The linchpin of President Joe Biden’s plan to conduct a well-ordered departure from Afghanistan was the fanciful assumption that an Afghan military trained, equipped, and advised by the United States for 20 years at the cost of $83 billion would be capable of holding off the Taliban long enough for a steady stream of American citizens and Afghan evacuees to leave the country calmly over several months.
When Biden announced his decision in April to end U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, he promised the withdrawal would be conducted “responsibly, deliberately, and safely” and that the 300,000 “strong” Afghan army would “fight valiantly on behalf of the Afghans.”
It sounded plausible on paper.
After all, even if, as some internal Pentagon reports suggested, the actual number of Afghan combat-ready forces was fewer than 200,000, the Afghan military still outnumbered the Taliban by 2-1 and had superior weaponry, including an air force capable of carrying out airstrikes.
But that assumption, belied by increasingly dire U.S. intelligence assessments that the Kabul government would quickly fall to the Taliban, turned out to be wishful thinking on steroids.
“The fact that the Afghan army that we and our partners trained simply melted away, in many cases without firing a shot, took us all by surprise,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sheepishly admitted to Congress this month. “It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.”
“We absolutely missed the rapid 11-day collapse of the Afghan military and the collapse of their government,” added Joint Chief Chairman Gen. Mark Milley.
Republicans and Democrats alike in Congress grilled the senior military leaders over two days about how, with all the warning signs, they could have been under the delusion the Afghans would stand and fight once the U.S. abandoned them.
American enlisted troops seemed to know better.
“I went to the mess hall and ate with the soldiers and the Marines and the folks on the ground,” said Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat.
Peters recalled the troops he visited saying, “I don’t trust these folks that we’re with. I don’t know if they’re going to fight. In fact, they don’t even show up. They get their paycheck, but they don’t show up.”
“How is it that a lot of, you know, 18-, 19-year-olds, mid-20-year-olds, E-5s, were predicting this, but yet some of our greatest minds, both on the civilian side and the uniform side, absolutely missed this?” asked Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat.
With the benefit of hindsight, here’s what three of the nation’s senior officers, all of whom commanded troops in Afghanistan, admitted were some of the biggest mistakes:
The U.S. built the wrong kind of military. The U.S. has the mightiest military in world history, so naturally, when it began to build the Afghan military from scratch, it modeled it in its own image.
Big mistake, said Milley, who traces the blunder to the earliest days of the U.S. occupation when the U.S. began nation-building in a tribal country with an 80% illiteracy rate and no history of central government or institutions.
“You know, you are talking to people who are coming out of rule by the Taliban in positioning Sharia law, a Stone Age approach to these things,” Milley told Congress. “You cannot impose technological literacy quickly.”
For instance, the U.S. replaced Afghanistan’s simple-to-fly-and-repair Soviet-era helicopters with high-tech, state-of-the-art U.S. Black Hawks.
The U.S. ended up building an Afghan force that couldn’t survive without an army of U.S. contractors to provide high-tech maintenance.
“We made them too dependent on technology, too dependent on our capabilities,” said Milley. “We ‘mirrored imaged,’ to put it simply. I think that’s a big lesson.”
The U.S. training failed to account for the Afghan culture. The final “lessons learned” report from the Pentagon’s special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction noted that the Afghan military force the U.S. “labored to develop” depended on “significant cultural shifts, including the erosion of factionalism, the development of a stronger education system — and, as it turns out, altered gender norms.”
“U.S. efforts to promote gender equality have occurred against the backdrop of the country’s decades-old struggle between traditionalists and modernists over the role of women in Afghan society,” the report concludes, calling the goals for recruiting women into the Afghan military and police “highly unrealistic.”
“We didn’t take in the cultural aspects perhaps as much as we should have,” admitted Milley.
The U.S. gave up its best tool for gauging the Afghan’s will to fight. As the U.S. began to draw down its forces over the past several years, some of the first troops to go were American advisers who were embedded in front-line Afghan units.
This left the U.S. somewhat blind to the deteriorating morale within the ranks of Afghans who were engaged in the bulk of the combat and taking heavy casualties.
“As we began to … scale back on the people that we had interfacing with the Afghans on a daily basis, we began to lose that fingertip feel,” Austin said in his Senate testimony.
“When you pull the advisers out of the units, you can no longer assess things like leadership and will,” said Milley. “We can count all the planes, trucks and automobiles and cars and machine guns and everything else. We can count those from space and all the other kinds of intel assets. But you can’t measure the human heart with a machine. You got to be there.”
The Afghan military did not trust its corrupt leaders. Ultimately, the military, any military, really, will not fight for a government it doesn’t trust or respect.
The Taliban’s final bloodless victory came when Ashraf Ghani, spooked by false reports that Taliban fighters were already in the Presidential Palace looking to find and execute him, fled the country on his private jet with his wife and suitcases full of cash.
“When your president flees literally on no notice in the middle of the day, that has a profoundly debilitating effect on everything else,” said McKenzie in his Senate testimony, noting there were still “considerable Afghan combat formations” around Kabul on Aug. 15. “I do believe it is possible they could’ve fought and held parts of Kabul had the president stayed.”
Instead, as Milley noted, “Kabul was taken with a couple of hundred guys on motorcycles, and there wasn’t a shot fired.”
“The underlying foundation of the reason for why this government crumbled and why those troops fled is corruption,” said California Democratic Rep. Jimmy Panetta, son of a former defense secretary and an Afghanistan veteran. “We basically supported the Potemkin village, and when we left, it fell.”
“It was all about bribes,” Panetta said. “And what we are left with when we are about to leave was a state that had grown so corrupt that governors were cutting deals with jihadists to switch sides.”
Austin said he “certainly agreed that corruption played a major role” in the collapse of the government and the security forces.
The Doha agreement demoralized the Afghan troops. If Ghani’s desertion was the last straw, U.S. military leaders believe the February 2020 withdrawal agreement the Trump administration struck with the Taliban was the beginning of the end.
“The Doha agreement had a significant negative effect on the morale of the military,” said Austin.
Once the agreement was signed, Taliban fighters spent 2020 going village to village, convincing beleaguered Afghan forces their cause was lost now that the U.S. was leaving and securing surrender agreements.
The result was that by the time Biden became president in January, most Afghan forces outside Kabul had agreed to switch sides to avoid a fight to the death.
“We did not anticipate the snowball effect caused by the deals that the Taliban commanders struck with local leaders in the wake of the Doha agreement,” Austin said.
“The Taliban and the Afghan military, they have the same DNA, so it comes down to the fighting heart of the man on the ground,” said McKenzie. “The Taliban were heartened by what they saw happen at Doha … the Afghans were very weakened by that, morally and spiritually.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
