The new year started off with a bang, so to speak. A guy who seems to have mostly failed—at school, in a less-than-impressive Army stint, in three marriages, and financially—recorded himself aligning with ISIS and then mowed down New Year’s celebrants in New Orleans. For some reason, the two containers of explosives he brought with him in this attack failed to detonate, but we’re now told that those explosives are of a rare type never before used (or known to be created?) in either the United States or Europe.

His deadly incompetence extended to a failed attempt to burn down the rental unit in which he last lived, and which therefore still preserved evidence regarding his explosives manufacturing and his online activities. This vehicle rampage was facilitated by local authorities who planned to erect bollards to prevent vehicles from entering Bourbon Street but hadn’t quite gotten to it before the New Year’s festivities.

Meanwhile, a Special Ops NCO whose wife left him the day after Christmas killed himself in Las Vegas and triggered an explosion in dramatic (but deliberately not very damaging to others) fashion, reportedly to call attention to a series of deep failures by military and civic leaders and to set aside his guilt for deaths that occurred during foreign operations.

Our country’s culture is teetering on the edge of a fatal fragility. The evidence is on display in the news and in the state of so many of our communities. Reweaving a healthy, principles-based culture will take time and major effort. It’s unclear if that can successfully be done, but a failure to attempt it will guarantee further chaos and suffering.

But there’s another culture, more localized yet vast in its impact, that we can and must address as well. The dysfunctional culture of the Beltway, which has produced Augean Stables-deep muck, seldom captures news headlines. But it has drained and poisoned our civic life, law enforcement, military readiness, and more.

Consider the recent op-ed by John F. Sopko in The New York Times. Sopko has served as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012. His final report will be released shortly, but the op-ed is devastating in its quiet conclusions:

In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, [I and my staff] have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects, and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks.

Oof. Read that again and let it sink in. This is a systemic, 20-year effort in which failures were piled on failures, culminating in the Taliban running Afghanistan using weapons that the U.S. left behind and funding that the U.S. continues to send their way.

As Sopko asks,

Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise? For two decades, officials publicly asserted that continuing the mission in Afghanistan was essential to national interests until, eventually, two presidents—Donald Trump and Joe Biden—concluded it was not.

The answer lies in the Beltway’s self- reinforcing ecosystem. Our presence in Afghanistan was never truly mission oriented—no definition of “success” was clearly articulated. Instead, the Beltway’s process for promotions, power, and profits dominated. As the special inspector general flatly states:

‘[A] perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes—even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlighted favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.’

They also aren’t good business for the contractors on which the U.S. mission relied to manage and support programs and projects. For contractors, claiming success, whether real or imaginary, was vital to obtaining future business. So spending became the measure of success … More money was always being spent to justify previous spending.

But that spending didn’t buy Afghan stability or support for the U.S., much less favorable reception for the various LGBTQ+ Pride billboards our State Department erected there even as the Taliban were degrading women and punishing any deviance from their strictures. And U.S. officials simply hid or ignored that failure.

Yet over two decades—even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021—I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility … Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue … Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was—at times deliberately—hidden from Congress and the American people … Despite vigorous efforts by the U.S. bureaucracy to stop us, my office made such material public.

Special interests are a big part of the problem … In Afghanistan the office of the special inspector general was often the only government agency reliably reporting on the situation on the ground, and we faced stiff opposition from officials in the Departments of Defense and State, USAID and the organizations that supported their programs.

And therein lies the deepest problem with the Beltway culture. When process leads to perceived success for participants, and actual mission outcome takes a back seat, any semblance of real truth—not to mention accountability for decisions and actions—is lost.

The Beltway likes it that way. For decades influence and money have flowed to those who play its game, and the American public suffers the consequences. It’s time to cleanse the Beltway’s Augean Stables—a Herculean task, but one needed as we repair our wider culture.