America must not fool ourselves that the Taliban victory was the Afghan government's fault. You go to war with the ally you have and not the ally you wished to have. We knew what we had and we stopped doing what we needed to do to compensate for our ally's weaknesses.
We screwed up critically either 6 or 12 years ago, depending on how you define it.* And then we screwed up a lot in the last several months when we trusted the Taliban "peace process" and abandoned the Afghanistan government while loudly speculating on the speed of their inevitable defeat.
One problem that leads to the common wisdom of the moment that the Taliban win was inevitable is that we see our side's weaknesses fairly clearly while the enemy shrouds their weaknesses from our view.
The enemy dies, suffers, and worries out of the spotlight. While reading Rick Atkinson’s fittingly appropriately titled An Army at Dawn, I came across this quote from Kipling that illustrates the problem of looking for enemy weakness while your own are staring you in the face:
The idea that the rapid collapse of the Afghan security forces proves
our efforts to build Afghan forces was a waste and that the Taliban
would inevitably win are nonsense. I simply was not panicked by leaked internal American government documents a couple years ago.
I did not panic because Afghan forces were beset by the same cultural weaknesses that affected the Taliban. The Taliban fell victim to those weaknesses when we rapidly drove them from power twenty years ago. This year the culture worked for the Taliban.
The fact is, we compensated for many of those weaknesses on the Afghan government side with our small military presence and assistance. Changing the cultural weaknesses was beyond our power. We could help but it would take decades or centuries for the Afghan people to fix.
Our side didn't have to be anywhere close to perfect, however. It just had to be better than the enemy.
But with our troops and assistance suddenly withdrawn, the Taliban had an opportunity built on years of gaining ground in the countryside. And with the initiative, their weaknesses were minimized while the Afghan forces faced catastrophe when their weaknesses and lack of American help were exploited.
I've long expressed my worries about the trends. And I went into some detail five years ago about how having the initiative could work for the government--or for the Taliban:
When you don't have the mobile troops, firepower, and surveillance to go after the enemy insurgents to keep them atomized, the enemy can begin to mass routinely in company strength and even in battalion strength (say, 300-600).
When the enemy can do that, outposts and patrols are subject to attack on a regular basis and the enemy can quickly overrun these units.
Government casualties and morale hits will compel the government to pull in outposts to man bigger cities and defended bases, and patrols can only be carried out in large numbers, reducing their frequency, scope, and ability to separate the people from insurgents.
The people begin to trend toward the insurgents from fear of insurgents or from loss of hope that the government can win. Neutrals become pro-insurgent, and friendly people become neutral or even pro-insurgent.
If government forces are pinned in large bases or cities with only occasional forays into hostile territory on pointless sweeps, perhaps treating the surrounding area as a free-fire zone that alienates more people, the enemy insurgents can go up the escalation ladder to operate in larger formations with heavier weapons because they don't need to fear being chased and caught by the government forces.
Under siege, the government forces have nowhere to run and if morale cracks for just a moment in one section of the defenses (or if defenders are bribed or bullied into walking away from their bunkers), insurgents can pour into the base and collapse resistance with a nice slaughter to inspire fear in other government bases and undermine faith in the government to win.
At that point, the insurgents are on the way to becoming the new government.
And we are put in the position of trying to hold a base to evacuate our nationals and whoever else we can airlift out.
My description of a potential Taliban victory path sounds eerily close to the news over the last several years. But it could have gone the other way if we had actually carried out the plan we had:
I keep hearing our military leaders say there is no military solution to ending the war. And perhaps the Taliban are too deeply embedded in Pakistan with government support to really wrap up a battlefield victory in Afghanistan for long.
I once thought Pakistan had to come to their senses regarding the jihadis. They have not.
But there is one thing that has a military solution--securing the Goddamn cities by going on the offensive and atomizing the enemy so they can't mass to attack cities, as I wrote not too long ago[.]
Also, mere religious fanaticism didn't guarantee Taliban victory. Yes, it sustains morale in the face of adversity. Some more and some less depending on their degree of faith. But against trained and supported troops properly led, that fanaticism can lead to much higher fanatic deaths. Iran faced that in its war with Iraq and eventually fanatical Iran's troop morale broke because of the casualties and failure to win as Allah allegedly guaranteed.
The Taliban victory wasn't inevitable even if the war was in fact "unwinnable" as the interpretation of the leaked documents alleged. More relevant is that America effed this up. Until we decided to bug out we had a flawed Afghan government that nonetheless held on and killed jihadis every day--suffering heavy casualties year after year without breaking--and prevented Afghanistan from being a safe haven for terrorists. We needed to adjust our plans to help Afghan forces gain the initiative but we did not face imminent disaster.
Until we bugged out.
So now we will see the difference between a frustrating stalemated war we weren't winning and a defeat.
Let's face our failures lest we do it all over again somewhere else.
UPDATE: Remember, out troop levels in Afghanistan at the point Biden decided to withdraw represented a decline to 2.5% of our peak troop strength after Obama's surges. The level kept going down while still holding off the Taliban victory. That was too much for America to sustain?
UPDATE: Given the ability of the Taliban to shut down our only escape route at the Kabul airport (with the inconveniently ominous KIA tag) with some simple mortars and anti-aircraft guns, don't expect America to be forceful in going out and getting our people to the airport.
This is going to be an ongoing humiliation as we pay what the Taliban demand in money and optics to get our citizens and troops out safely.
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*Did we screw up with the decision to surge forces in Afghanistan in 2009 or did we screw up with the decision about 6+ years ago to withdraw Afghan forces into larger bases and cities, and cede the initiative to the Taliban?
I
was very worried about advising the Afghan security forces to pull back
into the cities and cede the countryside and initiative. With their backs to the wall, the Afghan forces had no depth to fall back in case of reverses.
I was also unconvinced that we needed the surge because my objectives were much lower than nation-building. Did the price we paid to carry out the surge with 100,000 American troops in combat provide the excuse for leaving now and creating a disaster?
