CSI: Kabul continues. The chalk outline on the ground clearly shows a pooch being screwed.
Why did Afghanistan fall to the Taliban?
SIGAR’s latest report found that the stunning collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s U.S.-backed government was influenced by a failure to recognize that U.S. President Joe Biden was serious about withdrawing American troops, his exclusion from diplomatic talks with the Taliban and the unwillingness of the militant group to compromise, and the stacking of loyalists around the presidential palace that made corruption an endemic problem in Kabul. ...
“U.S. efforts to build and sustain Afghanistan’s governing institutions were a total, epic, predestined failure on par with the same efforts and outcome in the Vietnam War and for the same reasons,” said Chris Mason, an associate professor of national security at the U.S. Army War College, who was interviewed for the report.
The failure of the Afghanistan government to recognize we were really leaving might have been encouraged by the folly of really leaving totally, eh? After nearly twenty years of mowing the jihadi grass we finally got to the point when American dying while helping Afghan forces kill jihadis every day was rare. We were trying to prevent another 9/11. Gosh, why would the Afghans fail to recognize we'd shoot ourselves in the foot by actually leaving?
I worried that Obama's great reduction in American forces would lead to collapse as fear of fighting alone overwhelmed them. But Obama's small footprint was enough to prevent government collapse. So I certainly didn't think we'd really totally abandon our allies.
I was horrified that we didn't keep Afghan government officials involved in the talks, making it look like the government wasn't legitimate and encouraging the government to feel we could be selling them out.
The "failure" of the Taliban to compromise was actually our failure to recognize the Taliban were trying to win--not trying to compromise.
And the problem of corrupt loyalists around the president was something we should have recognized from Iraq after we left in 2011 as a natural result of leaving too soon.
Yet the biggest mistake was failing to build and sustain Afghanistan's governing institutions? No. The biggest failure was trying to build national rather than regional and tribal governing institutions, as I advised when the surges were gleams in President-elect Obama's eye:
The end result in Afghanistan, if all goes well, will be a nominal national government that controls the capital region and reigns but does not rule local tribes and which actually helps the locals a bit rather than sucking resources from the locals, who in turn do not make trouble for the central government or allow their areas to be used by jihadis to plan attacks on the West. We press for reasonable economic opportunities, with bribes all around (I mean, foreign aid), to keep a fragile peace.
And we stick around this time, unlike after the Soviets left Afghanistan when we ignored the place, for a generation or two to see if we can move Afghanistan into the 19th century (hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves).
Hopefully our military surge recedes by the end of 2011 and we can get down to a single combat brigade plus air power that function as a fire brigade and a hammer for the central government should a local difficulty exceed Afghan military capabilities.
Afghanistan is a tribal territory with a UN seat and not a country in any sense of the word. Pretending it was a country that could be built was the foundational cause.
And the immediate cause for defeat is that America fled from Afghanistan on a deadline rather than on conditions, in order to have a politically motivated celebration on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Rather than line up for our victory parade, the Taliban pursued victory. And the fearful and corrupt government ran rather than being the last to die for a cause that America inexplicably didn't care about. Remember, the Taliban could see we had a dead pool on how long the government would last before collapsing after America left!
And while this wasn't raised, don't even pretend the reason for defeat was that we created an Afghanistan military in our own image. That's nonsense.
So, no, SIGAR, you're close but you don't have it quite right pointing at the shortcomings of the Afghanistan government. You're right about the shortcomings. But America screwed the pooch. There's little point arguing we didn't have the ally we wanted rather than the ally we had--and implicitly encouraged.
NOTE: Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
