McKinsey was one of several major consultants brought in by TFBSO, including other big names, like Booz Allen Hamilton, Boston Consulting and the RAND Corporation. Of these, McKinsey had the largest contract by far, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

These consultants provided “strategy documents, staff training events, and lessons learned reports.” McKinsey’s contract accounted for roughly a third of TFBSO’s $60 million budget for “general and administrative costs.”

Buttigieg describes his work as “doing mathematical analysis, conducting research, and preparing presentations,” but as anodyne as all this sounds, the PowerPoint slideshows he created for McKinsey contained the blueprint for neocolonial regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The strategy of fostering manufacturing enterprises that TFBSO unsuccessfully attempted in Iraq had even less of a chance of succeeding in Afghanistan, which lacked the infrastructure. The solution proposed by McKinsey was resource extraction.

“Natural resources are the only ‘game changer’ available,” McKinsey senior partner John Dowdy wrote in a report titled “Private Sector Development in Afghanistan: The Doubly Missing Middle.”

Local companies were already mining industrial materials, he wrote, but “only globally traded minerals, such as copper, iron, gold, and rare earth elements, and energy supplies have the potential to generate significant public revenues.”

He added that this will “necessarily involve major international mining and energy companies, since the Afghans do not possess the indigenous capabilities themselves.”

In other words, under the pretext of generating public revenue for domestic development, the United States government would bring in foreign multinationals to mine Afghanistan’s natural resources for profit.

It’s reminiscent of the Bush Administration’s modus operandi in Iraq. Oil revenues were used to fund reconstruction, but mostly Western companies and defense contractors reaped the benefits. One study of contracts awarded in 2004, found that 85 percent of those valued at $5 million or more went to UK or US companies, whereas only 2 percent went to Iraqi firms.

According to a 2016 SIGAR audit, Afghanistan’s mineral reserves are estimated to be valued at $1 trillion, but the game plan McKinsey proposed in 2009 was badly botched first by TFBSO then USAID. Combined, they spent half a billion dollars trying to develop the Afghan mining industry with precious little to show for it.

Whereas an unused Olympic-sized swimming pool represented the failure of Iraq’s reconstruction, the symbols of waste in Afghanistan include a 43-million-dollar natural gas station (projected cost $300,000) and a 15-million-dollar empty warehouse.

The big winners in all of this were contractors and consultancies like McKinsey who get paid up front whether or not their plans yield results. SIGAR noted that the agency paid McKinsey close to $19 million for their work in Afghanistan alone and the sole tangible artifact they could find was a 50-page report.