Why The Afghan Military Collapsed

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."After 20 years of war, thousands dead and billions of dollars to rebuild Afghanistan, the government collapsed and is back under Taliban control.

President Biden stands by his move to withdraw U.S. troops.

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We're going to focus on one part of this seemingly sudden collapse: the Afghanistan Army.

Why did it crumble away? And what does it reveal about the failures of American and Afghan efforts?

Interview Highlights
We've read about mass surrenders, corruption, and how easily the Taliban walked right into several Afghanistan cities. Can you verify what happened in the past couple of days?

Craig Whitlock: "It was very surprising, I think, to most of the world just how quickly the Taliban was able to really take over the entire country, city by city, province by province, over the space of just over a week. That said, the Biden administration should not have been surprised that there were major structural flaws with the Afghan security forces. And the security forces consist really of an army, your traditional standing army, but also what they call the Afghan police. And in Afghanistan, the police are more paramilitary police.

"And the United States has trained and equipped both of those forces for the last 20 years. The U.S. government has known since the outset, since the early 2000s, that the structure set up to build the Afghan army and the Afghan police has been plagued by all sorts of problems that we could talk all day about them. And they've known that the reliability of those forces was very suspect. That said, I think they were caught by just how quickly things turned. I think they thought they had several weeks or maybe a few months before the Taliban could take over. But instead, it turned out to be about one week."

On why the Afghan military collapsed

Azmat Khan: "This has been a long recurring problem in Afghanistan. This idea of ghost soldiers, ghost institutions. So people who are officially marked as on the books and there's a payment coming in, but that person may not actually be there, and that money may be taken. In recent years, Afghan national security forces have been saying that they weren't necessarily receiving their payments. So they were being asked to fight a war without a lot of those kinds of promises that they were made.

"But in addition to that, I think it's really hard not to look at their incentive. So just consider the losses that Afghan national security forces have faced throughout this war. The estimates range ... in the tens of thousands. Brown University estimates 65,000 Afghan security forces have died between 2001 and now. And just to give you some context, in the last year since Operation Freedom Sentinel started, which was when the United States started to pull its troops away and function more around an air campaign. 64 Americans have died in hostile deaths in Afghanistan. Now Afghan national security forces have suffered anywhere between 40,000 and 65,000 deaths.

"And they've been paying that price even with American air support. So the United States has been providing air support to those soldiers so that when they try to go retake a place, this is a quintessential American strategy. ... Partner forces ... will send those partner forces in with drones and aircraft that are supporting them. So if somebody attacks them, they hit them, right? So now, even with massive air support in 2019, United States dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any year, previous year in the history of that war. Even with that incredible level of air support, Afghan soldiers were dying in large numbers.

"So now consider this from the perspective of an Afghan soldier. You now know that America is going to be withdrawing its air support, or at least curtailing it and reducing it significantly. Why would you continue to fight what would be a near certain death if you know that that support isn't going to be there? You may not even get paid. And there might be many people who are now, because of that air support, there have been so many civilian casualties in rural areas."...