The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has been regularly releasing reports detailing waste, fraud, abuse and potential corruption within the U.S. system of aid and support for Afghanistan since 2008. This is no small task. Afghanistan has become “the most costly reconstruction effort of a single country in U.S. history,” the Special Inspector General John Sopko noted in his testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in April. Congress has appropriated roughly $100 billion for the effort since 2002. Retrospectively and as a whole, these reports read as substantive challenges to current practices of nation-building, as well as to the reliance on contractors and to the American financial and political investment in the Karzai government.

The shape of watchdog organization’s future after this year is somewhat uncertain (much like any of the rest of the US relationship with Afghanistan). Post-2014 oversight for US assistance to Afghanistan will be no less necessary, but will no longer coincide with significant troop presence, at the very least presenting a logistical challenge. SIGAR is planning on holding a symposium this month to assess best practices for continuing its monitoring in an insecure environment.

SIGAR was established by Congress under section 1229 of National Defense Authorization Act for the fiscal year 2008. It had difficulties in its early years, notably the resignation back in 2011 of its original head, Major General Arnold Fields, after a Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency review and Congress found the organization’s early audits lacking in quality and overall direction. Formed to provide independent oversight of the use of reconstruction and assistance funds, it has been regularly releasing reports to Congress and the public about problems found in the lines of support that run between Washington and Kabul. Sometimes these reports make big headlines, as when SIGAR challenged the construction of a $34 million base in Helmand province for being unused and unnecessarily built. Others add to an accumulated sense of the weighty, problematic endeavor of such a large-scale reconstruction effort in such a complicated context.

The Pentagon and State Department are frequently put on the defensive with SIGAR’s allegations of failure, mismanagement and waste. Words like “damning” are often used in media reports to describe reports like a recent one characterizing the US attempt to throw $10 billion at fighting narcotics in Afghanistan as a failure. Recently, the organization clashed with the State Department and USAID over its reports that Afghan ministries to which USAID was giving funds (which add up to more than a billion in direct assistance) were highly susceptible to fraud and corruption. Both USAID and the State Department rejected the assessment, essentially calling SIGAR’s work incomplete and inadequate.

As a result of its unfavorable and lengthy reports, SIGAR has been the target of PR campaigns by the military to pre-empt, spin and overshadow the organization’s findings. USA Today reported at the end of January that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) issued a press release praising a hospital built in eastern Afghanistan as a “significant step forward in medical services for local Afghans” two days prior to SIGAR’s release of a report detailing serious problems with the hospital, starting with unreliable electricity and infants bathed in untreated river water and moving to significant structural problems that threatened the building’s collapse. According USA Today, ISAF never inspected the hospital, deeming the area too dangerous and force capacity too stretched, and mounted an active effort to target the SIGAR report.

Much of SIGAR’s reports get at a broader policy concern. They aren’t just indictments of individual projects that become moldy and structurally unsound or of the loss of funds to ultimately ineffective initiatives, but of the idea that putting such a huge volume of money into such a weak and fragmenting system can solve the problem of a future Afghanistan. The lessons from SIGAR’s reports, often extensive demonstrations of the failure of large sums of money to shape Afghanistan into a well-oiled governing machine, is that US efforts to build capacity in areas like social services and security have been misguided and often poorly effected.

SIGAR’s accounts of poor choices, bad planning and seemingly willful ignorance of the pitfalls of pouring money into a corrupt and leaking system usually deal with figures in the millions and billions. The recurring patterns in SIGAR’s watchdog work over the past six years create a narrative of loss on a massive scale ($10 billion, $34 million, $600,000). It speaks to a political desperation to will bundles of cash into a solution, a sort of futile attempt at political alchemy that magically turns money and infrastructure into long-term stability. Reports of PR efforts to diminish the opinion and policy impacts of SIGAR’s work imply a dedication to business as usual in defiance of the reformative and curative purpose of the watchdog organization’s audits. These reports are not intended to be fodder for political accusation, but assessments that trigger re-evaluation and improvement. Agencies’ and departments’ demonstrated preference to preserve image over making improvements is its own self-condemnation.

It’s fair to note, of course, that not only do some reports yield agency and departmental attempts at improvement, but SIGAR was never really designed to point out the parts of the process that are working. That said, the scale of the problems pointed out by the organization support the argument put forward here.

This kind of reconstruction work is ideally critical to counterinsurgency practice (COIN) — provide the necessary support to win the general population and diminish the legitimacy of the insurgency. SIGAR’s work is not necessarily an indictment of COIN, not at least of COIN in theory, but certainly of COIN as implemented by American and NATO allies over the past decade. Reconstruction efforts are central to US goals of making Afghanistan’s long-term forecast a good reflection of the last decade’s military efforts and of maintaining a political and economic environment inhospitable to militancy. The audits done by SIGAR also speak directly to the ability to build up Afghan forces and security, not simply improving governing function or social service infrastructure. A February 5 audit release concluded that the Pentagon “lacks a plan for collecting, validating, analyzing, and reporting on ANSF [Afghan National Security Force] assessments during the drawdown.”

Findings like this have serious impact on the believability of the Afghan military’s ability to provide the necessary security measures to prevent the Taliban from re-ascending to power in the wake of US withdrawal. The coming decades of Afghanistan’s governance are inevitably a reflection back on the immense effort of America’s war and policy investment in the country as well as a judgment on the efficacy of the broader war on terror to which Afghanistan has been strategically central.