At least when I was in the Treasury in 1993-95, and talking to the Treasury OASIA Latin America people and the IMF America people, the overwhelming view was that the currency board was a short-term but not a long-term solution, and that the currency board needed a nearly balanced budget--national debt growing no faster than GDP--to support it.
But on your broader point, I think you are right: Argentina achieved 80%+ of the goals set it by its international neoliberal policy advisors, and yet the situation has ended in disaster. No one can anticipate that *any* political system can deliver more than 80% implementation of *any* political program, and so any program that requires more than 80% implementation in order to be a success is simply not worth attempting at all.
When I talked to Jeffrey Sachs about this, he put it another way: that the Washington consensus guys at the Treasury and the IMF weren't very good at distinguishing between "necessary" and "desirable," and that while the Argentinian government did a great many things that were desirable from the neoliberal programmatic point of view, they failed to do the one thing necessary--to curb tax evasion--if they were to maintain the currency board. Then he began making analogies to genetic diseases where one wrong base-pair kills you, and saying that budget deficits and currency boards are in such a relationship.
Brad DeLong
P.S.: Some selections from emails from former not-very-senior staff:
>I could go on at length about why the initial decision to adopt a
>currency board was a gross error -- I thought so at the time: bad
>analysis, both economic and historical.... In a more specific
>level, I suspect a combination of factors explain why the train
>wreck had to happen, which boil down to "they didn't want to" [do
>either what was necessary to sustain the currency board, or to
>abandon the currency board....
>
>On why they couldn't unpeg the exchange rate... considerable
>political capital had become invested in the fixed rate -- some of
>which could even be considered rational. They had (I believe)
>managed to attract a sustained capital inflow, partly for good
>reasons (e.g., privatization) but also for such factors as
>"credibility" (in effect, they were borrowing based on an exchange
>rate guarantee -- cf Mexico). This was taken as a vote of
>confidence in Argentina -- so they were encouraged to believe their
>own propaganda....
>
>But the markets also believed it, which raises the larger question
>as to why we have had periodic -- roughly once a decade -- Latin
>debt crises. Why didn't they learn?.... I would argue that in this
>case, the fixed rate was the worst possible [exchange rate] regime:
>the exchange rate and the financial market are together a powerful
>-- and independent -- signaling device making politicians pay
>attention to economic reality. This can be especially important in a
>situation like Argentina's....
>
>The idea (beloved of gold bugs, who supplied a lot of the push
>behind the idea of currency
>boards) that fixed rates provide "external discipline" is bullshit.
>Unless you assume that the nation collectively is prepared to forego
>some essential attributes of sovereignty, it simply makes the crises
>less frequent but more severe. It is not at all clear that they are
>effective in forcing domestic politicians to behave in an
>economically rational fashion. What will?...