The rapid surrender of the ANA and police to the Taliban over the last 2-3 months has me convinced that they are cowards. I understand fear of being killed, I’ve done Afghanistan multiple times. With that said I don’t understand the mindset of the fighting-aged men who are literally handing the country over to Taliban, ensuring their wives and daughters will have miserable lives. These aren’t just a bunch of civilian bakers and carpenters who were captured by some hostile force. These are men who hold arms and were trained to fight and just said “f**k it”. I honestly don’t know how these guys can hand their weapons over to the Taliban and then go look their wives in the eye with a shrug. I keep hearing how the US needs to grant asylum to all the folks who assisted the US war effort like translators and whatnot, and I generally agree, but fighting age men shouldn’t easily gain asylum. If your country sucks fight to fix your country. Don’t run and watch it burn from the outside.
What possible justification could there be for laying down like this if it’s not cowardice?
I don’t know, I tend not to judge people whom I haven’t seen from closer than 10,000 miles away.
I can understand your frustration though, if you have “done Afghanistan multiple times”, I assume that means you served several tours of duty there, and so you were probably involved in some way in either fighting the Taliban or training Afghani soldiers to do so. I wonder how many Afghanis joined the army just to get enough to eat (my father did that in the US in 1940)? As for their wives and daughters, what would happen to them if their breadwinner was killed? I don’t know about Afghanistan particularly, but many such societies are not kind to widows and orphans.
Perhaps they were part of the Taliban all along or their families were under threat of reprisals. Without the US there to act as an intermediary and provide secure funding there resistance to Taliban rule may be futile.
There will be a bloodbath soon for those who dont bow down to the new order. Perhaps this is their best and only option.
Some words about why.
The Taliban hadn’t received a whole bunch of resistance before the USA showed up and failed to defeat them in 20 years. What will the men of Afghanistan have seen that would inspire them to approach the situation differently after the USA leaves and takes it’s endless supply of toys and personnel with them?
You’re rural, your tribal elders come to you with a message, “Surrender or die.” The elders hold your respect, and you don’t have a superpower covering your back and keeping you supplied anymore. Meanwhile, your adversary is still receiving all kinds of support from other major players in the region. What choice have you got? I suppose the honorable thing to do would be to kill the females in your family and charge the Taliban with pointy sticks, but most people simply lack that level of dedication to thriving as opposed to surviving.
Are the people of Russia cowards? How about N. Korea? Iraq under Saddam? etc.
I am a US citizen. I was born here, and I never lived in any of the places our armed forces have occupied. I was never military; having flunked my draft physical. When 19 Saudis pulled off the 9/11/01 massacres, my country attacked Afghanistan with no real plan of what to do next. We kept attacking them for 20 years, without ever coming close to creating a miniature US democracy there.
Our war with the Afghans was a mistake from day one. Our president at the time wanted revenge on Al-Qaida, but by the time the war started Al-Qaida’s leaders had fled to Pakistan. We kept at it, working under the myth that we were doing something useful there. As our troops leave, so does the myth.
The desertions are the Afghans’ way of resetting the balance without tremendous further bloodshed. Not many Afghans alive now have known anything but war.
Serious question. Given your experience there, would you say that the average Afghani life has markedly improved since the US and it’s western allies arrived on the scene?
I know we’ve heard of small improvements lik egirls being able to go to school and all, but it seems that was only true for small pockets of the country controlled by the west. Has there been fundamental change otherwise?
My WAG is that resistance is simply not worth it. If anything, given the local religion, they are probably half-amenable to the beliefs of the Taliban anyway.
The OP’s question seems a bit like asking why, say, a rural red-Republican region doesn’t take a stronger stance against white supremacists who go around with AR-15s and try to enforce an ultra-conservative government. Why should they bother when they already share half of the beliefs that these white supremacists have? If this were leftist Antifa or Communists that they were talking about, then sure, resist and fight tooth and nail, but is it really worth sticking out your neck for the sake of opposing people who are just a more extreme version of you yourself?
It’s not just the Afghans, in 2014, many northern Iraqis also totally turned tail and fled when ISIS came, indeed, Iraqi forces even abandoned the big city of Mosul even when the invading force of ISIS was small in comparison and they could have defeated ISIS had they just stayed and fought.
Lack of motivation. You’re assuming these soldiers actually think their wives and daughters will have miserable lives under the Taliban. But if a substantial portion of them don’t believe that because either they loosely agree with the Taliban’s version of Pashtunwali or because they don’t disagree enough to stake their lives on it, you’re in a pickle.
Because not every soldier has to refuse to fight to break cohesion - just enough of them. If say 20-30% of your unit melts away without firing a shot or indeed if some of them just switch sides, you’re good and fucked. “Shit Bob, John, Terry and Tom just bugged out and Phil and Jimmy have gone over to the other - fuck this, I’m outta here too.” It’s human nature and has been repeated many, many times.
The problem with the Afghan army is one of cohesion and motivation, not equipment or training. It’s not a very modern country and tribalism is often more important than national consciousness
The OP is assuming that the men of Afghanistan would see the Taliban as some sort of foe, and that their behavior should demonstrate that. Is it possible that the men of Afghanistan do not see the Taliban as some sort of foe? Or that they see them as a lesser evil than those foreigners that have been around?
Maybe part of it is an awareness that they cannot protect their wives and daughters while they’re doing their military duties away from their homes. They very well may consider that a miserable life is better than no life.
It isn’t anything unique to Afghanistan. History is replete to bursting with examples of soldiers (often but not always in backwards/3rd-world countries) fleeing from an enemy that they might have been able to defeat.
There are certain key points that an army must have to be successful:
Training
Equipment
Morale
Which one of the three is most important at any given time will vary. If one is lacking, the other two will sometimes compensate, but not always. I strongly suspect that #3 is the Afghan soldiers’ problem.
Answers so far are fairly realistic. Neither apologetic or condemning. So I would ask a follow up question. What is the international community responsibility to the women and children of Afghanistan if the men are fine with the treatment of that group? I (was) and American serviceman over there at one point and I’m not (at all) advocating for us staying (because it’s pointless) but what does it say about the rest of the world when we knowingly abandon all of those women and children to the whims of their spineless husbands/fathers?
As you are apparently an expert on the internal politics and social dynamics of Afghanistan perhaps you can put together a twelve point plan on how the non-Taliban Afghans should train, equip, and fight an insurgent force that has pervasive influence across the entire region and no scruples about killing entire villages if they are inclined to resist.
The problem with American policymakers and the people who elect or appoint them in general is that they have no real concept of ‘other’. We had this problem in Viet Nam, where we couldn’t understand why the Vietnamese were so resistant to invaders, be they Chinese, French, British, or Americans; we had in in Iraq with Condoleezza Rice appealing to Iraqis on the basis of a shared national heritage that they didn’t have because Iraq was patched together by the British Mandate out of three major ethnic groups; and we have it in Afghanistan, which we assume is a unified nation because it has defined borders on a map, even though it is really a collection of loose tribal affiliations that no national government has actually been able to control or pacify.
But hey, the o.p. is following the the proud history of knowing what is right for others, and I suggest that he volunteer to go over to Afghanistan and show them how it is done.
If we wanted to truly make a go of remaking the country, why didn’t we send millions to occupy the country and impose our will on them? Yes, it’s a silly question - I know.
But I ask it to highlight the limitations we’ve faced all along. What is the Afghan army without the technological supremacy, air superiority, and economic and political prowess of a world superpower behind it? The truth is beginning to make itself obvious, but it was there all along.
The bigger question is, will the U.S. (and the rest of the world) go back to doing business with the Taliban in the same way that we did in the weeks before 9/11? We have a tendency to forget that.
It just just a bunch of loosely connected tribes, lacking any real sense of unity.
The Taliban are bonded through religion.
The soldiers you speak of do not want to fight outside their own tribal areas–those “other people” mean nothing to Joe Afghan, & he may even be feuding with them.