Civilian Oversight of Military Operations in Afghanistan

The Case of SIGAR

Patrick J. Sullivan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9783031983221
• eBook ISBN: 9783031983238
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book assesses the oversight regime in Afghanistan to identify and characterize the oversight failures, and then links them to specific negative strategic outcomes. Although there are high-quality analyses available about what went wrong in Afghanistan and why, few of them are grounded in scholarly research that uses empirical methods. This book fills that epistemological gap as well as provides a unique contribution to the body of literature, which does not contain any comprehensive studies of Afghanistan oversight. This type of study is important because certain characterizations of an oversight failure—e.g., Congress knowing that things were going badly in Afghanistan but choosing not to do anything about it—point to several pathologies about political control of the military and the incentive structures contained therein. Understanding and proactively managing these pathologies will be critical to improving strategic outcomes in future complex military interventions of the Afghanistan type.

Table of contents

• Palgrave Studies in Global Security
• Civilian Oversight of Military Operations in Afghanistan
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Disclaimer
• Contents
• List of Tables
• 1. A Tale of Two Wars
• 2. SIGAR and the Afghanistan IG Enterprise in Context
• 3. Framework to Assess Afghanistan Oversight
• 4. SIGAR’s Failure to Audit
• 5. SIGAR’s Auditing of Failure
• 6. Afghanistan Oversight in the Congressional Record and Executive Reports
• 7. What the Failure of the Afghanistan Oversight Regime Says About the Future
• Appendix A: Content Summaries—SIGAR Quarterly Reports
• Appendix B: Content Summaries—SIGAR Lessons Learned Reports
• Appendix C: SIGAR and the DoD Statutory Reports
• Appendix D: SIGAR and the Congressional Record
• Index