. >>> nearly ten years ago, president barack obama decided to put a man named john sopko in charge of an inspector general's office related to the war. he would become the special general for afghanistan are you construction which means in laymen's terms he would be charged by the u.s. government for independently investigating what we're spending all our money on and what we're doing in afghanistan, and to my mind, john sopko was the right man for the job provided that you didn't want anybody to give you any happy talk about this particular situation. he had spent years as a senior congressional staffer but the kind of congressional staffers who worked mostly on investigations, specifically hard core investigations of things like organized crime and weapons of mass destruction in the former soviet union and enforcement of the foreign corrupt practices act, and international antinarcotics efforts, all the darkest, hardest stop, john sopko worked on that for years. for years before that he was a state and federal prosecutor, including years as a trial lawyer and the justice department'

john sopko is not a pushover. he's not going to tell you things you want to hear unless you deserve it. but in the decade-ish as being the man in charge, his assessments have often been brutal. at least they've been brutally blunt. here, for example, is how propublica wrote up one of his more well-known findings. quote n 2008, the u.s. bought 12 cargo plains. but just about everything you can think of was wrong. there were no spare parts for the planes, for example. the planes were also, according to the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction, quote, a death trap. so $486 million was spent on worthless planes that no one could fly. we did recoup some of the investment though. 16 of the 20 planes ended up being sold for scrap for the grand sum of $32,000. that's six cents a pound. how many hundreds of millions of dollars did those coast? john sopko also reported without fear or favor on, for example, the $43 million that we spent on a proof of concept gas station in afghanistan. it was a gas stati

it has been ten years of this kind of brutally blunt documentation from john sopko, in this important spectral general post. but now, as u.s. forces have left, and then gone back to deal with the evacuation, and as we are living day by day, hour by hour through the chaos of the evacuation, or lack thereof. he is just released his report on, how the first 20 years of our war went overall. i have to tell you, it is not a cynical document. it is not a defeatist document. but it is also as unblinking as you might expect from him. given what he has been through. it's titled, what we need to learn. that what we have learned, but we need to. learn lessons from 20 years of afghanistan reconstruction. key point number one. 20 years later, much has improved in much has not in afghanistan. if the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that could sustain itself, and pose little threat to u.s. nestle securities interest, the overall picture in afghanistan is bleak. >> if that was the goal, the overall picture is bleak. but look at key point number two. he says quote, there is no doubt that

. >> reporter: since 2012, john sopko has been the watchdog for reconstruction as the special inspectoreral for afghanistan. issuing report after report calling out failed projects and rampant corruption. just this past week he issued a "lessons learned" report. >> i did not think it would collapse this quickly, although once it happened, we realized that all the preconditions for failure were there. >> reporter: the report is based on his own inspections in afghanistan and on more than 700 strikingly candid interviews with senior administration officials down to aide workers in the field. none more candid than douglas lute, an army general who served as a special adviser on afghanistan to presidents bush and obama. "we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of afghanistan," lute told the inspector general. "we didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. it's really much worse than you think." or this recorded interview with ryan crocker, former ambassador to afghanistan, talking about the afghan police. >> they'reless as a security force. and they're useless as a s