We will analyze our defeat in Afghanistan. Again. As we do so, keep in mind that it has never been American policy to help allies build a military that relies only on indigenous resources.
America needlessly lost the Afghanistan War. Assuming it wasn't just a campaign in a bigger war against Islamist dominance of the Moslem world that is the real war we need to consider. And assuming we didn't change Afghanistan enough in our 20-year stay to make it impossible for the Taliban to control. But those are possibilities for the future. Right now the question is "just what went wrong in the 20-year conflict."
This author blames our leadership.
The senior officers in charge of the evacuation at Central Command meekly acceded to State Department demand to use Kabul's indefensible Karzai Airport rather than the more secure Bagram Air Base resulting in the ignominious debacle that occurred. It is hard to imagine a George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, or Chester Nimitz condoning or tolerating such incompetence. Whatever war gods created such men seem to have deserted us. What is left seems to be children of a lesser god.
In reality, the fault is not in the gods but in a system that we humans created. Somewhere along the line, our process for educating and selecting our senior military leaders went badly off the rails and reforming it should be a priority.
It is hard for me to disagree with the big picture. But I disagree with this assessment:
Is it any wonder that for twenty years, general officers educated in this environment refused to admit that they were creating an Afghan army that would not be able to sustain itself once we left?
That is not the metric to aim for. Nor did we create a mirror image of our military. We clearly tried to build a light infantry army:
You will notice from the graphic above that the Afghanistan military had lots of Humvees, trucks, and SUVs; and just a small number of lightly armored vehicles; plus helicopters and propeller-driven aircraft.
American teenagers have more pickup trucks and SUVs!
There are no 5th generation fighters. No 4th generation. Heck, no 1st generation jets. Just helicopters and prop planes much easier to train to use and maintain.
No heavy armor or self-propelled artillery. No rocket artillery--just older tube artillery. But lots of trucks. Again, easier to use and maintain.
But lots of infantry weapons. Although I don't even see mortars in the list. Perhaps the threat of them falling into Taliban hands was too high. And with American direct air support and support to the Afghanistan air force, it was perhaps not needed.
Basically, Afghanistan had a light infantry and paramilitary force. This is not in any way a military built "in our image".
And it was fighting successfully--and dying--to beat the Taliban.
Yes, it required some support for years, especially for the simple air elements--support we denied them in our final "plan" to bug out. FFS, our advanced NATO allies can't sustain a fight without us.
I don't think the mistake was how we armed our Afghan allies:
[The] failure to build Afghan forces is over-stated. We built Afghan forces able to fight with our support. Just as we built Iraqi forces able to fight with our support. Each fought and died every day against our common jihadi enemies. Our troops had little need to fight after years of effort to build up our local allies.
Don't forget that in 2011, European NATO states were unable to take on the forces of Libya--wracked by civil war, no less--without American help. So yeah, of course Afghan forces needed help to keep fighting! But America left, while debating just how long it could take for Afghan forces to collapse. That's a real confidence booster for our allies, eh?
I think part of the problem was trying to build a professional ANDSF. "Afghanistan" is a territory with rival tribes and not a national government young men are devoted to defending.
Prior to our surges, I wanted a decentralized Afghan security force with American and Coalition support[.]
Blaming the types of weapons and equipment we supplied for our defeat implies that we
should have only built an Afghan military that could sustain itself with
indigenous resources. Seriously?
Where would that sustainable force objective have led to? To static militias equipped with fire-hardened pointy sticks; with swords, shields, bows and arrows, and hand-made artisanal firearms and mortars for the elite forces on horses and donkeys.
And what kind of military could have withstood being abandoned?
The original withdrawal plan was for a thousand or more U.S. and NATO troops to remain to advise and train IRA security forces and monitor the corruption. The IRA wanted to survive but to do that they had to keep receiving billions a year from foreign donors, mainly the United States. Refusal to cooperate meant termination of aid and nearly all the foreigners would leave. The Americans got a new government in early 2021 and that led to fatal changes to the withdrawal plan. Everyone was ordered out but were given three additional months to do it. That gave Pakistan and the Taliban an opportunity to increase their pressure on the IRA, which now rightly believed the Americans were going to abandon them.
And we still spend money on Afghanistan. But we spend it to sustain the Taliban enemy.
We lost the war because our senior civilian leaders decided that "ending the war" by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks was too good of an image opportunity to pass by. And because none of our senior military leadership had the knowledge to advise the government about the wisdom of that objective or how to draw down our forces; or the honor to publicly resign in protest if good advice was given but rejected.
Can we honestly judge "what went wrong" when the leadership that ordered the skedaddle debacle bizarrely insists it was a success?
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.