How was it that the Taliban’s 80,000 poorly-equipped fighters were able to take on the better equipped 300,699 Afghan forces, which include the Afghan army, Air Force, and police, overrunning the whole country in a matter of weeks?
Perhaps the bigger question would be – What in the hell have the United States and its allies been doing in Afghanistan for the past 20 years?
The BBC is reporting that just last week, leaked U.S. intelligence reports estimated that Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul could come under attack within weeks, and the government could collapse within 90 days. Well, it didn’t take that long.
The U.S. and its Nato allies – including the UK – have spent the best part of the last 20 years training and equipping the Afghan security forces, to the tune of $89 billion, while countless American and British generals have proudly claimed to have created a “more powerful and capable Afghan army.”
However, reality presents a very different picture – one where Afghan military commanders surrendered without a fight in a matter of hours as Taliban forces took over one province after another.
Reality is a different truth
The truth be told – Afghan officials really don’t know how many soldiers they have, simply because of the country’s troubled history of high casualties, desertions, and corruption. Some Afghan commanders became good at claiming the salaries of troops who simply didn’t exist – so-called “ghost-soldiers.”
But the lack of resistance by many Afghan army units is shocking to many people. Reuters is reporting that some troops abandoned their posts while others reached agreements with the Taliban to stop fighting and hand over their weapons and equipment.
And U.S. officials are saying some provincial governors asked security forces to surrender or escape, perhaps in order to avoid further bloodshed because they believed defeat was unavoidable. But even without any deals, Afghan forces still appear to have melted away.
And with the country’s history of corruption and poor military and political leadership, it has been well documented by U.S. officials that badly paid, ill-fed and erratically supplied front-line soldiers – some of whom have been left for months or even years on end in isolated outposts, would throw down their arms and flee at a moments notice.
According to Reuters, “Over many years, hundreds of Afghan soldiers were killed each month. But the army fought on, without any of the airborne evacuations of casualties and expert surgical care standard in Western armies, as long as international backing was there. Once that went, their resolve evaporated.”
“Would you give your life for leaders who don’t pay you on time and are more interested in their own future?” a second U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, asked.
The thing is – this is a sentiment shared by many leaders in the Taliban. One Taliban commander said the government forces’ collapse started as soon as U.S. forces started withdrawing “as they didn’t have any ideology except fleecing the Americans.”
Realistically, Afghanistan was never ready to be on its own
President Joe Biden’s decision to finish with the pullout of American troops from Afghanistan was met with derision by many on the opposite side of the political spectrum, and shock by many world leaders.
And as The Guardian reports, there was also the question of why the Biden administration ever thought it was safe to leave Afghan forces on their own after decades of dependence on the US.
It would seem that after 20 years of extensive training and support, including air cover, logistics, maintenance, and training support for ANDSF ground vehicles and aircraft; security; base support; and transportation services, the Afghan military would be a fighting force comparable to any force in the world.
But here is another truth – After 10 years of training, in 2010, the U.S. military decided to evaluate the battle-readiness of the Afghan troops. Something called the Sigar report acknowledged that its monitoring and evaluation procedures “failed to measure more intangible readiness factors, such as leadership, corruption, and motivation – all factors that could affect a unit’s ability to put its staffing and equipment to use during actual war-fighting”.
By 2014, and with no measurable improvements being seen in the Afghan forces, it was decided that the Sigar assessment reports should become classified. The focus shifted from battalions to command headquarters.
I don’t believe it has ever been a realistic goal to create a Western-style army in one of the world’s poorest countries, as well as one with a social and political culture far from the developed sense of nationhood. And playing the blame game here just won’t work.
