Kabul, Afghanistan – After 15 years of intensive U.S. military effort and $108 billion in civilian support to build a sustainable democratic government in Afghanistan after 9/11, the government here is in imminent danger of collapse with the country falling back under the control of the Taliban and, in some areas, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). What happened, and what does it mean for us?

I have spent 10 years of my life here since 2003 absent from my family in Minnesota as a civilian assisting with the design and management of what's called in foreign-aid parlance the "democracy and governance" aspects of nation-building. I won't go into all of the difficult reasons that have brought us to this juncture, except the one that is the immediate cause of the Afghan government's pending collapse — corruption — and the reason I am back in Afghanistan.

Government here is rife with corruption at all levels, and it affects everyone. In its 2015 annual ranking of corruption by country, Transparency International rated Afghanistan near the bottom at 166 out of 168 countries. In its 2015 annual "Survey of the Afghan People" conducted by the Asia Foundation, 89.9 percent of Afghans said corruption is a problem in their daily lives. In a country where the average annual household income is only $174, according to the same survey, Afghan citizens are often asked for bribes for basic public services such as enrolling a child in school, getting seen by a doctor at the local clinic or obtaining a driver's license. It is so bad that the word "mafia" has now entered the lexicon of the country's primary language, Dari, to refer to the entrenched government networks of corruption.

The current version of the Afghan government was brokered into existence by the U.S. secretary of state in September 2014 after presidential elections that were so flawed by voter fraud and political corruption that no one could tell who actually won. As a result, both candidates were promoted to lead the government in an uneasy alliance, one as "president" and the other as the "CEO." Ironically, both candidates campaigned with the promise to "end corruption in Afghanistan."

There is a direct link between corruption and security in a country engaged in an existential struggle for its very survival with the Taliban and now ISIL. In the same Asia Foundation survey mentioned above, exposure to government corruption not surprisingly increased sympathy toward the Taliban among Afghans. For example, corruption in the Afghan government courts is so bad, rated as the most corrupt institution in government, that people more often take their grievances for settlement to the Taliban.

More alarmingly, in a recent survey by the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies, 72 percent of Afghan police forces said they believe armed resistance against the government is justified because of corruption. It has recently been reported here that some Afghan army field commanders are routinely selling the food, fuel and ammunition meant for their own troops on the local black market — or worse, to the Taliban directly.

What does this mean for us? It ultimately means that the next U.S. president will have some difficult decisions to make that will affect us all. Do we let this government and military fall after 15 years of heavy U.S. taxpayer investment and give it back to the Taliban, a condition from which Osama bin Laden once directed Al-Qaida global operations and plotted the 9/11 attacks? Or do we continue to prop up a hopelessly corrupt government that its own people are turning away from? For me, I just arrived back in country from Minnesota after a two-year absence to assume management of the U.S. government's new anti-corruption campaign as of April 1, not because I'm optimistic, but because I'm just willing to give it another shot. Too little, too late?

Mark Kryzer, of St. Paul, is an international foreign aid manager in Kabul.