America's Fools Errand in Afghanistan Nears an End

Numerous times American hubris - i.e., think we can do what no one else has been able to achieve - and a seemingly endless failure to factor in social, economic (particularly rampant corruption) and religious realities on the ground have led to slow moving military defeats after years of squandered American lives and immense amounts of money.  Vietnam is one such example and now Afghanistan is about to be added to the list. Some estimates are a trillion dollars was spent in Afghanistan in a attempt at nation building in a nation still largely operating on a local tribal basis, containing over a dozen ethnic groups, with no history of democracy or a sense of a national identity.  The British tried to subdue and control Afghanistan over an eighty year period and ultimately left in defeat.  The Russians spent a decade seeking to control Afghanistan and left in defeat.  Sadly, after twenty years America is finding itself in the same posture that the former Soviet Union experienced as the American embassy in Kabul is being evacuated and people are airlifted out of the country.  Along the road to this point, American citizens were told the Afghan security forces would be able to defend the supposed central government, even as many in the military and diplomatic corps saw the reality as a disaster waiting to happen. A very long piece in the Washington Post from 2019 looks at what this reality looked like which explains the rapid collapse now nearing an end.  Things did not improve over the last two years.  Here are excerpts:

The Afghan forces are better than we thought they were,” Marine Gen. John Allen told Congress in 2012. “The Afghan national security forces are winning,” Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson told reporters in 2014.

But in a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by The Washington Post, U.S., NATO and Afghan officials described their efforts to create an Afghan proxy force as a long-running calamity. With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would remain private, they depicted the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated, poorly trained, corrupt and riddled with deserters and infiltrators

In one interview, Thomas Johnson, a Navy official who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Kandahar province, said Afghans viewed the police as predatory bandits, calling them “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan. An unnamed Norwegian official told interviewers that he estimated 30 percent of Afghan police recruits deserted with their government-issued weapons so they could “set up their own private checkpoints” and extort payments from travelers.

Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, told government interviewers that the Afghan police were ineffective “not because they’re out-gunned or out-manned. It’s because they are useless as a security force and they’re useless as a security force because they are corrupt down to the patrol level.”

Victor Glaviano, who worked with the Afghan army as a U.S. combat adviser from 2007 to 2008, called the soldiers “stealing fools” who habitually looted equipment supplied by the Pentagon. He complained to government interviewers that Afghan troops had “beautiful rifles, but didn’t know how to use them,” and were undisciplined fighters, wasting ammunition because they “wanted to fire constantly.”

[A]fter almost two decades of help from Washington, the Afghan army and police are still too weak to fend off the Taliban, the Islamic State and other insurgents without U.S. military backup.

Government watchdogs and journalists have chronicled severe shortcomings with the Afghan security forces over the years. But the interview records obtained by The Post contain new insights into what went wrong and expose gaping contradictions between what U.S. officials said in public and what they believed in private as the war unfolded.

On paper, the Afghan security forces look robust, with 352,000 soldiers and police officers. But the Afghan government can prove only that 254,000 of them serve in the ranks.

For years, Afghan commanders inflated the numbers so they could pocket salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for no-show or imaginary personnel, according to U.S. government audits. As a result, Washington now asks the Afghans to produce biometric data, including fingerprints and face scans, to verify the existence of people in uniform.

The army and police have suffered so many casualties that the Afghan government keeps the exact numbers a secret to avoid destroying morale. Estimates are that more than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, about 17 times the number of U.S. and NATO troops who have lost their lives.

Questionable motivations and loyalties snaked through the ranks of the army and police. Ethnic and tribal tensions posed a perpetual problem, with the officer corps dominated by warlords who doled out promotions based on patronage, according to the interviews.

Filling specialized billets was especially tough. It took nearly a decade to get the Afghan air force off the ground, because of not just a lack of qualified pilots but also a dearth of mechanics who could read repair manuals.

U.S. advisers constantly tried to plug holes in the system to prevent looting and stealing but said they were often stymied by Afghan government officials who did not want things to change.

“The less they behaved, the more money we threw at them,” a former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2015. “There was no real incentive to reform.”

For much of the war, Washington paid the salaries of the security forces by transferring huge sums of money to the Afghan government, which in turn paid soldiers and police officers in cash — after commanders often took an illicit cut for themselves, according to the interviews and news reports.

The piece goes on and on and it is obvious that administration after administration (i) was lied to by the military commanders in Afghanistan and at the Pentagon, and (ii) failed to level with the American public as to the reality in Afghanistan out of fear of admitting defeat.  Joe Biden will be condemned by hawks for ending the madness but there were only two choices: get out or have America maintain a large fighting force in Afghanistan for decades and decades more while squandering taxpayer funds need to repair America's own crumbling infrastructure.  .