The One Big Thing Biden Got Right About Afghanistan

This failure was aggravated by pressures in Washington to rack up successes very quickly. Officials poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan, mistakenly believing that more money would yield faster results, when in fact the cash just swelled the corruption. When officials realized this fact, they tried filtering the money through unofficial channels--and, as a result, the few honest officials in the Afghan government never learned how to manage those own agencies. U.S. personnel policy also deepened the morass. Washington's "inability to get the right people into the right jobs at the right time" marked "one of the most significant failures of the mission."