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WASHINGTON (AP) – Built and trained at a cost of $ 83 billion over twenty years, the Afghan security forces have collapsed so quickly and completely – in some cases without gunfire – that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They seized not only political power, but also the firepower provided by the United States – guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.
The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they invaded Afghan forces who failed to defend the district centers. Bigger gains followed, including fighter jets, as the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases at astonishing speed, capped off by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.
A US defense official confirmed on Monday that the Taliban’s sudden build-up of US-supplied equipment in Afghanistan is huge. The official was not allowed to discuss the matter publicly and therefore spoke on condition of anonymity. The overthrow is an embarrassing consequence of a poor assessment of the viability of Afghan government forces – by the US military as well as by intelligence agencies – who in some cases have chosen to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than to fight.
The failure of the United States to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are reminiscent of what happened in Iraq. The forces have proven to be hollow, equipped with superior weapons but largely lacking the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.
“Money cannot buy willpower. You can’t buy leadership, ”said John Kirby, chief spokesperson for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday.
Doug Lute, a retired army lieutenant general who helped lead the Afghan war strategy during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said that what the Afghans received in tangible resources, they the most important intangibles were missing.
“The principle of war is valid – moral factors dominate material factors,” he said. “Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than the number of forces and equipment. As foreigners in Afghanistan, we can provide the material, but only the Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors. “
In contrast, the Afghan Taliban insurgents, with fewer numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved to be a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies have largely underestimated the extent of this superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April that he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, intelligence agencies did not plan a final offensive. of the Taliban who would succeed in such spectacular fashion.
“If we hadn’t used hope as a course of action,… we would have realized that the rapid withdrawal of US forces was sending a signal to Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,” said Chris Miller, who saw the fight in Afghanistan in 2001 and was Acting Secretary of Defense at the end of President Donald Trump’s term.
Stephen Biddle, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and former adviser to US commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden’s announcement sparked the final collapse.
“The problem with the US withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the template is in place – a sudden nationwide signal that everyone was reading the same way,” said Biddle. Before April, Afghan government troops were slowly but surely losing the war, he said. When they heard that their American partners were returning home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”
The failures, however, go back much further and go much deeper. The United States attempted to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it fought the Taliban, attempted to broaden the political foundation of the government in Kabul, and sought to establish democracy in a country plagued by corruption and cronyism.
Year after year, US military leaders have played down the problems and insisted that success is on the way. Others saw the writing on the wall. In 2015, a professor at the Institute for Strategic Studies at the Army War College wrote about the military’s failure to learn from past wars; he captioned his book “Why the Afghan National Security Forces Won’t Hold”.
“Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in plain words, the United States has taken this route strategically on two occasions, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no good reason why the results will be different in Afghanistan, “Chris Mason wrote. He added, foresight, “Slow decline is inevitable, and state failure is only a matter of time. “
Some elements of the Afghan army fought fiercely, including commandos whose heroic efforts are not yet fully documented. But on the whole, the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies constituted a “house of cards” whose collapse was as much due to the failures of American civilian leaders as of their military partners, according to the report. Anthony Cordesman, a longstanding war in Afghanistan. analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Afghan force-building exercise was so dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the salaries of Afghan troops. Too often this money and untold amounts of fuel have been embezzled by corrupt officers and government overseers who prepared the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the badly spent dollars coming.
Of the roughly $ 145 billion spent by the US government trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $ 83 billion went to developing and sustaining its military and police force, according to the Office of the Inspector General. Special for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan, a post-war congressional watchdog body. since 2008. The $ 145 billion is in addition to the $ 837 billion spent by the United States to fight the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.
The $ 83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year’s budget for the entire United States Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year. for food stamp assistance for approximately 40 million Americans.
In his book “The Afghanistan Papers,” journalist Craig Whitlock wrote that American coaches tried to force Western channels on Afghan recruits and hardly thought about whether American tax dollars were investing in it. a truly viable army.
“Since the US war strategy depended on the performance of the Afghan military, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to whether the Afghans were prepared to die for their government,” he said. -he writes.
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Associated Press editors Nomaan Merchant, Lorne Cook in Brussels and James LaPorta in Boca Raton, Florida, contributed to this report.
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