After Key Report On Afghanistan, State Department Says Taliban Was Keeping Aid

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Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, 2 August 2025

In this article about the final (quarterly) report of the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), now abolished, – that highlights Afghanistan corruption – AAN’s Thomas Ruttig is quoted as saying:

“If you followed those reports, you were clearly aware where it was going and how it would end,” veteran Afghanistan analyst Thomas Ruttig told RFE/RL.

“Politicians chose to ignore this and continue to give us good messages from Afghanistan until the troops had to flee in August 2021. It’s a very valuable archive of data on what went wrong in Afghanistan. It would have been much better if donors and particularly the US government would have acted on it,” he added.

Elsewhere, the report states that Western countries and global institutions flooded Afghanistan with money that fueled corruption, which US officials overlooked as they “prioritized security and political goals.”

Ruttig, who worked in Afghanistan for the United Nations, the European Union, and Germany in a series of stints from 2000 to 2006, agreed with this assessment of Western engagement.

The following quote did not make it into the report:

Ruttig disagrees with the SIGAR report that states that politicians were “not knowing with whom they were doing business and empowering highly corrupt actors” in Afghanistan, saying that “I doubt that no one knew what they were doing. In my view, abetting corruption was used as a political instrument: binding known corrupt actors to ‘our’ side, with the hope, perhaps, to reign them in later on. This pervaded the ‘new’ state system and strongly undermined its credibility in the eyes of many Afghans – who knew whom the US and other donors were dealing with. Those actors were not interested in the emergence of a democratically function state, only in a façade democracy – which the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan finally became, to its collapse.”