Afghanistan: fast and furious

By Richard North - August 14, 2021

It didn’t take very much predictive power to work out that we were in for a rush of “what went wrong” analyses. And indeed, before even the Taleban have had a chance to take over Kabul, they’re coming in fast and furious.

The strongest strain of “what went wrong” commentary, however, is second-guessing Biden’s decision to pull out US troops by 9/11, a decision which is somewhat tempered by the fact that Donald Trump got there first with a commitment to withdraw by 1 May.

Whether either president was right is very much the subject of debate in some quarters, with Tom Tugendhat in the Telegraph arguing that the UK’s 750 troops and the US’s 2,500, at half a combat brigade, was no big deal. And it enabled 400,000 Afghan police and army.

There was, nevertheless, a certain method in threatening withdrawal, and making out like it was really going to happen. Without that sort of pressure, it was reasoned, nothing would have focused the minds of the Taleban and the Ashraf Ghani’s government, and brought forward some sort of power-sharing deal.

I suppose the theory then was that Biden should have pulled back from his promise and kept troops in place – at least long enough to see a transitional government in place and to guarantee the implementation of whatever deal had been finalised.

Attractive though that idea might be, I don’t think it lies in the realm of practical politics. The idea that the Taleban could even be relied upon to honour a deal is unrealistically optimistic and, without as deal, we were looking at a slow-motion take-over anyway. It would just take a little bit longer to get to where we are at the moment.

The real world option, therefore, was probably far more stark than the likes of Tugendhat would like to admit. Whoever had won the presidential election would have been confronted with the same choice: either pull out or ramp up the military presence again, to stave of Taleban encroachment.

One can easily understand a reluctance to increase the military presence. Reluctance is probably the real world. It is unlikely that any US president would have got a congressional mandate for that course of action. Complete withdrawal really was the only tenable option.

That leaves us with the not entirely academic question of how we got to where we are – a question that needs to be addressed at some time if we are to stand any chance of making the same mistakes again.

For that, there is no shortage of volunteers, with Ben Farmer doing a catch-up for the Telegraph, in a piece headed: “Why the 300,000-strong Afghan army is collapsing so swiftly against Taleban”, as he explains that, rather than resisting the insurgents, “the Afghan army have quickly been beaten back and at times folded without a fight”.

Anyone hoping for anything new or particularly enlightening, though, will be disappointed. Rather, in a Shipmanesque “wallpaper journalism”, he employs Col Edris Ataaie, having him draw on his cigarette and rub his eyes, suffering from a lack of sleep “because of a drumbeat of terrible news from the frontline”.

Once we get past the human interest stuff from “the garrison commander at the Afghan army’s training academy”, it’s all much of the same. Edris talks of a lack of strategy for war, of Afghan forces being “misused”, of unsuitable political leaders were who “treated our generals and our forces really badly”.

Edris, however, is also angry at the Western decision to do a deal with the Taleban which, he says, gave legitimacy and confidence to terrorists he had spent his career fighting. Thus, he complains:

Shoulder to shoulder with the foreigners we carried out tasks. Our agreement was that the Taleban were terrorists. And we fought them for 20 years. We fought the Taleban side-by-side. But, they went and made a deal with the same terrorists we were fighting together. They gave them political legitimacy and handed over our future.

The man has a point. Taleban, he says, is “a group of barbaric bigots”. Rather than having moderated, they are worse than ever. “They are more barbaric and more ignorant than they were previously. They have no guilt and will spare nothing in killing our people”, he says.

This plays to the political reality: Biden either had to fight them or surrender. In the name of American politics, he has chosen the latter, while the Afghans embark on their own journey of immolation.

Once again, we have the same tedious litany of rampant corruption and poor leadership. Soldiers complain of not being paid or not getting food or ammunition. They have frequently been left to defend exposed checkpoints and bases and when surrounded have been abandoned to their fates by callous commanders.

Frontline soldiers received little leave and the wounded were treated badly. In one of the most damning examples of the corruption that has blighted the entire Afghan reconstruction effort, wounded soldiers in a prestigious military hospital were left to starve if they did not bribe nurses for food.

Many of the military accuse Ghani’s government of ethnic discrimination and claim it has dubious political legitimacy. It is unsurprising troops, Ben Farmer writes, can feel such leadership is not worth fighting for”.

A similar view, albeit from a different perspective, comes from the Atlantic magazine, written by Mike Jason, a recently-retired US Army colonel. In 24 years of active duty, he has commanded combat units in Germany, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

From the very beginning, Jason writes, the American military’s effort to advise and mentor Iraqi and Afghan forces was treated like a pickup game -informal, ad hoc, and absent of strategy.

We patched together small teams of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, he says, taught them some basic survival skills, and gave them an hour-long lesson in the local language before placing them with foreign units. We described them variously as MiTTs, BiTTs, SPTTs, AfPak Hands, OMLT, PRTs, VSO, AAB, SFAB, IAG, MNSTC-I, SFAATs – each new term a chapter in a book without a plot.

Thus, Jason admits, we did not successfully build the Iraqi and Afghan forces as institutions. We failed to establish the necessary infrastructure that dealt effectively with military education, training, pay systems, career progression, personnel, accountability – all the things that make a professional security force.

Rotating teams through tours of six months to a year, he says, we could not resolve the vexing problems facing Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s armies and police: endemic corruption, plummeting morale, rampant drug use, abysmal maintenance, and inept logistics.

With dismal clarity, he concludes, for more than 20 years, efforts to build and train large-scale conventional security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq have mostly been an aimless, ham-fisted acronym soup of trial and error that never became the true main effort, and we are to blame for that.

For all that, Jason asserts that we [the military] are not the only ones responsible. Someday, he says, we will ask young men and women to do this again – to fight a war overseas, to partner with local forces, to train them and build them up. Before we do, he warns, we owe it to those young people to ask the tough questions of how, and why, we all failed.

To an extent, we have a pretty good idea of how we all failed. Why we failed is another, more complex matter. There is no shortage of talent in this game, and any number of people, well before this final showdown, were pointing to the certainty of failure.

The real issue then is how we get ourselves into a situation where so many intelligent people, many in a position of some power and influence, can see the system going off the rails but, neither individually nor collectively, seem to be able to do anything about it.

What is it about failure that this seems not only the preferred course of action in an institutional setting, but the inevitable outcome of collective action?