How Billions Spent On Afghan Army In Two Decades Ultimately Benefitted Taliban

The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.

A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban바카라�s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces 바카라� by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies 바카라� which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.

The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are not unlike what happened in Iraq. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.

바카라�Money can바카라�t buy will. You cannot purchase leadership,바카라� John Kirby, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said Monday.

Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who help direct Afghan war strategy during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that what the Afghans received intangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles.

바카라�The principle of war stands 바카라� moral factors dominate material factors,바카라� he said. 바카라�Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. As outsiders in Afghanistan, we can provide material, but only Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors.바카라�

By contrast, Afghanistan바카라�s Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry, and no airpower, proved a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.

바카라�If we wouldn바카라�t have used hope as a course of action, ... we would have realized the rapid drawdown of U.S. forces sent a signal to the Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,바카라� said Chris Miller, who saw combat in Afghanistan in 2001 and was acting secretary of defense at the end of President Donald Trump바카라�s term.

Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden바카라�s announcement set the final collapse in motion.

바카라�The problem of the U.S. withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the jig is up 바카라� a sudden, nationwide signal that everyone read the same way,바카라� Biddle said. Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war, he said. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight 바카라�spread like wildfire.바카라�

The failures, however, go back much further and run much deeper. The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism.

Year after year, U.S. military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall. In 2015 a professor at the Army War College바카라�s Strategic Studies Institute wrote about the military바카라�s failure to learn lessons from past wars; he subtitled his book, 바카라�Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold.바카라�

바카라�Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan,바카라� Chris Mason wrote. He added, presciently: 바카라�Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.바카라�

Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole, the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a 바카라�house of cards바카라� whose collapse was driven as much by failures of U.S. civilian leaders as their military partners, according to Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Afghanistan war analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops바카라� salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating 바카라�ghost soldiers바카라� to keep the misspent dollars coming.

Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.

The $83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year바카라�s budget for the entire U.S. Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year for food stamp assistance for about 40 million Americans.

In his book, 바카라�The Afghanistan Papers,바카라� journalist Craig Whitlock wrote that U.S. trainers tried to force Western ways on Afghan recruits and gave scant thought to whether U.S. taxpayer's dollars were investing in a truly viable army.

바카라�Given that the U.S. war strategy depended on the Afghan army바카라�s performance, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to the question of whether Afghans were willing to die for their government,바카라� he wrote.