It is ping-pong season in Afghanistan. Within 48 hours of an assertion on the status of hostilities by US Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford, Taliban delivered a snub through coordinated attacks in several districts in northern, northeastern and southern Afghan provinces.  On July 19, Afghan officials acknowledged the insurgents have made territorial gains in some areas. The renewed insurgent hostilities came a day after Dunford concluded a three-day visit to Kabul as part of the overall assessment of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan. He attributed recent lower level of violence than anticipated to Afghan forces’ significantly increased capabilities, notably air power. But Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid offered a contrasting claim and attributed the slow-down in attacks to the “unusually hot month of Ramadan.”  In messages to media, Mujahid said simultaneous and coordinated attacks in several provinces, including Kunduz, Baghlan, Badakhshan and Helmand starting Sunday are a proof of the plans the Taliban devised during Ramadan and the activity is going to intensify. These conflicting views mean continued hostilities and an enormous financial bleeding for the US-led Resolute Support Mission, a sequel to the Operation Enduring Freedom, which ended in December 2014 with the bulk drawdown of US-NATO troops from Afghanistan, following a 13-year massive infusion of money (over $700 billion) and manpower in the war that peaked in 2010/11 with 133,000 men. Additionally, this cost several billion dollars in the name of Afghan-military related support missions, infrastructure projects, and social service centres. It has been a bizarre spending spree sans accountability. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction office, headed by John Sopko since 2012, has looked at hundreds of projects to check how the approximately $113.1 billion spent on Afghanistan relief and reconstruction since 2002 were spent. These audits also...

Some recent events and statements originating in Washington, Warsaw (NATO summit) and Kabul, seemed to have created a triumphant, though largely misplaced impression that both India and Afghanistan have managed to encircle Pakistan. An appended perception was that of Islamabad’s international isolation. But these noises beg some reflection. Is Pakistan really isolated? Let us look around for an answer. China has stuck its neck out for a mutually beneficial multi-billion dollar China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Russia too, is embarking on a new phase of relations with Pakistan, particularly after the latter’s entry into the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The World Bank has loaned some $5.5 billion to the country in the last three years, which wouldn’t be possible without a nod by Washington, which holds majority shares in the Bank. And what about power brokers in Washington DC itself? Well, one finds a lot of cockcrows, trying to belittle Pakistan; among them, Balochistan-fame congressmen like Dana Rohrabachar, or the Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad; although he has served as the US ambassador in Afghanistan, but in Washington he sounds more like the Afghan ambassador. During the July 12 proceedings of a sub-panel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Khalilzad and Bill Roggio, senior editor of the publication Long War Journal, accused the Pakistan military of maintaining ties with the Taliban and Haqqani militants. This is the time to increase the pressure by suspending all assistance to Pakistan — military and civilian — and move towards isolating Pakistan internationally, including not supporting IMF renewal of financial support, Khalilzad argued in his testimony, which was vociferously shared with the media by Indian and Afghan officials in Washington. Unlike these noises by presumably directly or otherwise paid lobbyists, remarks by Senator John McCain and other members of a bipartisan congressional delegation to Pakistan and Afghanistan after...

Over 15 years in the Afghan war, having spent billions of dollars and losing thousands of lives, the talk in Washington, DC amongst some of the policymakers and think tanks is whether Pakistan is a friend or a foe. Pushed by the Indian lobby or not, the current political climate in DC is such that it’s hard to remain neutral on Pakistan, let alone have a soft stance towards the country, with propositions to halt the entire US aid to Pakistan, and putting economic sanctions are surfacing more frequently than ever before. Normally, such a discourse and political developments should cause an alarm in Pakistan’s diplomatic corps and within the security establishment. In response, however, the Foreign Office of Pakistan gets down to releasing a pre-prepared statement from 2006 reminding the US of the cost Pakistan has suffered during the war. This exercise has become so monotonous that civil bureaucracy on both sides realises to a certain extent the irrelevance of such blank statements given the fact that their respective security institutions, and not them, drive policy between the two countries. Peddled by a handful of US congressmen, such a narrative may not have any immediate effect on the US policy towards Pakistan but in the long run may reduce Pakistan’s clout and ability to lobby for its interest in the US. The last entire decade is a witness to Pakistan’s shrinking space in the US capital because of it slowly being labelled as playing a ‘double game’ and ‘state sponsoring terrorism’ in the wake of the US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, Pakistan continues to receive one of the largest military and economic aid packages from the US — something that India finds hard to grapple with and for the right reason. Part of the reason why Pakistan continues to receive highest aid from the US while getting the most beating at the same time despite of all the sacrifices the country and its people have made, is that its relations with the US is driven largely by the...

In 2008, the Pentagon bought 20 refurbished cargo planes for the Afghan Air Force, but as one top US officer put it, “just about everything you can think of was wrong.” No spare parts, for example. The planes were also “a death trap,” according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. So $486 million was spent on worthless planes that no one could fly. We did recoup some of the investment. Sixteen of the planes were sold as scrap for the grand sum of $32,000. That’s 6 cents a pound. You’d think someone would have been in trouble. Wrong. Nothing happened to anybody in charge of that spectacular screw up. No general even had to make an embarrassing appearance on Capitol Hill. Congress made not a peep. Even worse, such jaw-dropping waste without a shred of accountability is not an anomaly. It has happened in Afghanistan again and again, and, you guessed it, again. Some of the more outlandish examples have briefly seized the attention of the news media, but really, the running tab for the waste has mounted out of sight of the taxpayers footing the bill. And what a bill it is. There’s a widely held idea of “just” as in “just a few million.” Like the military officer who wrote that the $25 million blown on a fancy headquarters nobody used was “probably not bad in the grand scheme of things.” But those millions add up. To billions. The problem, contrary to popular assumptions, is not unscrupulous contractors. Follow the long trail of waste and you’ll be standing at the doors of the military, the State Department and the US. Agency for International Development. It’s their bad decisions, bad purchases and bad programs that are consistently to blame. ProPublica pored over more than 200 audits, special projects and inspections done by SIGAR since 2009 and built a database to add up the total cost of failed reconstruction projects. Looking at the botched projects collectively — rather than as one-off headlines — reveals a grim picture of the overall...