Robert Burns – AP News Aug 17, 2021
Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.
The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.
A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.
The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are not unlike what happened in Iraq. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.
“Money can’t buy will. You cannot purchase leadership,” John Kirby, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said Monday.
Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who help direct Afghan war strategy during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that what the Afghans received in tangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles.
“The principle of war stands — moral factors dominate material factors,” he said. “Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. As outsiders in Afghanistan, we can provide materiel, but only Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors.”
By contrast, Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.
“If we wouldn’t have used hope as a course of action, … we would have realized the rapid drawdown of U.S. forces sent a signal to the Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,” said Chris Miller, who saw combat in Afghanistan in 2001 and was acting secretary of defense at the end of President Donald Trump’s term.
Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden’s announcement set the final collapse in motion.
“The problem of the U.S. withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the jig is up — a sudden, nationwide signal that everyone read the same way,” Biddle said. Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war, he said. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”
The failures, however, go back much further and run much deeper. The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism.
Year after year, U.S. military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall. In 2015 a professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute wrote about the military’s failure to learn lessons from past wars; he subtitled his book, “Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold.”
“Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan,” Chris Mason wrote. He added, presciently: “Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.”
Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a “house of cards” whose collapse was driven as much by failures of U.S. civilian leaders as their military partners, according to Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Afghanistan war analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the misspent dollars coming.
Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.
The $83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year’s budget for the entire U.S. Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year for food stamp assistance for about 40 million Americans.
In his book, “The Afghanistan Papers,” journalist Craig Whitlock wrote that U.S. trainers tried to force Western ways on Afghan recruits and gave scant thought to whether U.S. taxpayers dollars were investing in a truly viable army.
“Given that the U.S. war strategy depended on the Afghan army’s performance, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to the question of whether Afghans were willing to die for their government,” he wrote.
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Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant, Lorne Cook in Brussels and James LaPorta in Boca Raton, Florida, contributed to this report.
Well at least American taxpayers can be satisfied they equipped one army that one. That hasn’t happened since 1945.
I wonder why america really pulled out. Miden is no more in charge of america than quazimodo is in charge of britain, so it wasn’t some kind of incompetence on his behalf. He’s just a puppet. I’m guessing it was because they’re spread too thin and they want to keep up their pitiful threat to china. With any luck the americans, the british, and all the rest will be forced out of the entire middle east, and ultimately from everywhere they don’t belong and have no right to be. If they’ll dumb enough to start a war with china they’ll get their butts kicked and that’ll be the end of them – and good riddance.
Yid-man never allows a White-man victory of any kind.
@ good
i suspect that the israelis after decades of
scientific DNA investigations found out
that the most Taliban belong to their once
lost tribes of israel . that could be a reason.
they protect their tribe what the whites dont
do .
Here comes the blame game and analysis paralysis of the experts from the great babylonian country. Human, is an outstanding and a perfect machine. Try as much as we want, study as much as we want, from the Tavistock people to the military college professors, human emotion can never be understood and can never be predicted consistently.
The immediate capitulation of the ANA is an indication of human emotion response to external events impacting their basic needs and priorities. We have no idea what these needs and priorities are, as we do not know, understand and live the Afghanistan culture and thinking. It is always bad bedside manner to invade a country that has done you no harm and force your culture on them. The smart people from the babylonian country should not act surprise.
The Taliban is run/funded by the West (US). I doubt therea more than 10 sheeple in the US who knows this on an official needs to know basis. Of course, many more will know, including the deep states in other countries.
Or maybe the Russians, or Chinese are running and funding the Taliban?
I am sure the Taliban are run on a shoestring, but that is still a lot of money year in year out. For a start, the fragile control structures in the Taliban only survive because certain Talibunnies have the money. You can’t threaten the leadership unless someone offers you a blank cheque book. You can say the same for ISIS or the IRA where it was wealthy Amerikans protected by their own deep state. This doesn’t mean that British intelligence didn’t hold more that 50% of the IRA’s top positions.
The the fake news, left or right, they control the slightly differing narratives so the sheeple have some sort of no choice.
This is the same with minor wars & insurgencies where both sides are played off against each other.
The US under Trump did a deal. This deal wasn’t about cutting the staggering US debt or cutting military spending.
This deal was done because the US has bigger fish to fry. Most probably China, the Chinese certainly think so.
Much of the fake news ranting over the Afghanistan pull out is hot air and flannel. Biden should never of been president and he was definitely never going to be a two term president, so maybe he’s the logical choice, Biden will never face another election & maybe Trump knew this game and dispite Trump’s protestations, he kinda knows he has a very good chance of a second term.
The real losers in thr US/Taliban deal are the British, hence we see Tories like Blair saying things that simply aren’t said in public. Tony Blair has lost a lot of potentially lucrative contracts because the UK has effectively been officially excluded from a big chunk of the Middle East/Asia
Having said that, I am sure the SAS will be even more active in Afghanistan. I would imagine that huge quantities of cash ($€) have been taken into Afghanistan so the UK can keep running their networks.
All I can say is that the Taliban must have agreed to keep drug production and exports going, even though they plan to stop the locals using the sherbet.
I’m sure a few hundred will die at the airport and that a few thousand will be murdered, but all of this will be in the deal. On one hand the new Taliban regime must appear to be firmly in control, but on the other hand, they need to appear as a very different beast from what they were in the 1990s.
I am more interested in what the US has gained in military potential.
Bush lost the immoral, stupid, costly, and hopeless war by starting it in the first place; all Biden did was to officially acknowledge that fact. As much as I dislike Biden, at least he did t he right thing this time by cutting the losses. Now he needs to do the same thing in Iraq and Syria.
This is yet another disinformation article for the blue pilled. Ignore the Taliban. Ignore Afghanistan completely. This entire episode is just another purposely created Jewish PYSOP to deceive the world. On my Blog I am trying to wake up the public about this.
https://strangerinajewishworld.blogspot.com/2021/08/afghanistan-for-red-pilled.html
“Yid-man never allows a White-man victory of any kind.”
What a ridiculous comment. Jew-controlled America being driven out of Afghanistan is a victory for the “White-man.”
“The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.”
The same that was said about the Afghan ‘army’ could probably be said about US forces as well.
No doubt, in a major conflict with a motivated, patriotic, well-equipped and well-trained enemy (and I’m thinking China, Russia and even Iran) U.S. forces, particularly white males, demoralized by communist propaganda, Critical Race Theory, trans-genderism and feminism, could not be expected to sacrifice themselves on a battlefield for a country that basically hates, despises and discriminates against them. And, of course, the combat efficiency of black, hispanic, homosexual, trans and female troops, with years of grievances, real and imagined fanned by agitators at home, could basically be considered nil as well.
China and Russia will naturally be watching and noting the effects of this ‘woke’ propaganda initiated on troops by the Biden Administration. That, combined with Biden’s obvious deficiencies as a leader, as well the utter incompetence of his Vice President and a Secretary of Defense recently described as ‘utterly stupid’ and chosen only for the sake of ‘diversity’ and generals more interested in rooting out ‘white supremacy’ instead of training and motivating their soldiers – all this basically means major efforts by one or both to counter and even negate completely America as any kind of force in the world.
For openers, watch for China to move against Taiwan and Russia against Ukraine and probably sooner rather than later.
I’m sure they will be studying this for years to come – but they need look no further than Arminius, a Germanic prince who joined the Roman Empire, learned Latin and their military tactics and then inflicting the most humiliating defeat of Varus’s Legions in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.
The Afghans were waiting for their moment, as they’ve done so many times before.
I read long ago that the Taliban are “our guys”, along with ISIS, Al Qaeda and the IRA. And let’s not forget the Red Brigades in Europe.
This event will draw attention away from the Arizona Audit, with another benefit being the drawing of China into Afghanistan, just as the Soviets were in 1979.
The Graveyard of Empires indeed.