In early 2025, a high-profile television journalist approached me at the Frontline Club in London and called me a “warrior journalist”. I wasn’t sure what she meant then. I am now.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, has just published what will probably be its final report. Inspectors general are independent watchdogs mandated by the US Congress to investigate how taxpayers’ money is spent. SIGAR was created in 2008 with sweeping powers to audit, investigate and expose waste, fraud and abuse in the billions of dollars that Washington poured into Afghanistan. It is the closest thing the United States has to a forensic conscience in its foreign policy.

Its parting report is forensic indeed: a catalogue of aid diverted, manipulated, and in some cases stolen. It documents how the Taliban coerced international agencies into delivering assistance on its terms, how billions of dollars disappeared into a fog of inefficiency and corruption, and how the very organisations charged with helping the Afghan people ended up complicit in their suffering.

SIGAR’s conclusion is blunt: vast sums of international aid have prolonged the Taliban’s hold on power while leaving ordinary Afghan people in crisis. This was what I had been reporting for years. For saying so, I was called many things, none polite.

Aid executives bombarded my editors with indignant letters; “experts” lined up to say I was wrong; and agencies tied themselves in knots denying the obvious. One senior UN official dismissed my reporting as “calumny” during a live interview on the BBC. Another UN agency sent a junior staffer to berate me for exposing evidence of spoiled food deliveries (the evidence was sound).

The Taliban trolled me online and, when they kidnapped me in Kabul in July 2022, demanded why I didn’t criticise Americans. I told them to read my archive. No one, I said, had escaped. The aim was never to prove me wrong. It was to plant enough doubt in editors’ minds to make me a nuisance, and to make the story go away.

Now, with SIGAR’s report, black and white figures are chilling: between August 2021, when the Taliban returned to power, and April 2025, when the United States effectively exited the foreign aid sector, international donors pumped more than $10.7billion into Afghanistan. Nearly $4billion of that came from the United States.

SIGAR’s report, based on years of work, documents how Taliban officials diverted and stole assistance, how UN staff were accused of demanding bribes for contracts, and how aid agencies retained hefty overheads, through many levels of administration, before even a single penny reached the desperate.

Hints were always there, often in my reporting. The United States’ representative at the UN, in a session chaired by the very man who had so confidently denounced my work on the BBC without challenge, cited my reporting as cause for concern. Reuters confirmed the accuracy of my reporting the next day. Facts, once disputed, had become irrefutable. But by then, I was protesting too much.

SIGAR’s last word, delivered in August, is not just about Afghanistan. It is a warning to every democracy that outsources oversight of vast aid budgets to agencies more concerned with donor funding than accountability. It shows how truth can be sidelined until the damage is irreversible, and how easily institutions slip into collusion when the cost of speaking out is deemed too high. For me, it is a reminder that journalism – real, hard-hitting, fact-based journalism – matters most when it makes enemies.

So perhaps “warrior journalist” was a reluctant compliment. Not because I sought battles, but because I refused to back down from them when they found me. My reporting has been vindicated, late but decisively. The shame lies not with those of us who told the truth, but with those who avoided it or even tried to bury it. The responsibility to do better belongs to all of us, regardless of the consequences.