I wouldn’t for a moment deny all of what you said, but I disagree: it’s clear that they were not capable of fighting without American air superiority. That fact became evident right quick. But to your point, it’s probably over-simplification to say that it’s solely the withdrawal of US air power - clearly, corruption (and other factors) contributed bigly.
I do want to emphasize, and I’ve been saying this I think since like 2017 at least on these boards–we did build the Afghan Army in the model of the American Army, which is unsuitable for Afghanistan. We spent way too much money on expensive systems that Afghans themselves would be hard pressed to maintain at scale without permanent U.S. involvement. But it goes too far to paint a picture that we had an infantry force who was trained to flee at first engagement, and to never fight without air support. That isn’t, for what it is worth, how we train our own infantrymen in the United States. We generally have air support for almost every operation we conduct as a military, but as someone who was actually in the Army and schooled on a lot of our formal doctrines and training practices, the basic infantryman training we gave the Afghans was modeled quite a bit on our own, and nothing in that training teaches you to not fight without a friendly bird over head. They’d have learned basic maneuvers and small arms use, use of cover, basic discipline etc.
Correlation isn’t causation.
There’s no question that the one-on-one negotiations with the Taliban were devastating to Afghan morale. More than that, they had the complete opposite effect on the Taliban: they knew that they had effectively won the war once they got bilateral deals cut. From that moment on, it was almost as if, in the eyes of the US, the Taliban, an army that we had spent close to a trillion USD to vanquish, was every bit as legitimate a player as the government the US had spent a trillion USD to enable. That’s why Mike Pompeo can go fuck himself. I wish a journalist would have the balls to put it exactly in those terms and ask him to explain why he doesn’t owe the US taxpayer money.
Nothing in any doctrine we built the Afghan Army to train its infantrymen in, would have taught them “if you have an established defensive position with more weapons and soldiers than the enemy, flee immediately if they attack and you do not have a nearby air force you can call in air strikes from.”
There’s tons of instances in the last 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan where U.S. units fought for hours without immediate air support. Air support is supposed to be force multiplier, it’s not essential to holding a defensive position, nor is any military trained that way.
The Afghan Army has had issues with a huge % of its soldiers being unwilling to participate in combat going back to at least 2010, maybe earlier. Also the narrative that pulling air power “caused” the Army to collapse doesn’t even correlate that well. There were units agreeing to surrender deals with the Taliban in 2017, and the period 2017-2018 actually saw a surge in U.S. military airstrikes in the country to levels not seen for many years.
The Afghan Army, at least in my opinion, largely collapsed because the Afghan state collapsed. Part of why the Afghan state collapsed is its leadership wasn’t willing to rally and redeploy the core elements of the Afghan Army that likely would have fought on for years. The Afghan state collapsed because it had no functional legitimacy and many of its provincial leadership were just corrupt middle men with no loyalty to even the premise of a unified democratic state, and it had minimal support from its people because it was offering minimal value as a government to them, along with a host of other reasons.
You can train someone how to fight, but you can’t train someone to want to fight. Sure, you can train someone not to give in to their fear, but those Afghanis weren’t running away because they were afraid - they were running away because they didn’t have any reason not to. That’s not a training issue, that’s a motivation issue.
There are plenty of potential sources of motivation - patriotism, religion, hearth and home, honor, pride, shame, even money. Choose one; hell, choose a few. What did the ANA have?
Which is why I used the phrase “unwilling to engage in combat.” I didn’t say they were too afraid. There were probably a number of major motivators for why the Afghan Army soldiers had very low rates of morale and commitment to mission, as has been discussed elsewhere/already.
Hashish and ammo:
Here is an excellent documentary (1h25m) from VICE about the ANA and how they operate on the ground. It shows how the US military tried to train the ANA and ensure they would be able to operate without their support. It explains how things ended up the way they have:
It’s too bad Afghanistan doesn’t produce cocaine instead of opium and hash. It might have made them a more effective fighting force, or at least a more energetic one.
Thanks for the recommendation – that documentary was so edifying. Everyone interested in the subject should watch it.