Theres a lot of threads on Afghanistan, I don’t know if this question has been asked though.
Supposedly the US was down to 10,000 troops for the last several years. I don’t know how many foreign troops were also there. Supposedly there were about 80,000 armed taliban members.
Whats the minimum number of well trained, well supplied troops it would’ve taken to keep the taliban at bay? I’m assuming 20,000 or so but I’m not sure.
FWIW, I read in a book about a deceased member of seal team 6 that their group took out a large percentage of the soldiers behind the insurgency in Afghanistan by themselves roughly a decade ago. Granted that could be bragging, but seal team 6 is only about ~150 members. I can’t remember what page I read it, but I’m pretty sure it was the book Fearless by Eric Blehm. Point is that a small group of highly trained, motivated and supplied soldiers going on mission after mission made a major impact against the sunni insurgency there years ago.
From what I’ve heard the Afghani commando units are the only ones who fought, but how large are those units? how many Afghani commandos are there in the Afghan military?
Rereading the book, what they said was that about 100 members of seal team six killed or captured a few hundred people who were part of a bomb making network, and IED explosions decreased by nearly 80% because of it.
So not quite the same thing, but still. The point is a small group of trained, motivated, well funded soldiers made a pretty big impact.
This was one of the greatest victories in the war, but few in the government grasped—and the public did not even realize—that this offensive was executed almost entirely by two squadrons of DEVGRU SEALs. Fewer than one hundred men were responsible for destroying the network, killing in total more than two hundred enemy, and capturing upwards of three hundred. “It’s impossible to know how many lives were ultimately savedby eradicating those bombing cells,” says one intelligence officer who supported the mission. “But conservative estimates were in the thousands.”
US policy changed around 2011 or 2012? We cut troop levels and let the Taliban retake control of the outer provinces. I’ve read there were areas that had a provincial gov and a shadow Taliban government operating at the same time.
The US seemed to have good control of the major cities. That was with about 25,000 troops? I remember reading that Trumps cuts left some remote bases vulnerable. IIRC we closed some? I remember a report on 60 Minutes.
I don’t think we could have stopped a Taliban offensive with what we had left after Trumps cuts. We were down to under 7000?
I would think that the tripwire/deterrence effect would outsize the actual force there. The taliban probably would not be willing to take on even 1000 US troops in open warfare, knowing that it would lead to reinforcements and catastrophic retaliation. They probably psychologically and politically needed the idea that the US was pulling out before launching serious conventional offensives.
Did I hear on CNN that with 2,500 troops that there was essentially a stalemate, with the Taliban pretty much held in check and not making any gains? And that there were no US deaths in over a year? Is that true?
I don’t know what you heard on CNN, but my understanding is that with 2,500 troops we were left holding the wolf by the ear. There are also another 5,000 allied forces there, so that’s probably where the 7,500 number comes from. Enough to hold the Taliban away from the urban centers, but that’s it. And NATO countries want to bring their troops home, too.
Here’s a good accounting of the situation Biden was left with after Trump’s agreement:
The Taliban kept their word to not kill Americans, but they had already started to kill women and highly educated people, among others.
There was no winning this as a conventional war. The Taliban began planning their strategic route the day after we invaded, because they always knew we would eventually have to leave.
It’s not so much the number of troops that matters, but the air support - helicopters, fighter planes, drones, and missiles. That’s what actually makes the difference.
So if the US had been prepared to maintain a fortified airbase, and order strikes against the Taliban, they probably could have kept Ghani in power in Kabul, while the Taliban held rest of the country. Pointless really.
Yeah I agree raw troop numbers isn’t the determining factor. We were spending about $45-48bn/yr in Afghanistan since Obama declared the end of major combat operations in 2014–and that declaration wasn’t fictitious, since that declaration we did dramatically limit our significant infantry/ground operations there.
So that’s the baseline…except, we know that for the last few years the Taliban had adopted a “wait and see” strategy, largely because they expected us to eventually just leave. Why waste men and money fighting a superpower when you know they’ll be gone in a few years? If we had signaled that our commitment was open-ended, it is highly unlikely the Taliban would remain waiting and seeing. That means it is more likely they would be fighting actual battles etc more frequently. So to keep that under wraps, the assumption should be it would cost at minimum $45bn a year, and most likely in a scenario where the Taliban realizes it’s an open ended battle, probably 2x that, so $100bn a year basically forever.
Edit: By the way, and I know we now spend money to a degree that maybe $100bn doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s what $100bn represents. It is a certain amount of men, material etc. The money we were actually spending on Afghanistan up until this year is larger than the defense budget of all but 8 other countries on earth. The $100bn I threw out as an estimate to keep things stable if the Taliban realized we weren’t leaving, and planned to actually resist more ferociously? That’s larger than the defense budgets of every country on earth other than China, India is #3 at $72bn.
The fiction that an open ended commitment to Afghanistan was sustainable is highly incorrect. People point to the fact we are “still in Korea, Germany, and Japan” and while that is true, I think our total $ cost for maintaining all those presences is like $8bn/yr.
My issue with saying the stalemate works is we have supposed intelligence reports that the Taliban knew we’d leave eventually, so no reason to massively fight us. The Taliban are from there, this isn’t like they’re “deployed” this is where they live. Fighting the United States is really hard. Making deals with local commanders of the Afghan National Army, and waiting for us to leave, is a lot easier. For the Taliban us leaving maybe meant 5 years, maybe it meant 15. For them that’s a number that they’re fine with. They have time on their side. It is highly unlikely if they genuinely believed our commitment was open ended/permanent, that they would not be waging more aggressive warfare, which would have likely necessitated a much larger commitment from us.
Bear in mind that for every 100 SEALS you need to deploy at least 1,000 intelligence, support and logistics troops as well. Don’t just focus on the tip of the spear and give everyone else the shaft.
300,000. That was the assessment made way back in 2004/5 and that is what the ANA* size was based on, since the plan always was for them to take over.
Aboit 200,000 men deployed all over the country, 50,000 in the Kabul region and 50,000 as basically air cavalry deployed to hotspots as the arose, what became Afghan special forces.
The plan was sound.
Of course such an extended and vast commitment was politically impossible and hence the need for building up local forces.
*ANA as it turned out (with apologies to Voltaire) wasn’t Afghan, National and absolutely not an Army.
As for the training mission, I do think the method used by colonial powers in the last century might have been superior. Instead of rotating troops in an out after a year, it might have been better to have long-term postings, 4-5 years. . It would have permitted the trainers to properly raise up units and formations rather than the haphazard way it was done.
That would have required building infrastructure to house families, but since some of the bigger bases were almost small towns in themselves, it would have been pretty easy to accommodate them and provide security. Give the trainers skin in the game.
In all the 20 years of the US-Afghan war, Afghanistan was not stable at any time. So, take the maximum number of troops during that time, and it’s not enough.
Are we talking about all of Afghanistan or just a central area around Kabul? My understanding is the Taliban has been in de facto control of large portions of the country.
The US didn’t fail militarily; it failed politically. Short of committing mass slaughter and terrorizing the population into obedience, there’s nothing the military can do that can compensate for political failures. We spent a trillion plus dollars, had hundreds of thousands of troops in and out of there, and developed a local force that, in the end, was highly dependent on US air power.