The Department of Defense inspector general warned that the Afghan air force would not be sustainable without U.S. support months before President Joe Biden announced the withdrawal, which occurred in August.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, submitted the report to the DOD in January 2021, and it was declassified on Tuesday. Its conclusions appear to demonstrate that U.S. officials knew months in advance that the Afghan forces would not hold up despite years of training and billions of dollars from the U.S.
Afghanistan’s air force “resources, capability, and sustainment … may be at risk” without the “continued assistance and clear focus on the development of all levels and positions,” the report states, even though the U.S. spent more than $8.5 billion since 2010 to train the Afghan forces.
MARINES GRANT TWO RELIGIOUS EXEMPTIONS, MARKING FIRST ACROSS MILITARY BRANCHES
Neither the Afghan air force nor the Special Mission Wing “have been able to meet their authorized end strengths, and both forces lack a strategy to overcome these challenges and respond to growing mission requirements. Additionally, sustainable Afghan air forces requires more from the Afghans than simply providing pilots and aircrew to be trained by the U.S. government for combat missions on airframes purchased and maintained by the U.S. government.“
SIGAR issued recommendations that military leaders coordinate with the Afghan military to “develop and implement formal recruiting strategies and personnel placement producers,” to “incorporate support personnel and their training requirements … into the Afghanistan Master Training Plan,” and to “finalize a mitigation plan to ensure the continuation of essential maintenance, operation, and advisory support.”
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that “what remains clear is our long-standing insistence and open acknowledgment of three key tenets surrounding the importance in the long-term viability of what was the Afghan air force, the important role that they had in supporting the DSF on the ground, the need and the importance that we recognized of continued funding and maintenance or logistics and training support,” when asked about the report.
The report details the failures of the U.S. to prepare the Afghan air force adequately to maintain its duties without U.S. support despite repeated assurances from the Biden administration that it would be able to withstand a Taliban offensive.
“You have the Afghan troops, they’re 300,000 well-equipped, as well equipped as any army in the world, and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable,” the president said on July 8. “They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.”
SIGAR released a report on July 31 that did note that 300,699 Afghan National Defense and Security Forces personnel were enrolled in the Afghan Personnel and Pay System at the end of April. But only 182,071 of them were Afghan National Army members, including in the Afghan air force, while 118,628 were actually part of the Afghan National Police, which reported to the Interior Ministry instead of Defense, meaning the size of the military was smaller than the 300,000 Biden referenced.
The watchdog also noted that “[Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces] personnel strength reported for this quarter does not reflect the loss of personnel to casualties, surrender, capture, or fleeing to other countries that occurred during the Taliban offensive from May through July.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
In early August, the Taliban launched a swift offensive despite being outnumbered, and they overthrew the U.S.-backed government. The U.S. and other Western allies then spent the remaining two weeks in August evacuating more than a hundred thousand people who believed they’d be at risk under the new regime.
Previous SIGAR reports also demonstrated the flaws in the execution of the U.S. military’s 20 years in Afghanistan. An October quarterly report revealed the U.S. provided $89 billion for training and equipping the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces and more than $17 billion “in on-budget assistance” to the Afghan government, neither of which existed past the Taliban’s takeover.
