Lessons learnt, or not, from Afghanistan.

Just before the shambolic collapse of the American position in Kabul, the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) produced its report  ​"What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction".  

An earlier report had a line that would be familiar to many people who've worked in a bureaucracy: ​“The…key finding is that…monitoring and evaluation (M&E) created the risk of doing the wrong thing perfectly. That is, programs could be deemed “successful” even if they had not achieved or contributed to broader, more important goals…”