Have we morally failed Afghanistan?

In My Humble Opinion
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So you’re saying that some of the ANA should not be expected to function as a trained military might be expected to function because they may not in fact be a functional fighting force? Well, isn’t that what some have characterized the ANA to be… a paper army?

Where are you going with this? I view the AHA no less “masculine” than I view the Taliban fighters. I’m not questioning their capacity to fight as men. I’m questioning their commitment to what the AHA was ostensibly created and trained to do - protect the citizens of Afghanistan against the Taliban.

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You tell me. You’re the one attributing or denying certain motives to the Afghan army, “questioning their commitment” to protecting the citizenry and the rights of women as it were. If it’s a functionally nonexistent entity and always has been, then how can you possibly attribute any motives to it?

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What are we even talking about here?

The ANA served as an opposing force to the Taliban. They did so even before the ICF (International Coalition Forces) arrived on the scene in 2001. The ANA was never very effective in fighting the Taliban but they did have the advantage of non-Taliban (non-Pashtun) tribal support, particularly in the northern parts of Afghanistan. As time passed, Taliban grew in strength, capability and determination. The ANA trained and backed by ICF also grew in numbers. But not, it seems, in their stand-alone ability to fight the Taliban. This in spite of all the support they had been receiving from ICF.

Now, we’re left to speculate about why it is that what is essentially two groups of Afghans, one a revolutionary guerilla force (Taliban) and the other an Afghan national government backed and ICF supported and trained military force have shown such a demonstrable gap in commitment to their respective objectives. There are multiple factors but I submit chief among them is that many of the members of the ANA, especially those in command, were simply not committed to their goals and objectives to the same extent that the Taliban has proven themselves to be.

For an interesting read, here is a paper describing the Taliban Winning Strategy, from 2010. I think it is still highly relevant, accurate and in many ways prescient.

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I’m not looking to continue an argument for the sake of arguing. I just wanted to share this article I just found from someone whose story, as you said, needed to be heard:

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Here’s the real story from the side of the Afghan Army.

It’s well worth reading.

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How do they say Dolchstoßlegende in Afghanistan?

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It’s a thoughtful and reasonable assessment from a senior military Afghan Army general. But how is this story in major contrast to things we already knew up to this point?

For 20 years everybody, including the enemy (Taliban) new that the ICF would eventually leave Afghanistan. They announced they would do so practically every year. A common expression well known was that Americans have the watch but Afghanistan has the time. Well, it seems to me that the ANA and Afghan leadership who fought the Taliban did not make good use of their time knowing that eventually they would have to face the Taliban on their own (without ICF support). And if 20 years was not enough to ensure they were ready to take on the challenge, how many more years would have been enough?

Also, it’s slightly telling that the general admits that the best they could do with more warning, and had Ghani not done a rabbit, is to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban to retain control of Kabul instead of having it fall entirely. That does not speak well of a national military preparedness.

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The point is, who set up, trained, equipped, and funded the Afghan army in such a way that it was not possible for it to function without US support? And then pulled the plug?

It was set up so that it could never fight independently. The whole structure was based on highly paid contractors supporting high-tech equipment, and supplying logistics. When the US switched that off, they were left without even ammunition for their rifles.

They assumed that the contractors would remain, and the US would continue to support them, even after pulling out.

They found out that they were being totally abandoned only a few weeks before the pullout. Bagram was the turning point.

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The point is that the ANA was largely incompetent and untrainable as an effective fighting force.

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and

Great points on how easily advice to decision makers can fall short in a painfully–even lethally–dramatic way.

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This article is essential reading:

Afghan corruption enabled and condoned by far worse American corruption.

The Taliban victory is the product of the corruption and cronyism of elites – especially senior US military personnel and Afghan politicians.

Did you know that US taxpayers’ money was financing the Taliban?

     … with the full knowledge of the US military top brass?

A 2009 report in the Nation cited US military officials who estimated that between 10% and 20% of the money from Pentagon logistics contracts in Afghanistan – hundreds of millions of dollars – went to the Taliban. “Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the American military to the problem,” reported the Nation . But 10 years later, the payments were allegedly still happening.

Why were they happy for hundreds of millions of dollars to be paid directly to the Taliban, year after year?

My opinion: Because if the Taliban were defeated, there would be no excuse to continue the war, and the flow of profits would stop.

So they were happy to pay the Taliban to continue fighting – in effect, to pay them to keep killing US servicemen, so that they could continue to suck up large sums of money from the US taxpayer. Blood-sucking in all senses of the word.

In April, I co-authored an investigation for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that implicated the Afghan president and his family in mining corruption, along with well-connected US military contractors.

Another stream of Taliban financing, facilitated by the Pentagon and Afghan elites, was the exploitation of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.
…
His office signed off on extralegal rights for the Afghan subsidiary of a US military contractor, SOS International (SOSi), to acquire chromite, a valuable component in stainless steel
…
SOSi is deeply tied to the American military and intelligence services. The company recruited heavily from the office of the former CIA director and top American commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, securing significant political heft in the process. “It’s an open secret that SOSi is essentially a front for the [US Department of Defense],” one high-ranking Afghan official told us.

The Afghan state and army was in large part a facade, held up only by the American occupation, and it’s no surprise that Afghans were unwilling to fight and die for it any longer. But its failure isn’t on them. Afghanistan fell because after looting all they could from the country, American and Afghan elites gave up and fled, leaving the Afghan people behind.

 

This is not just speculation. There’s an active lawsuit by the families of a large number of US servicemen killed, against the major military contractors.

From the website:

We represent 702 Americans who have alleged claims under the Anti-Terrorism Act against several large multinational corporations, most of which have offices in the United States. As alleged in the complaint, the defendants funded terrorists in Afghanistan through a sophisticated scheme under which the defendants made, or aided and abetted, “protection payments” sought by the terrorists. As alleged in our clients’ Anti-Terrorism Act complaint, the defendants supported the terrorists’ “protection payments” scheme because the defendants would make more money by doing so.

Full court filing - 288 page PDF

Defendants’ protection payments adhered to common practice by certain corrupt contractors in post-9/11 Afghanistan. Many contractors viewed terrorist protection payments as the cost of doing business, and they openly admitted as much. Typical statements by companies operating in Taliban areas included: “I pay the Taliban not to attack my goods, and I don’t care what they do with the money”; “You have to [pay the Taliban]. Everybody does”; and “We assume that our people are paying off the Taliban.” Investigations by U.S. military-intelligence agencies, USAID, Congress, and investigative journalists also documented similar payments. As one Kabul-based reporter summarized the evidence in 2009, “virtually every major project includes a healthy cut for the insurgents.” It was accepted wisdom on the ground that, to maximize profits in Afghanistan, companies commonly paid protection money to the Taliban in amounts worth between 20 and 40 percent of the value of the project being “protected.”
…
When Defendants paid the Taliban not to attack them, they were not reducing the overall threat of terrorist attack. Instead, they were simply redirecting attacks to other targets while supplying the Taliban with funding to cover the costs of its escalating insurgency. Protection money was quantitatively significant – by most accounts the Taliban’s first-or-second-largest funding source overall – and the Taliban’s highly disciplined process for extracting it made for an especially potent form of terrorist finance.

 
The contractors could not have done this without the full knowledge and support of the US generals.

When the definitive history of this war is eventually written, it will be the story of an American military corrupt to its core, the story of the worst corruption in American history.

So, yes, the US has morally failed Afghanistan, but the moral failure of the US to its own people is far greater.

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I’d probably argue that we failed the instant we decided to push democracy on them without holding a vote on the subject.

And, I’d continue to argue, a failure to get buy-in from the actual people involved probably plays no small part in their failure to ever buy into it.

(There’s also the issue that when most people say “democracy” what they actually mean is Humanism’s Natural Law - you should swap that in with what I said above. Democracy is a different thing and was something that the Framers of the US Constitution sought to avoid, not to attain.)

355

You’re writing a book?

356

Don’t be ridiculous. :grinning:

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I think we all agree on the the basic situation. The United States has been involved in Afghanistan and the situation in Afghanistan has been a failure. So the dispute is over why this happened.

  1. Failure was inevitable. The mistake America made was getting involved in, or staying in, a situation where success was never possible.

  2. Success was possible. We could have succeeded in Afghanistan and we tried. But the United States made mistakes and failure was the result.

  3. We aimed for failure. The United States wanted Afghanistan to fail for some unknown reason. We intentionally did things to cause Afghanistan to fail.

Other people are arguing whether it was #1 or #2 (including the people you cite). You seem to be the only person arguing that it was #3.

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  1. The United States had other interests that competed with success. Actions were taken in pursuit of those objectives that resulted in failure, although failure was not the goal.
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They didn’t aim for failure, they aimed to make as much money for themselves as possible. They succeeded in that.

And it’s certainly not just me. I’m only repeating what’s being said by

Some highly reputable news organisations
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The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (winner of many journalistic awards around the world, and funded amongst others by the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the Ford Foundation, the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights, the United Nations Democracy Fund)
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Over 700 families of US servicemen who have filed a lawsuit under the Anti-Terrorism Act

If you’re so upset about what’s being said, perhaps you could try to find some factual arguments against it?

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Anyone can file suit. Let’s see how far they get with it.

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Sit down. Are you sitting down?.. Because here’s what:

If this investigative reporting body and appropriate authorities find evidence that people (including American officials) profited illegally from this war, then I hope they are prosecuted to the full extent of whatever laws apply.

But insisting that because some people (yet largely unnamed) may have been involved in corruption and profiteering, does not automatically mean the entirety of the ICF was involved in corruption, knowingly contributed to the corruption, and did not try their best to equip & train the ANA, and help Afghans in general. The well documented and significant role played by the Afghan government & ANA in various corruption schemes at all levels, including demonstrable incompetence at the rank and file level. This cannot be hand-waved away or blamed on the ICF, and American military specifically (as you’ve repeatedly done). You have yet to fully acknowledge that last part and admit it was a (if not the) major contributing factor that ultimately lead to failure and collapse of the Afghan state to the Taliban. Or maybe you have. In which case, what are we still talking about, right?

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“They” is a rather amorphous blob.

Barack Obama was “they” for 8 years. Given that we were in Afghanistan for 20 years, that’s nearly half of the entire span of the matter so that’s far from an insignificant they-dom.

The leadership over Afghanistan, among the US military, were the persons selected by Barack Obama for those eight years. I would assume that he chose them based on his belief in their talents and integrity and, likewise, I would assume that the persons chosen had no way to wend themselves into the position, to gain those big, corrupt cash payouts. That is, unless we are to believe that Barack Obama was on the take and was selling out these roles to the highest bidder?

As QuickSilver says, it’s a very different thing between “some people” acting corruptly and “the entire effort” having been a corrupt effort. There’s almost certainly no doubt that there were some people who acted corruptly.

But, if you want to make the argument that the whole effort was built around corruption, then you need to show how all the top people were raking it in by taking Afghani money.

Personally, if I wanted to take over a country for purposes of pillaging and profiting, I’m not sure that - of all vaguely Middle Eastern states - Afghanistan would look like the juiciest morsel.