Althouse: "The swift offensive has resulted in mass surrenders, captured helicopters and millions of dollars of American-supplied equipment paraded by the Taliban on grainy cellphone videos."

August 14, 2021

"The swift offensive has resulted in mass surrenders, captured helicopters and millions of dollars of American-supplied equipment paraded by the Taliban on grainy cellphone videos."

"In some cities, heavy fighting had been underway for weeks on their outskirts, but the Taliban ultimately overtook their defensive lines and then walked in with little or no resistance. This implosion comes despite the United States having poured more than $83 billion in weapons, equipment and training into the country’s security forces over two decades. Building the Afghan security apparatus was one of the key parts of the Obama administration’s strategy as it sought to find a way to hand over security and leave nearly a decade ago. These efforts produced an army modeled in the image of the United States’ military, an Afghan institution that was supposed to outlast the American war.... How the Afghan military came to disintegrate first became apparent not last week but months ago in an accumulation of losses... [beginning] with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more and more control of roads, then entire districts. As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.... And when the Taliban started building momentum after the United States’ announcement of withdrawal, it only increased the belief that fighting in the security forces — fighting for President Ashraf Ghani’s government — wasn’t worth dying for. In interview after interview, soldiers and police officers described moments of despair and feelings of abandonment...."

From "The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly?/The Taliban’s rapid advance has made clear that U.S. efforts to turn Afghanistan’s military into a robust, independent fighting force have failed, with its soldiers feeling abandoned by inept leaders" (NYT).

8 comments:

Lloyd W. Robertson said...: Just before they go, the boomers will face more debates about nation-building, hearts and minds. Trump injected a note of clarity or reason, but he didn't exactly have a coherent position. The Statue of Liberty hope is that a liberal system is so attractive, people will adopt it if given the opportunity. The somewhat different hope of the Emma Lazarus poem is that if people come to the U.S., they will leave their old ways behind. I don't believe in open borders or what Biden is doing now, but I have tended to have more hope in "assimilation here" than in "changing hearts and minds there." I have some sympathy for conservatives who fear the U.S. is being asked to give up too much of its "old" ways in order to save other people from their old ways.; 8/14/21, 5:46 AM
Tim said...: Because we failed to learn from history. We left Vietnam with ARVN a strong, reliable force. But it was designed to for air support from the US, and built on that doctrine. And it relied completely on the US for logistical supply. When Congress cut off the military supply, and Ford failed to supply the promised air support, South Vietnam fell to a North Vietnamese force plentifully supplied by China and Russia. Afghanistan forces were never well trained and loyal to the Kabul government, and when support was removed, they crumbled immediately.

You cannot move from tribalism to national identity in 20 years. It took 50 years in the Phillipines...and they started at a higher level than Afghanistan.; 8/14/21, 7:46 AM
Temujin said...: You need weapons to fight a war, but if you don't have the heart- the will- you won't win. If you fear your enemy to the point of running away, well...
We seem to re-arm our enemies on a regular cycle.; 8/14/21, 8:12 AM
Big Mike said...: If there were shoulder-launched surface-to~air missiles in the weapons caches recovered by the Taliban, then within two years we’re going to have exploding civilian airliners. There shouldn’t be any such missiles — the Taliban never had aerial assets of any sort — but you have to have worked inside the Pentagon to appreciate how idiotic its bureaucrats can be.; 8/14/21, 9:05 AM
mccullough said...: The corrupt government the US propped up didn’t pay its soldiers or even feed them.

Kept the money for themselves.; 8/14/21, 9:08 AM
Narr said...: In an earlier Afghan thread, Ken in Tx related how the US subdued the North American indigenes.

While his facts are correct, the contexts are completely different. The demographic balance was in favor of the Europeans and became more so with time, the thinly populated expanses of the American West were highly desirable for settlement and development, and for all the mythology about ancestral lands most Indians encountered after 1800 had not been in their areas for more than a few generations--having defeated other tribes for it by adapting better to advanced tech. (And most of the acreage got by the US during the 19th C was purchased from recognized countries anyway, not conquered by the cavalry.)

Afghanistan, despite the best efforts of the modern world, has a long history of stubborn and successful resistance to outsiders, and has sent many an empire running with tail between its legs. That IS Afghanistan's history.

It's an interesting experience to pick up Niall Ferguson's "Colossus: The Rise and Decline of the American Empire." It came out about 2006, when the true foolishness and criminality of the Bush-Cheney war policy in Iraq was becoming obvious. Ferguson, of course, is in favor of sensible and necessary imperialism . . . aye, there's the rub.

Someone made the point that the US Army merely cloned itself to create an Afghan National Army in its own image--as if enormous lots of high-tech gear and hardware (thanks, Raytheon et al) in the hands of illiterate tribesmen was an answer to thousands of years of backwardness.; 8/14/21, 11:23 AM
Bender said...: The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years

This is a really misleading talking point that I've heard over and over.

The shelf life of any army is about five years. That's how long soldiers serve before they move on to something else. The Afghan army had few if any 20-year veterans, so that 20 years of building the army means nothing. At best, that time built up an infrastructure, but the time spent on TODAY'S actual fighting ability and will to fight is only a handful of years.; 8/14/21, 11:56 AM
Ray - SoCal said...: Afghanistan is a tribal society. Loyalty is to your local strong man of your tribe,

Yet, GW Bush implemented a centralized government. And then had military units from other tribal areas in other areas, that treated the locals badly.

And a couple of elephants in the room were never addressed. Support from Pakistan, and to a lesser extent Iran for the Taliban.

And for some reason, the US decided to go into nation building.

The US Strategy for many years, was basically avoid defeat, and minimize US Casualties, as well as Civilian. It's impossible to win a war with that attitude.; 8/14/21, 8:36 PM