I’m certainly not going to watch an hour and a half long video. It’s unreasonable to expect that.
Would you care to summarize it?
Nope. If you have not the time or the interest in fighting your own ignorance on the subject, I believe I’ve done as much as I can be reasonably expected to do about it.
I guess you haven’t watched that video yourself. 
It’s never been acceptable on this board to post a lengthy video without comment, and say ‘that’s my argument’.
It’s up to you to make your case for yourself.
In a letter to today’s London Sunday Telegraph, M. Christie writes:
“Until last year I was a senior Army officer in the Parachute Regiment and completed several tours in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2010 … The Afghan special forces units that we trained were tough, professional, well-motivated and highly effective. However, the regular Afghan National Army and police that I came across were almost invariably of low combat value. They were often incapacitated through drug use, frequently preyed on the civilian population and were reluctant to confront the enemy. I had to stop one of my soldiers attacking an Afghan policeman we were patrolling with after he opened fire on a civilian because he wanted his shoes.”
Imagine how many more pairs of shoes you get when you call in an airstrike!
I see poorly trained, poorly disciplined and poorly motivated troops. The people who built and commanded this force did a piss-poor job.
Speaking as a former soldier myself, if one soldier is undisciplined, it’s the soldier’s fault; if all of the soldiers are undisciplined, it’s their commanders’ fault; and if all of the commanders are undisciplined, then it’s the fault of whoever appointed them. Responsibility starts from the top down, always.
In all the videos I’ve watched and all the accounts I’ve read, it seems clear to me that the ICF (International Coalition Forces) that were tasked with training the ANA were not given responsibility or authority to command the ANA. In other words, they were there to train and advise, but not in a position to demand accountability from the Afghan units. In fact, they took great pains to ensure they were not offending them and would take time to apologize for anything they may have said or done to cause offense. So I think stories of success in training ANA units are the rare exception.
I think it’s a sort of confluence of multiple things which have been mentioned individually up thread.
One, the average ANA soldier and the Taliban are probably not really all that far apart in terms of beliefs, etc… It’s probably like having a bunch of Baptists trying to fight the Evangelicals.
Two, there’s no real concept of “Afghanistan” as a nation. It’s the name for the land, but people don’t have allegiance to Afghanistan the nation, or even believe in the idea of Afghanistan. The place is very backward, so it’s all warlords/strongmen, even within the ANA itself. Which gets us to…
Four, allegiance is to one’s leader personally, not to the institution. So the ANA enlisted men are following Captain X and listening to his orders because he’s perceived as strong and generous. And he’s following some guy up the food chain, who has a higher ANA rank. Or they might be also following their tribal chief as well. These guys live in a more or less feudal system, and have more in common with say… Viking war bands of 1000 years ago than they do with a modern military. Replace Captain X with Captain Y, and you have problems- those men aren’t loyal to Y personally.
Five, this feudal system means that the leaders can’t demand too much from their men, or they’ll go be loyal to some other guy. It’s much more of a give and take than Western militaries expect from their men.
All this stuff translates into a military that’s not particularly motivated or effective, unless it happens that their particular strongmen and/or tribal groups are aligned against the enemy. I think from the perspective of your average ANA soldier, it seemed absurd to risk one’s life and put up a hard fight against the Taliban, because if they rolled over, they’d just be considered men loyal to their local strongmen/tribal chieftans, who at some level, would ally with or swear fealty to the Taliban, and life would go on much as before. So why fight hard and possibly get killed? They didn’t give a shit about the idea of Afghanistan, they didn’t have any ANA esprit de corps, and they weren’t expecting much retribution if the Taliban took over. Fighting hard seemed like a sucker bet, I’m sure.
We’ve discussed this, or very similar, problem before, on the theme of ‘Why Arabs Lose Wars’.
I said: This has been seen in many military organisations in Third World cultures around the world. Imparting instruction is one thing. Changing mindsets is quite another. Many of these people have no concept of leadership, beyond personal charisma.
Setting an example to be emulated is foreign to them.
“ First my men, then myself ” is foreign to them.
Taking a chewing-out, accepting it and moving on is foreign to them.
Sinking one’s personal interest in the common goal is foreign to them. e.g., if you have been sent on an expensive technical course in America and returned with a box full of technical literature the last thing you want to do is start training people to do the stuff you have learned. Your newly acquired knowledge now makes you indispensable and that literature goes straight in your office safe and stays there. Acquiring status, rank, and wealth is your goal, not improving unit efficiency.
I honestly believe that this was the result of a failure of empathy. The neocons who were the architects of this invasion assumed people would react like the neocons would have reacted. They’d been involved in corporate takeovers, and you just fired the ten or fifteen percent of the people who were loyal to the old regime and the rest just switched allegiances; here’s the new boss, same as the old boss.
The neocons never thought that people would react any differently than they would have. Because they aren’t loyal and switch bosses with the drop of a hat, they assumed the Afghan people would as well. A failure of empathy is a hard weakness to compensate for, especially because they perceive it as being a strength.
10 -15 years we heard a lot about ‘Afghan good enough’ - the idea that while it definitely wasn’t perfect, it was good enough for Afghanistan standards. TE Lawrence’s [para]phrase that one should “Try not to do too much yourself. Better that the Arabs should do it tolerably, rather that that you should do it perfectly for them.” was much quoted. Today that looks less persuasive.
Some points to consider in light of that:
It’s possible that they thought that they were not fighting for their country but for a new invader. The government that they were fighting for was also considered a puppet.
The U.S. started decreasing support to them considerably across several months and sent mixed signals: they wanted to turn over gov’t to the Taliban while imagining that the U.S., the Taliban, and the Afghan military would join forces against terrorists.
Some believe that the U.S. was only interested in exploiting Afghanistan.
I would say that the West had no understanding of Afghanistan and wasn’t ever interested in learning about it. They had their template of war defined, the enemy they needed named, and on they go. Al Qaeda done, onto Taliban, tick, Saddam, tick, Libya, tick, oh wait, all of those are still disaster zones and we solved nothing.
To start with Afghanistan was a country in civil war, between the opium producers and the religious fundamentalists, which let other groups have sanctuary. The latter group might have been what we called the Taliban originally, and probably bears absolutely no relation to the group we call it now.
We declared them enemies for allowing AQ to use their area as staging bases. We struck an alliance with, yep, “The Northern Alliance” (of opium producers, this was clear at the time) invaded and put those into power. Then threw money at them. They took that money. And continued their business.
After that “The Taliban” was simply the name for the enemy. No wish to understand or befriend them, just annihilate them. There are tales of British soldiers being told “Those are Taliban” and they go and wipe them out. It was a fellow competitor in the drug production game. This is the template which the West put down: “that side are religious fundamentalists, we are enemies of them” (yet are great friends with the Saudis, arguably far more responsible for 9/11 than the Afghans), and if you wanted someone gone, just tell them they’re Taliban. This hardly promotes loyalty at a local level, and life might actually be better for some villagers on the Taliban end of the territory, less chance of being killed by someone, and you might know why you’ve been killed.
From what I understand whatever might be called the Taliban now (and I’m pretty sure this is a very complicated set of tribes and factions) agreed some truces with some of the drug producers, allowing production for export on condition of not selling inside the country. This is a more moderate Taliban now than before. This may have healed a lot of the general disagreement than before. Will they come in and do the crazy shit they did in the 90s? There’s a decent chance. They may not. There might be a chance this will birth another more temperate country like Vietnam was post-war. Might go North Korea. It’s not worked out well before though. And the country will likely go dark now, like in the mid90s, so hard to work out who and what will be there now.
Then there’s ISIS, supposedly an enemy, but hey, who can tell on that one, they sound like the same aims at least of the old Taliban, ie: one of the many repeated attempts to set up a fully islamic state in the middle east (apart from Saudi Arabia, that is).
But the upshot, is that it’s a changing of the guard. A lot won’t be a lot different for a lot of Afghanistan one way or the other from the US administration to the next one. Why fight someone else’s war? Especially if you’ve seen the current “war” last 20 years with no sign of ending. So I understand why the “Afghan army” put their weapons down. The divide is greyer than you think for the locals. Everyone wants to feed their family, and that’s probably working for the local employer (army) until they’re gone. They’ve no real skin in the game. The “terror” claimed to be at war with wasn’t their terror.
And what did they see when the West came in? A country occupying and fighting the other half their country, for what real reason? To sell trillions of dollars of weapons and services to the US government (Mr Rumsfeld) by diddling a simpleton (Dubya Bush) who believed the nonsense moral absolutism peddled by Reagan and Thatcher. Not their war. Not their job. “I quit”.