Waste, fraud, and abuse.

     "What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists. . .. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules."

     Sarah Chayes, former NPR reporter in Afghanistan, and advisor to the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Maybe we are to blame.

The word "Afghanistan" now represents failure. Some people blame the mission, wrong from the get-go. Some people blame our decision to leave. Some people blame the generals for telling Biden Afghanistan would remain orderly for 90 days, not collapse in a week. Some people blame Biden for being so naive as to believe them. Trump blames Biden. At a rally yesterday evening in Alabama, Trump said Biden was weak and incompetent, and everything would have gone great if we had just retained him as president.

Possibly "corruption" has been mentioned all along in the news coming out of Afghanistan, but if so, it was in the background and not the main story and I didn't notice. American news focused on the map of Taliban control of what territory, not why the Taliban remained such a viable alternative in the Afghan countryside.

Beginning this week we are hearing about Afghan government corruption. Afghans faced two bad choices--Taliban brutality representing a return to Islam and traditional customs, or a Western government noteworthy for its corruption. "Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were," Chayes wrote. She observed that the last speaker of the Afghan parliament, Rahman Rahmani is a multimillionaire, "thanks to monopoly contracts to provide fuel and security to U.S. forces at their main base, Bagram."   Click: Chayes

The easy and politically convenient people to blame are Afghan elites. Rachel Maddow pointed that direction in a recent show on MSNBC. That is an incomplete story. The corruption happened under American watch, with our money sloshing around. Americans contractors were getting rich, too. 

Click: Taibbi

Matt Taibbi wrote that nation-building missions "assume bureaucratic lives of their own, and contracting becomes an end in itself." Foreign operations like this one become "boondoggles in large part because they’re so many levels removed from anything like oversight."

He reported that our Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction determined that as they reviewed money spent there that about 30% of the money spent in Afghanistan was lost to "waste, fraud, and abuse."

The $700 billion military budget is already an unguarded trough for contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Overseas theaters are simply more inaccessible plunder zones within that already impenetrable black box of over-spending,

Chayes, too, points the finger back at Americans.

 I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for. . .. I hold U.S. civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome.

Americans may be in no mood for self-reflection, especially on a problem that is as baked into our system as the military-industrial complex. We fight wars with masses of money, not massed armies of American soldiers. There are casualties either way, and in this case, money. We supercharge corruption. The civilian leadership called out by Chayes include presidents and legislators of both parties. Nearly everyone signed onto the original mission. Some piece of every weapon system gets built in nearly every state. There is no one to act as accuser and truth-teller--except an independent media.

Governments learn and change when confronting failures. The public demands something be done. There is potential here for Americans to examine how we waste our tax money and facilitate corruption that undermines our values and subverts our national interest. I don't expect us to recoil from corruption. The trend is the other way. Trump populism moved Americans back toward Jacksonian spoils system ethic.  Americans have become accustomed to politicized, less "professional" departments. The executive branch carries out policies to empower the political and personal interests of its leader, and non-partisan rule-oriented people are "deep state" impediments. State and county election officials who stood by their work get harassed. The Justice Department is politicized.  We have normalized self-dealing and cashing in, whether in Trump hotels or revolving doors to K Street. Corruption is not just is what we tolerate in Afghanistan, but in what we tolerate for ourselves. 

We have changed. Jimmy Carter seems quaint, and Walter Cronkite is dead.