SIGAR Quarterly Report to the United States Congress

Abstract

I am pleased to submit to Congress, and to the Secretaries of State and Defense, SIGARs 50th quarterly report on the status of reconstruction in Afghanistan. This report will be the first for the new Administration and Congress, and it comes at a time when Afghanistan faces what many consider its most perilous moment since the United States first intervened in the country nearly twenty years ago. Although almost exactly a year ago the United States entered with some fanfare into a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban, peace talks between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban have so far yielded few substantive results. There has been no cease-fire agreement and high levels of insurgent and extremist violence continued in Afghanistan this quarter despite repeated pleas from senior U.S. and international officials to reduce violence in an effort to advance the peace process. According to U.S. Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A), the Taliban this quarter has carried out a campaign of unclaimed attacks and targeted killings of Afghan government officials, civil society leaders, and journalists. Nor is it evident, as SIGAR discusses in this report, that the Taliban has broken ties with the al-Qaeda terrorists who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks on the United States. On November 17, Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller announced that, on instructions from President Donald J. Trump, U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan would be reduced from the 4,0005,000 reached in November, to 2,500 by January 15, 2021. The 2,500-troop level was not specified in the U.S.-Taliban agreement signed in February 2020 and defense officials acknowledge that this lower force level introduces some limitations on force capacity and on the train, advise, and assist mission.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 30, 2021
Accession Number
AD1147605

Entities

People

  • John Sopko

Organizations

  • Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Business Administration
  • Congress
  • Contingency Operations (Military)
  • Correctional Facilities
  • Criminal Investigations
  • Employment
  • Health Services
  • Interagency Coordination
  • Management Personnel
  • Medical Personnel
  • Military Science
  • Mobile Phones
  • National Governments
  • National Security
  • Organizational Structure
  • Personnel Management
  • Political Systems
  • Societies
  • Terrorism
  • Terrorists
  • United States Government
  • Warfare

Fields of Study

  • Political science

Readers

  • Government and Public Administration Law.
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.
  • Military and Counterinsurgency Studies.