Failed U.S. Plan to Rebuild Afghanistan Cost $145 Billion with Hundreds of Millions Going to Taliban

For nearly two decades the U.S. government spent a breathtaking $145 billion on a failed plan to rebuild Afghanistan and at least $26 billion of it was lost to waste, fraud and abuse, according to the final report published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The United States also left behind over $38 billion in military equipment and military and civilian infrastructure, the audit reveals, offering enraging details about the U.S. government’s costly debacle to restore a terrorist nation that promptly returned to Taliban rule the moment American troops left in 2021. Even after the Biden administration’s disastrous military withdraw, hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid kept flowing into the coffers of fake charities created by the Taliban. The terrorist group also received at least $239 million in development assistance because the State Department did not screen award recipients, failing to comply with its own counterterrorism partner vetting requirements before disbursing dozens of grants to local entities in the central Asian Islamic nation.

“The Afghan government’s stunningly rapid collapse in August 2021 laid bare a fragility concealed by years of confident assertions of progress,” the new SIGAR report states. “The gap between ambition and reality was vast, with deteriorating conditions continually stymying objectives that proved to be unrealistic.” Investigators blame multiple factors for the U.S. failure to transform a war-torn, underdeveloped country into a stable and prosperous democracy. “For example, early and ongoing U.S. decisions to ally with corrupt, human-rights-abusing powerbrokers bolstered the insurgency and undermined the mission, including U.S. goals for bringing democracy and good governance to Afghanistan,” the audit says, adding that efforts to improve Afghanistan’s economic and social conditions also failed to have a lasting impact and that despite nearly “$90 billion in U.S. appropriations for security-sector assistance, Afghan security forces ultimately collapsed quickly without a sustained U.S. military presence.” The cost of the failed Afghanistan reconstruction plan was “immense,” investigators found, and includes tens of thousands of people— including more than 2,450 U.S. servicemembers—killed. Many more were injured, among them more than 20,700 U.S. servicemembers, the watchdog writes.

SIGAR, which was created in 2009 and will officially shut down at the end of January 2026, has identified at least 1,327 instances of waste, fraud, and abuse for a total of at least $26 billion from 2002 through the middle of 2021. The cash started flowing shortly after President George W. Bush launched military operations in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks as part of the war on terror. Even after Afghanistan fell back to Taliban rule in 2021, the U.S. remains its largest donor disbursing over $3.83 billion in humanitarian and development assistance, much of it managed by the famously corrupt United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was dismantled by the Trump administration. Nevertheless, the money is still flowing to Afghanistan, with disbursements of $120 million in the March 2025 quarter alone, according to the SIGAR report. Past failures have not stopped Uncle Sam from cutting the checks. The report offers a multitude of examples of the waste over the years, including $7.3 billion on an ineffective counternarcotics program that did little to stem the production and exportation of illicit drugs; $4.7 billion on a failed stabilization project to keep insurgents out of an area after they had been expelled by security forces; $675 Million on wasteful business development programs aimed at reducing violence to enhance stability and economic normalcy; $486 million for unused aircraft for the Afghan Air Force; $335 million for a USAID constructed power plant that was not utilized and $85 million for an unfinished—and never used—hotel across from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

Most of the projects that seemed legitimate were also wasteful and failed to accomplish their goal, the final in-depth probe confirms. For instance, the U.S. allocated $90 billion to Afghanistan Security yet the nation’s security forces collapsed quickly without sustained U.S. Military presence. Investigators warn that the costly failure to rebuild Afghanistan was predictable. “Unlike past reconstruction efforts in places like post-World War II Europe or Japan where the United States successfully rebuilt countries whose modern economies, industry, and infrastructure had been degraded by war, Afghanistan was a severely underdeveloped state,” SIGAR writes. “U.S. efforts there were often trying to create capabilities, systems, and institutions of a type and quality the country had never possessed.”