interview, 

March 10, 2017.

1120. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

August 15, 2016.

1121. U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign

Assistance for Afghanistan, annex VII, p. 10.

1122. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 27.

1123. USAID, Lessons Learned: USAID Perspectives, 

p. 1.

1124. Crowley, SIGAR interview, August 3, 2016.

1125. USAID official, SIGAR interview, December 7,

2016.

1126. Fishstein and Wilder, Winning Hearts and 

Minds, p. 60; Social Impact, Final Performance 

Evaluation of USAID/OTI Community 

Cohesion Initiative in Afghanistan, p. 21. 

1127. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation of

USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, p. xii.

1128. Antonio Giustozzi and Ashley Jackson, Talking 

to the Other Side: Humanitarian Engagement 

with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Humanitarian 

Policy Group, December 2012, p. 22; former 

USAID official, SIGAR interview, June 1, 2017.

1129. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “Nawa: Assassinations 

Cast a Pall Over Recent Gains,” Kabul 003727

cable (declassified by State on April 28, 2017, 

at SIGAR’s request), November 18, 2009; 

Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017; 

Azami, “Kandahar: Assassination capital of 

Afghanistan.”

1130. Christoph Zürcher, “What Do We (Not) Know 

About Development Aid and Violence,” pp. 508, 

512.

1131. Empirical Studies of Conflict Project analysis. 

Data from Andrew C. Shaver and Austin L.

Wright, “Data on Combatant Activity During 

Afghanistan War Advance Scientific Investigation 

of Insurgency,” Technical Report 2017.

1132. U.S. Embassy Kabul, “After the Taliban: High

Expectations in Helmand’s Nawa District,” Kabul 

002261 cable (declassified by State on April 28, 

2017, at SIGAR’s request), August 7, 2009; U.S. 

Embassy Kabul, “The Fight for Marjah is Just 

Beginning,” Kabul 000763 cable (declassified 

by State on April 28, 2017, at SIGAR’s request), 

March 3, 2010; senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview, September 13, 2016; Chretien, SIGAR interview, July 22, 2016; Egel et al., Investing in the 

Fight, pp. 268–275; Dressler, Counterinsurgency 

in Helmand, p. 38; Flynn, Pottinger, and 

Batchelor, Fixing Intel, p. 13. 

1133. Senior U.S. official, SIGAR interview,

September 13, 2016; Chretien, SIGAR interview, 

July 22, 2016. 

1134. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 70; Fishstein

and Wilder, Winning Hearts and Minds, p. 60. 

1135. Andrew Wilder, SIGAR interview, January 25, 

2017.

1136. Chretien, SIGAR interview, July 22, 2016.

1137. Mujib Mashal, “Marines Return to Helmand 

Province for a Job They Thought Was Done,” 

New York Times, April 29, 2017.

1138. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 70; Egel

et al., Investing in the Fight, p. 267; FM 3-24, 

Counterinsurgency, 2006, chapter 1, p. 13. For 

the operation in Marjah, a sub-district of Nad Ali 

(population 88,000), coalition nations contributed more than 15,000 troops to the operation, including three battalions from the United States. 

1139. Wesley Morgan, Afghanistan Order of Battle, 

2009–2012, Institute for the Study of War, pp. 77, 

89, 203. 

1140. Chretien, SIGAR interview, July 22, 2016.

1141. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 71.

1142. Mashal, “Marines Return to Helmand Province 

for a Job They Thought Was Done.”

1143. Afghan Hand for VSO, SIGAR interview,

September 7, 2016.

1144. State, USAID, and DOD, Stabilization

Assistance Review, p. 2.

1145. State, USAID, and DOD, Stabilization

Assistance Review, pp. 2, 6–7.

1146. State, USAID, and DOD, Stabilization Assistance 

Review, p. 8.

1147. State, USAID, and DOD, Stabilization

Assistance Review, p. 11. Similarly, as the UK 

government notes, “even when there are military-led and implemented tasks in stabilisation 

(e.g., carrying out patrols to bolster local security), their application should occur in the context 

of an operationally civilian-led, politically-engaged, stabilisation approach.” UK Stabilisation 

Unit, The UK Approach to Stabilisation, 2014, 

p. 5.

1148. SIGAR’s CERP audit similarly recommends

that DOD develop measures of effectiveness 

for CERP. SIGAR, Commander’s Emergency 

Response Program: DOD Has Not Determined 

the Full Extent to Which Its Program and 

Projects, Totaling $1.5 Billion in Obligations, 

Achieved Their Objectives and Goals in 

Afghanistan from Fiscal Years 2009 through 

2013, SIGAR 18-45-AR, April 2018.

1149. For an overview of how cultural competency is 

already atrophying within DOD as it did after

Vietnam, see Ben Connable, “Human Terrain 

System is Dead, Long Live . . . What? Building 

and Sustaining Military Cultural Competence in 

the Aftermath of the Human Terrain System,” 

Military Review, January/February 2018. 

1150. For more on the AFPAK Hands, see Capt. James

Hamblet, “AFPAK Hands (APH) Program,” Joint 

Staff J-5, Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination 

Cell, n.d.; U.S. Army, “The Afghanistan-Pakistan 

Hands Program,” February 11, 2014. 

1151. State, USAID, and DOD, Stabilization

Assistance Review, pp. 12–13.
278 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

1152. For detailed discussions of which civilian skills 

May be necessary in such a standby component

and the difficulty of civilian staffing in contingency operations more generally, see Terrence 

K. Kelly et al., Stabilization and Reconstruction 

Staffing: Developing U.S. Civilian Personnel 

Capabilities, RAND, 2008; Hans Binnendijk 

and Patrick M. Cronin, Civilian Surge: Key 

to Complex Operations, National Defense 

University, 2009.

1153. A good example of this kind of reform is the 

Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability 

Act of 2016, which requires agencies to focus 

on outcomes rather than outputs, devote more 

programmatic resources to M&E, and be more 

transparent about the efficacy of their foreign 

assistance programs. See Adva Saldinger, “U.S. 

Congress approves long-sought Foreign Aid 

Transparency and Accountability Act,” Devex, 

July 7, 2016. 

1154. Reconstruction and Stabilization Civilian 

Management Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-417 (22

USC 2734).

1155. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017; Bill 

Roggio, “Afghan, U.S. Forces Hunt al Qaeda, 

Taliban in northeast,” Long War Journal, 

August 2, 2010; Combined Joint Task Force-101 

(CJTF-101), Comprehensive Plan for USG 

Support to Kunar Province 2009–2012, 

March 2009, pp. 1, 11; Linda Robinson, One 

Hundred Victories, (New York, NY: Public 

Affairs, 2013), pp. 228–229.

1156. Robinson, One Hundred Victories, pp. 228–229;

CJTF-101, Comprehensive Plan for USG 

Support to Kunar Province 2009–2012, p. 8; 

Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1157. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1158. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1159. David Kilcullen, Accidental Guerilla: Fighting

Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford, 

UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 106.

1160. Kilcullen, Accidental Guerilla, p. 106.

1161. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017; field 

director for an implementing partner, SIGAR 

interview, May 9, 2017.

1162. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017; DAI, Preliminary 

Impact Assessment of ASI-East in Four 

Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, pp. 26, 41.

1163. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1164. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1165. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1166. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1167. Greg Jaffe, “U.S. and Afghan forces launch 

major assault in eastern province of Konar,” 

Washington Post, June 29, 2010.

1168. Jaffe, “U.S. and Afghan forces launch major 

assault in eastern province of Konar;” Vowell, 

SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017; Toby Harnden, 

“Afghanistan: Gen. Petraeus Says U.S. Forces 

will remain through end of 2014,” December 8, 

2010, Telegraph.

1169. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 43.

1170. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017; USAID 

official, SIGAR interview, March 24, 2017; field 

director for an implementing partner, SIGAR 

interview, May 9, 2017.

1171. USAID official, SIGAR interview, March 24, 2017.

1172. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1173. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1174. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1175. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1176. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017; field 

director for an implementing partner, SIGAR 

interview, May 9, 2017.

1177. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1178. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 52.

1179. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1180. As of February 2012, UNDP programs operating 

in Marawara included the National Area-Based

Development Program and the Disarmament 

of Illegal Armed Groups program. DAI, 

Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASI-East in 

Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, p. 41.

1181. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1182. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 48.

1183. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, August 30, 2016.

1184. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1185. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1186. Mangal, SIGAR interview, March 3, 2017;

McQuillan, SIGAR interview, July 21, 2016; 

U.S. official, September 13, 2016; Chou, “Does 

Development Assistance Reduce Violence? 

Evidence from Afghanistan,” p. 5. One critical 

form of tangible community cooperation was 

information sharing by communities with the 

coalition regarding IED emplacement. Berman et 

al., “Modest, Secure and Informed,” p. 512.

1187. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 17; field director for an implementing partner, 

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1188. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1189. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1190. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1191. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1192. Operation Strong Eagle II, conducted halfway 

up the valley a month after Strong Eagle I, was
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 279

quite brief, because the coalition faced very 

little opposition, engaging in only one small 

firefight upon landing. Vowell, SIGAR interview, 

March 21, 2017.

1193. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1194. Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 2017.

1195. Field director for an implementing partner,

SIGAR interview, May 9, 2017.

1196. Social Impact, Final Performance Evaluation of

USAID/OTI Community Cohesion Initiative in 

Afghanistan, pp. ii, 56.

1197. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 42.

1198. Morgan, Afghanistan Order of Battle, 2009–

2012, pp. 5, 21, 27; Morgan, Afghanistan Order 

of Battle, 2013, Institute for the Study of War, 

pp. 4, 9; Vowell, SIGAR interview, March 21, 

2017.

1199. Empirical Studies of Conflict Project analysis. 

Data from Andrew C. Shaver and Austin L.

Wright, “Data on Combatant Activity During 

Afghanistan War Advance Scientific Investigation 

of Insurgency,” Technical Report 2017.

1200. DAI, Preliminary Impact Assessment of ASIEast in Four Districts in Eastern Afghanistan, 

p. 18. For more on the steady deterioration

of security since transition, as measured by 

various indicators, see Thomas Ruttig, “More 

violent, more widespread: Trends in Afghan 

security in 2017,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, 

January 29, 2018. 

1201. Checchi and Co., Final Project Evaluation

Report for Afghan Civilian Assistance 

Program, prepared under contract for USAID, 

April 2010, p. 2

1202. Checchi and Co., Final Project Evaluation

Report for Afghan Civilian Assistance 

Program, p. 12; USAID, “Fact Sheet: Afghan 

Civilian Assistance Program.”

1203. USAID, “Fact Sheet: Afghan Civilian Assistance 

Program.” ACAP did not provide assistance to

individuals or families adversely affected by 

fighting between Afghan security forces and 

insurgents. Checchi and Co., Final Project 

Evaluation Report for Afghan Civilian 

Assistance Program, p. 11.

1204. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Afghan Civilian

Assistance Program Final Evaluation, pp. 1, 

12–14, 17, 29.

1205. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Afghan Civilian

Assistance Program Final Evaluation, pp. 22–

23.

1206. Senior USAID official, SIGAR interview,

December 4, 2016; MSI, USAID Stabilization 

Unit Afghanistan: Performance Management 

Plan, Fiscal Years 2012–15, June, 2013, p. 7

1207. IRD, Afghan Civilian Assistance Program II: 

Final Program Report, May 2015, p. 41

1208. IRD, Afghan Civilian Assistance Program II: 

Final Program Report, p. 1.

1209. IRD, Afghan Civilian Assistance Program II: 

Final Program Report, p. 1.

1210. IRD, Afghan Civilian Assistance Program II: 

Final Program Report, p. 3.

1211. MSI, Afghan Civilian Assistance Program: 

Final Performance Evaluation, February 2015, 

p. 6.

1212. IRD, Afghan Civilian Assistance Program II: 

Final Program Report, p. 4.

1213. IRD, Afghan Civilian Assistance Program II: 

Final Program Report, p. 19.

1214. DOD, Report on Progress toward Security and 

Stability in Afghanistan, June 2009, p. 43

1215. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach 

Program: Final Report, prepared under contract 

for USAID, January 2012, p. 3

1216. Saltmarshe and Medhi, Local Governance in

Afghanistan: A View from the Ground, p. 44.

1217. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach 

Program: Final Report, p. 1.

1218. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach 

Program: Final Report, pp. 4, 6, 22.

1219. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach 

Program: Final Report, pp. 13–19.

1220. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach 

Program: Final Report, pp. 30–31.

1221. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach 

Program: Final Report, pp. 4, 32.

1222. AECOM, Afghanistan Social Outreach 

Program: Final Report, p. 28.

1223. Altai Consulting, Afghanistan Stabilization

Initiative: Third Party Evaluation and 

Strategic Support, prepared under contract for 

USAID, June 2012, p. 6.

1224. USAID, Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative 

Quarterly Report: January–March 2010, 

prepared under contract for USAID, p. 3; 

Altai Consulting, Afghanistan Stabilization 

Initiative: Third Party Evaluation and 

Strategic Support, p. 11.

1225. USAID, Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative–

South: Final Report, p. 14; DAI, Final Report 

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative-East, 

pp. 13–36.

1226. DAI, Annual Report, Year 1: Afghanistan

Stabilization Initiative-East, prepared under 

contract by USAID, July 2010, p. 3; USAID, 

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative–

South: Final Report, p. 6; DAI, Final Report: 

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative-East (ASIEast), September 2012. 

1227. DAI, Final Report: Afghanistan Stabilization 

Initiative-East, p. 10; Altai Consulting, 

Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative: Third 

Party Evaluation and Strategic Support, p. 18.

1228. DAI, Final Report: Afghanistan Stabilization 

Initiative-East, p. 14.

1229. USAID, Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative–

South: Final Report, p. 6.

1230. USAID, Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative–

South: Final Report, pp. 8, 10.

1231. USAID, Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative–

South: Final Report, pp. 11–12.

1232. USAID, Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative–

South: Final Report, p. 11.
280 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

1233. USAID/OTI, ALAG: Afghanistan Local Activity 

Guide, August 27, 2011, p. 15. For example, 

a grant to repair gates controlling water flow 

through an irrigation system in Marjah required 

that the beneficiaries first clean out the canal, 

and that the provincial-level government entity 

responsible for regulating irrigation systems 

verify that the cleaning had taken place, before 

the grant could proceed.

1234. Shahmahmood Miakhel, “A Brief Overview 

of the Afghanistan Stabilization Program: A

National Program to Improve Security and 

Governance,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, 

July 9, 2012, p. 2; DFID, Country Programme 

Evaluation Afghanistan, May 2009, p. 46; 

USAID, “Afghanistan Stabilization Program 

Scope of Work,” pp. 1, 9.

1235. DFID, Country Programme Evaluation 

Afghanistan, p. 46. 

1236. Miakhel, “A Brief Overview of the Afghanistan 

Stabilization Program,” p. 2.

1237. Miakhel, “A Brief Overview of the Afghanistan 

Stabilization Program,” p. 2; USAID,

“Afghanistan Stabilization Program Scope of 

Work,” p. 8.

1238. USAID, “Afghanistan Stabilization Program 

Scope of Work,” pp. 3, 5.

1239. USAID, “Afghanistan Stabilization Program 

Scope of Work,” pp. 4, 8.

1240. Miakhel, “A Brief Overview of the Afghanistan 

Stabilization Program,” p. 3; Checchi and Co.,

Performance Evaluation of District Delivery 

Program, April 2012, p. 38; DFID, Country 

Programme Evaluation Afghanistan, p. 46. 

Many of ASP’s intended functions were reassigned to new, off-budget programs. These 

included ASOP, the Governor Performance 

Fund, and the Afghan Local Governments 

Facility Development Program. Miakhel, “A 

Brief Overview of the Afghanistan Stabilization 

Program,” pp. 3, 4.

1241. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, p. 16.

1242. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, p. 14.

1243. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, pp. 7, 31.

1244. USAID, “USAID Field Report Afghanistan,” 

June 30, 2005; Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI 

Afghanistan Program: Final Evaluation, p. 19.

1245. USAID, “USAID Field Report Afghanistan,” 

June 30, 2005; Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI 

Afghanistan Program: Final Evaluation, pp. 10, 

14.

1246. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, pp. 13, 15, 29, 30.

1247. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, pp. 8–9.

1248. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, p. 66.

1249. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, p. 39.

1250. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, p. 10.

1251. Social Impact, Inc., USAID/OTI Afghanistan

Program: Final Evaluation, pp. 11, 28.

1252. USAID OIG, Audit of USAID/Afghanistan’s 

Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Productive 

Agriculture, 5-306-10-008-P, p. 5; IRD, AVIPA 

Plus: Final Report, p. 2.

1253. IRD, AVIPA Plus: Final Report, p. vii; 

USAID OIG, Audit of USAID/Afghanistan’s 

Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Productive 

Agriculture, 5-306-10-008-P, p. 5.

1254. IRD, AVIPA Plus: Final Report, pp. 2, 6.

1255. IRD, AVIPA Plus: Final Report, p. 1. This decision was prompted by the sudden cancellation 

of a five-year agricultural program that had been 

set to begin later that year, coupled with the U.S. 

military’s request that, in preparation for the 

anticipated troop surge in the south that summer, USAID have stabilization activities ready to 

be initiated as the troops cleared Helmand and 

Kandahar.

1256. IRD, AVIPA Plus: Final Report, p. 14.

1257. IRD, AVIPA Plus: Final Report, pp. 1–2.

1258. IRD, AVIPA Plus: Final Report, p. 3.

1259. USAID, Office of Transition Initiatives:

1994–2009, 2009, p. 2. 

1260. Social Impact Inc., Final Performance

Evaluation of USAID/OTI Community 

Cohesion Initiative in Afghanistan, p. ii; 

USAID, Community Cohesion Initiative: Final 

Report, p. 2. 

1261. Social Impact Inc., Final Performance

Evaluation of USAID/OTI Community 

Cohesion Initiative in Afghanistan, p. 3.

1262. USAID, Community Cohesion Initiative: Final 

Report, p. 3.

1263. Social Impact Inc., Final Performance

Evaluation of USAID/OTI Community 

Cohesion Initiative in Afghanistan, pp. 5–6.

1264. Creative Associates International, Community

Cohesion Initiative Annual Report: Oct 2013–

Sep 2014, p. 7; USAID, Community Cohesion 

Initiative: Final Report, pp. 3, 7, 13.

1265. USAID, Community Cohesion Initiative: Final 

Report, p. 3.

1266. Creative Associates International, 2014 Afghan

Presidential and Provincial Council Election: 

Assessment Report, prepared under contract for 

USAID, December 2014, p. 12. 

1267. Social Impact Inc., Final Performance

Evaluation of USAID/OTI Community 

Cohesion Initiative in Afghanistan, pp. iv-v, 14. 

1268. Social Impact Inc., Final Performance

Evaluation of USAID/OTI Community 

Cohesion Initiative in Afghanistan, pp. xi, 1.

1269. “USAID “Factsheet: Community Development 

Program,” June 2011. MSI, Community 

Development Program: Final Performance 

Evaluation, p. 8.

1270. MSI, Community Development Program: 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 4; Altai 

Consulting, Community Development Program–

North (CDP-N): Final Evaluation, prepared 

under contract for USAID, November, 2012, 

p. 12; SIGAR, USAID’s Kabul Community 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 281

Development Program Largely Met the 

Agreement’s Terms, But Progress Toward LongTerm Goals Needs to be Better Tracked, SIGAR 

11-11-AR, June 2011, p. 2.

1271. MSI, Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 1.

1272. MSI, Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 4.

1273. MSI, Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, p. 4.

1274. USAID, “Factsheet: Community Development 

Program,” October 25, 2013; USAID, “Factsheet:

Community Development Program,” June 2011.

1275. MSI, Community Development Program: Final 

Performance Evaluation, pp. 5, 14.

1276. USAID, “Community Based Stabilization Grants 

(CBSG),” awarded to Creative Associates

International, Cooperative Agreement No. 306-A00-10-00513-00, 4 March, 2010, p. 11.

1277. USAID, “Community Based Stabilization Grants 

(CBSG),” pp. 11–12.

1278. Creative Associates International, Community

Based Stabilization Grants: Final Report, 

prepared under contract for USAID, July 2012, 

pp. 7–8.

1279. Creative Associates International, Community

Based Stabilization Grants: Final Report, 

p. 13; Creative Associates International, 

Community Based Stabilization Grants 

(CBSG) Program Quarterly Report: Q2 FY11 

(Jan – March 2011), prepared under contract 

for USAID, p. 6.

1280. Creative Associates International, Community

Based Stabilization Grants: Final Report, p. 8. 

1281. Creative Associates International, Community

Based Stabilization Grants: Final Report, p. 12.

1282. Creative Associates International, Community

Based Stabilization Grants: Final Report, 

pp. 6, 17; USAID, “Factsheet: Community Based 

Stabilization Grants,” June 2011.

1283. Creative Associates International, Community

Based Stabilization Grants: Final Report, p. 6.

1284. Creative Associates International, Community

Based Stabilization Grants: Final Report, p. 14; 

Creative Associates International, Community 

Based Stabilization Grants (CBSG) 

Program Quarterly Report: Q2 FY11 (Jan – 

March 2011), p. 19.

1285. Adam Smith International, Diagnostic of the

District Delivery Program, p. 6; Checchi 

and Co., Performance Evaluation of District 

Delivery Program, April 2012, p. 11.

1286. Adam Smith International, Diagnostic of the

District Delivery Program, p. 9; Sibghatullah, 

SIGAR interview, December 5, 2016.

1287. Checchi and Co., Performance Evaluation of

District Delivery Program, p. 6.

1288. Checchi and Co., Performance Evaluation of

District Delivery Program, p. 38.

1289. USAID, “District Delivery Program and 

Stabilization: U.S. Mission Road Map and Way 

Ahead,” n.d., p. 2.

1290. Checchi and Co., Performance Evaluation of

District Delivery Program, p. 39.

1291. Tamas, SIGAR interview, July 13, 2016; Checchi 

and Co., Performance Evaluation of District 

Delivery Program, pp. 15–17.

1292. Sibghatullah, SIGAR interview, December 5,

2016.

1293. Kandahar Food Zone, “Kandahar Food Zone 

Annual Report (Fourth Quarter 2016),”

October 2016, p. 14.

1294. MSI, Kandahar Food Zone, Mid-Term

Performance Evaluation, March 2015, p. 5.

1295. MSI, Kandahar Food Zone, Mid-Term

Performance Evaluation, p. 5.

1296. MSI, Kandahar Food Zone, Mid-Term

Performance Evaluation, p. 6.

1297. The program named this approach Community 

Based Planning to Support Alternatives for

Poppy Cultivation or CBPSA-PC. MSI, Kandahar 

Food Zone, Mid-Term Performance Evaluation, 

p. 7.

1298. MSI, Kandahar Food Zone Annual Report 

(Fourth Quarter 2016), prepared under contract 

for USAID, October, 2016, p. 77; MSI, Kandahar 

Food Zone, Mid-Term Performance Evaluation, 

p. 25.

1299. MSI, Kandahar Food Zone, Mid-Term

Performance Evaluation, p. 25.

1300. MSI, Kandahar Food Zone Annual Report 

(Fourth Quarter 2016), p. 24; MSI, Kandahar 

Food Zone, Mid-Term Performance Evaluation, 

p. 2.

1301. MSI, Kandahar Food Zone, Mid-Term

Performance Evaluation, p. 31.

1302. MSI, Kandahar Food Zone Annual Report 

(Fourth Quarter 2016), p. 3.

1303. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Local

Governance and Community Development 

Program Evaluation, January 2009, p. 5. In 2006, 

USAID changed the QIP element of its work 

on PRTs into LGCD, expanding the scope to 

include capacity building and conflict mitigation, 

in addition to construction. Michelle Parker, A 

Case Study of Nangarhar, Afghanistan in 2006, 

National Defense University, Case Studies in 

National Security, no. 10, August 2007, p. 10.

1304. SIGAR, USAID Spent Almost $400 Million, 

SIGAR 12-8-AR, pp. 1–3.

1305. SIGAR, USAID Spent Almost $400 Million, 

SIGAR 12-8-AR, p. 7.

1306. As of September 2011, USAID had spent approximately $373 million on LGCD. SIGAR, USAID 

Spent Almost $400 Million, SIGAR 12-8-AR, p. 4.

1307. SIGAR, USAID Spent Almost $400 Million, 

SIGAR 12-8-AR, p. 5; DAI, Local Governance 

and Community Development: Final Report, 

August 2011, p. 3.

1308. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, p. 1.

1309. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, p. 81.

1310. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, p. 64.

1311. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, pp. 82, 84. While 

LGCD’s local governance component was for-
282 | ENDNOTES

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

mally removed and reassigned to another USAID 

program, Afghanistan Civil Service Support, 

USAID continued to ask LGCD to provide technical assistance at the district level. 

1312. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, pp. 83–84.

1313. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, p. xii.

1314. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, p. 4; Rohullah Niazi, 

SIGAR interview, December 12, 2016. 

1315. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, pp. 44–45.

1316. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, p. 171.

1317. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development Quarterly Report, Reporting

Period: January–March 2008, prepared under 

contract for USAID, p. 2.

1318. DAI, Local Governance and Community 

Development: Final Report, pp. 171, 245. 

Community contributions included materials, 

such as bricks, land, timber, or sand and rocks, 

while labor contributions often took the form of 

lodging, food, security, or the use of community 

buildings. However, there were some instances 

in which communities made substantial cash 

contributions. DAI, Local Governance and 

Community Development: Final Report, pp. 45, 

252.

1319. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Local

Governance and Community Development 

Program Evaluation, January 2009, p. 31.

1320. SIGAR, USAID Spent Almost $400 Million, 

SIGAR 12-8-AR, pp. 5–9; Checchi and Co.,

Final Report: Local Governance and 

Community Development Program Evaluation, 

January 2009, p. 40.

1321. SIGAR, USAID Spent Almost $400 Million, 

SIGAR 12-8-AR, p. 4.

1322. The eight programs were CBSG, ASI, CDP,

DDP, CCI, the SIKAs, KFZ, and ACAP II. USAID, 

AID-OAA-I-10-00002, “Measuring Impact of 

Stabilization Initiative,” awarded to MSI, 

March 14, 2012, p. 14; USAID, “Amendment 

of Solicitation/Modification of Contract,” 

Amendment/Modification 08 to AID-306-

TO-12-00004, February 12, 2014, p. 12; MSI, 

“Amendment of Solicitation/Modification of 

Contract,” Amendment/Modification 08 to AID306-TO-12-00004, February 12, 2014, p. 7.

1323. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends Impact

Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 

5, p. 1; MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and 

Impact Evaluation Survey Analytical Report, 

Wave 3: November 16, 2013–January 30, 2014, 

p. 7.

1324. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends Impact

Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

pp. 1–11.

1325. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends Impact

Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 1.

1326. USAID, “Measuring Impact of Stabilization 

Initiative,” pp. 7, 16; Egel and Glick, Peer Review 

of the MISTI Survey, p. 56.

1327. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends Impact

Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 1.

1328. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends Impact

Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 3.

1329. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends Impact

Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 3.

1330. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends Impact

Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 323.

1331. Egel and Glick, Peer Review of the MISTI

Survey, p. 37.

1332. Egel and Glick, Peer Review of the MISTI

Survey, p. 24. 

1333. Egel and Glick, Peer Review of the MISTI

Survey, p. 19; USAID stabilization official, SIGAR 

interview, September 9, 2016.

1334. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends Impact

Evaluation Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 5, 

p. 3. For more information on MISTI’s technical and analytical approach, see MSI, MISTI 

Stabilization Trends Impact Evaluation 

Survey: Analytical Report, Wave 5, and Egel and 

Glick, Peer Review of the MISTI Survey.

1335. MSI, MISTI Stabilization Trends and Impact

Evaluation Survey, Analytical Report, Wave 2, 

May 18–August 7, 2013, April 5, 2013, pp. 47–48.

1336. Egel and Glick, Peer Review of the MISTI

Survey, p. 1.

1337. USAID, “PRT Quick Impact Projects,” n.d., 

USAID website.

1338. USAID, “Provincial Reconstruction Teams,”

January 2006, USAID archived website.

1339. Reina C. Neufeldt, Ethics for Peacebuilders:

A Practical Guide, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & 

Littlefield, 2016), p. 109.

1340. Michelle Parker, Programming Development 

Funds to Support a Counterinsurgency: A 

Case Study of Nangarhar, Afghanistan in 

2006, National Defense University, Case Studies 

in National Security Transformation, no. 10, 

August 2007, p. 13.

1341. GAO, Afghanistan Reconstruction: Despite 

Some Progress, Deteriorating Security

and Other Obstacles Continue to Threaten 

Achievement of U.S. Goals, GAO-05-742, 

July 2005, p. 18; IOM, “Emergency and 

Development Infrastructure Department,” annex 

1, p. 17.

1342. USAID, “PRT Quick Impact Projects.”

1343. Checchi and Co., Final Evaluation Report:

Rule of Law Stabilization Program–Informal 

Component, April 2014, p. 7; Sayara Research, 

Performance Evaluation, p. 6.

1344. Sayara Research, Performance Evaluation, 

p. 13. In Afghanistan TDR providers include local 

village elders, family elders, and religious leaders. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Rule of Law 

Stabilization Program–Informal Component, 
STABILIZATION

MAY 2018 | 283

prepared under contract for USAID, July 2012, 

p. 12.

1345. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Rule of Law

Stabilization Program–Informal Component, 

p. 8.

1346. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Rule of Law

Stabilization Program–Informal Component, 

p. 12.

1347. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Rule of Law

Stabilization Program–Informal Component, 

p. 17; Sayara Research, Performance 

Evaluation, p. 25.

1348. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Rule of Law

Stabilization Program–Informal Component, 

pp. 10, 18.

1349. Checchi and Co., Final Report: Rule of Law

Stabilization Program–Informal Component, 

pp. 7, 20. Spinsaries are female elders or 

traditional justice actors that play a limited role 

in community decision making and dispute 

resolution. 

1350. Checchi and Co., Final Evaluation Report:

Rule of Law Stabilization Program–Informal 

Component, pp. 1, 4.

1351. USAID, “Fact Sheet: Rule of Law Stabilization 

Program–Informal Justice Sector Component,”

October 1, 2013; Sayara Research, Performance 

Evaluation, p. 6.

1352. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program: 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 7, 8.

1353. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program: 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 1, 7.

1354. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program: 

Final Performance Evaluation, pp. 7, 9.

1355. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) Program: 

Final Performance Evaluation, p. 11; USAID, 

“Factsheet: Stability in Key Areas (SIKA).”

1356. AECOM, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA)-West

Final Report, prepared under contract for 

USAID, October 2015, pp. 49, 53.

1357. AECOM, “Stability in Key Areas (SIKA)–West

Final Report,” October 2015, pp. 36–37.

1358. MSI, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA)–East MidTerm Performance Evaluation, November 2014, 

p. 26.

1359. In various documents SAM stood for either the 

Stability Assessment Methods or the Stability

Analysis Methodology. Caerus Associates, The 

Stability Analysis Methodology in Afghanistan; 

MSI, USAID Stabilization Unit Afghanistan 

Performance Management Plan Update, FY 

2012–2015, May 2014, p. 20.

1360. SIGAR, Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) 

Programs: After 16 Months and $47 Million

Spent, USAID Had Not Met Essential Program 

Objectives, SIGAR 13-16-AR, July 2013, pp. 5–8.

1361. Checchi and Co., Final Report Evaluation

of USAID’s Strategic Provincial Roads 

Southern and Eastern Afghanistan SPR-SEA 

Program, prepared under contract for USAID, 

August 2011, pp. 1, 9; Scott Higham, Jessica 

Schulberg and Steven Rich, “Doing well by doing 

good: the high price of working in war zones,” 

Washington Post, May 4, 2014.

1362. USAID, “Fact Sheet: Strategic and Provincial 

Roads-Southern and Eastern Afghanistan (SPRSEA),” June 2011.

1363. Checchi and Co., Final Report Evaluation of

USAID’s Strategic Provincial Roads Southern 

and Eastern Afghanistan SPR-SEA Program, 

p. 15.

1364. Checchi and Co., Final Report Evaluation of

USAID’s Strategic Provincial Roads Southern 

and Eastern Afghanistan SPR-SEA Program, 

p. 20.

1365. IRD, Afghanistan: Case Studies in Community 

Stabilization 2006–2013, 2014, p. 36.

1366. Checchi and Co., Final Report Evaluation of

USAID’s Strategic Provincial Roads Southern 

and Eastern Afghanistan SPR-SEA Program, 

pp. 14, 43.

1367. Checchi and Co., Final Report Evaluation of

USAID’s Strategic Provincial Roads Southern 

and Eastern Afghanistan SPR-SEA Program, 

p. 16.

1368. Checchi and Co., Final Report Evaluation of

USAID’s Strategic Provincial Roads Southern 

and Eastern Afghanistan SPR-SEA Program, 

p. 1; Higham, Schulberg, and Rich, “Doing well 

by doing good: the high price of working in war 

zones,” Washington Post, May 4, 2014. Note: 

Miles were converted to kilometers. 

1369. Higham, Schulberg, and Rich, “Doing well 

by doing good: the high price of working in

war zones,” Washington Post, May 4, 2014; 

Checchi and Co., Final Report Evaluation of 

USAID’s Strategic Provincial Roads Southern 

and Eastern Afghanistan SPR-SEA Program, 

pp. 17–18.

1370. Checchi and Co., Final Report Evaluation of

USAID’s Strategic Provincial Roads Southern 

and Eastern Afghanistan SPR-SEA Program, 

p. 33. 
284 | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SIGAR acknowledges the invaluable contributions to this report from scores 

of individuals. 

We thank our peer reviewers for their insights and thoroughness: Frances Z. 

Brown, Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Stuart 

Gordon, Research Fellow at Chatham House; Nick Marinacci, Senior Transition 

Advisor at USAID; Mike McCord, Foreign Service Officer at USAID; David 

Petraeus, Chairman of the KKR Global Institute; Jake Shapiro, Professor at 

Princeton University and Co-Director at the Empirical Studies of Conflict 

project; Astri Suhrke, Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute; Andrew 

Wilder, Vice President of Asia Programs at USIP; and Christoph Zürcher, 

Professor at the University of Ottawa.

We sincerely thank the more than 100 individuals who gave generously of their 

time and allowed us to interview them at length. In particular, we are grateful 

to retired generals John Allen, Karl McQuillan, David Petraeus, Edward Reeder, 

and David Richards. We also thank current and former Afghan ministers Wais 

Barmak, Gulab Mangal, and Ehsan Zia, as well as former deputy ministers 

Tariq Esmati, Barna Karimi, Farid Mamundzai, and Shah Mahmood Miakhel. 

We greatly appreciate the hospitality of U.S. Embassy Kabul, the fieldwork of 

Dr. Sibghatullah, and the GIS services of John M. Steed. We also are grateful 

for the formal and informal contributions and detailed feedback of all those at 

USAID, State, and DOD.

Finally, we appreciate the support of Scott Worden, former director of SIGAR’s 

Lessons Learned Program and current director of Afghanistan and Central Asia 

Programs at USIP, and Kim Corthell, former acting director of SIGAR’s Lessons 

Learned Program; both were instrumental in getting this report off the ground. 

Report Staff

Jordan Kane, Research Analyst

Paul Kane, Research Analyst

Olivia Paek, Senior Visual Information Specialist

Jordan Schurter, Student Trainee

Joseph Windrem, Lessons Learned Program Director

David H. Young, Lead Analyst and Project Lead

Elizabeth Young, Editor
The National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2008 (P.L. 110-181) 

established the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan 

Reconstruction (SIGAR). 

SIGAR's oversight mission, as defined by the legiSlation, is to provide for the 

inclepenclent and objecUve 

• conduct and supervision of audits and investigations relating to the programs 

and operations funded ·with amounts appropriated or otherwise made available 

for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. 

• leadership ~md coorclination of, and recornmendations on, policies designed 

to promote economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in the administration of the 

programs and operations, and to prevent and detect waste, fraud, and abuse 

in such programs ancl operations. 

• means of keeping the Secretary oJ State and the Secretary of Defense fully 

and currently .informed about problems ancl deficiencies relating to the 

administration of such programs and operation and the necessity for and 

progress on corrective action. 

Afghanistan reconstruc:1 i011 includes any major e:ontTact, grant, agreement, 

or other funding mechanism entered into by any department or agency of the 

U.S. govemrnent that involves tile use of ammmts appropriated or otherwise made 

available Jor the reconstruction of Afghanistan. 

As required by the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2018 (P.L. 115-91), 

this report has been prepared in accordance wit.11 the QuaUt;y Standards for 

lnsp<-'ctjon and Evaluation issued by the Council o[ the Inspectors General on 

lntegriLy and Efficiency. 

~ow·ce: P.L 110-181. "Nuticm;-tl Defense Authoriwtio11 Aet tor FY 2008;' .JR11umy 28. 2008; P.L 115-9] ,"National 

D"'fe11se Alli horizacfon Ac, for FY 201 S, .. Dert>.mbeJ· 12. 20 l 7