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.

Patrick J. Sullivan, PhD, is a United States Army Colonel currently serving as an Academy Professor and Director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is veteran of eight combined tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and has commanded engineer units at company-level through brigade.