I know we’re all playing armchair general here, but I think it was Panache45 who mentioned how the ANA should’ve been staffed with women, implying because women have more to lose from a taliban takeover than men do. Which is a good point.
I don’t pretend to know the area well, but isn’t the Taliban a Pashtun movement? If so would selecting soldiers and officers who had the most to lose from taliban takeover (women, other ethnic groups, non-muslims, shia muslims, etc) have resulted in a better fighting force? I don’t think the culture there would accept female soldiers, but the point still stands about picking soldiers from groups that are mistreated by the taliban.
I mean in the civil war, the military units made up of black fighters and ex-slaves fought with extra ferocity against the confederacy for understandable reasons. They had the most resentment against the other side and the most to lose if they lost the war. During WW2 the allies had the Jewish brigades to fight against the Nazis. etc.
Or would this just open up a whole new set of problems?
I saw that article by the Afghan general and give it little or no weight, the simple reality is anyone of that high rank in the Afghan Army is highly likely to have been personally corrupt, and was probably a huge part of the problem in that country. His self-serving op-ed does little to inform us of anything.
I also think we need to put to bed the canard, that somehow for the first time in the history of war or infantry, we created a fighting force that could not operate without air support. That is not reality. Infantrymen with infantry weapons can fight and hold territory without air support, period. That’s basic military reality. Doing so against an enemy that has air support when you lack it, is very difficult. That was not the situation here–the Taliban did not have an air force.
We also did not create some special logistical system for things like ammunition and food, that could only be maintained by sophisticated contractors. That just isn’t true. People are taking kernels of reality and running with it to, for some reason, cover up the corruption, backwardness, and innate tribalism that plagues Afghan society to its core. What is reality is we did give a number of advanced weapon systems to the Afghan army that native Afghans had very little aptitude at maintaining and using. While we had technicians minimally trained on this stuff, none could operate without U.S. personnel physically on site to assist them. This is a problem, but the advanced equipment was not the entirety of their military. They had an over-reliance on advanced equipment, but even if you waved a magic wand and removed all that equipment they still had far more men, and far more weapons than the Taliban. Moving food and bullets was not based on some sort of advanced technology, that is just basic logistics. The reason that frontline units were regularly struggling to get ammunition and food isn’t because we gave them a system too complicated, it’s because most men in the Afghan army were corrupt, and people were simply stealing military supplies and selling them off or pilfering them for various reasons.
We made 20 years of bad decisions in Afghanistan–often the overriding one was helping people that did not deserve our help to begin with. But none of that absolves the Afghan government and Army of the deep corruption, the pervasive placing of tribal concerns first over national concerns etc. They are a dysfunctional people and dysfunctional people don’t run functional governments.
Something that needs to be frankly understood is the Afghan people want the Taliban. There are 32 million Afghans, there is simply no capacity for 60,000 people to pacify that number of people unless the 32 million are fine with the outcome. You could distribute clubs and spears to them and the Taliban would not be able to conquer them at such a numerical disadvantage.
That does not mean all 32m ideologically agree with the Taliban, it does mean that the vast majority of them simply view the Taliban as the best option to see the endless civil wars end, and did not view the U.S. backed government as legitimate.
It’s like imagining a scenario where Hitler had managed to get only 60,000 troops across the English channel into Britain, and the United Kingdom capitulated. That can only happen if most of the English people were content to have Nazis running their country.
The Afghan general himself talks about corruption in the Afghan government being a major problem.
The bottom line is that 66,000 soldiers of the Afghan army died fighting the Taliban, and a couple of hundred thousand were left with disabilities (and no support). Many times more than all the foreigners put together.
It’s this kind of arrogant, patronizing, racist American attitude that’s the cause of the whole fiasco.
You didn’t invade their country to ‘help’ the inhabitants.
And we should never have stayed there to “help” them either. That’s the entire point. It is not patronizing for me, an American, to say that the Afghan people are not worth one drop of the blood of American soldiers. It is instead, how I would expect America’s leaders and America’s Presidents to have behaved. And also how I would expect the leaders of virtually any country, and their people, to behave. What’s patronizing is believing we should be trying to bring medieval peasants into the 21st century. It’s the same mindset that was frankly representative of colonial thought in the New World and Africa in the previous centuries. The Afghan people do not want reforms and changes to their society that destroy their way of life, and I thought a long time ago we learned it isn’t our job to impose that sort of thing. It was quite obvious some people forgot that when we stayed in a country for 20 years for no discernable reason other than a fiction that we knew better than the people who have lived there for thousands of years how they want their society ran.
We went in because we were told we had to punish the Taliban and disrupt al-Qaeda. We had achieved both very quickly. If anyone had said we were invading to “help” Afghans, that person would have lost his office. But once we were in country they were happy to obfuscate and keep us in country for what I can only assume was a general lack of desire to be blamed for pulling out of a country with no functioning government and take the political hit. So to avoid a politician having to answer awkward questions we had to spend $2 trillion on nation building? The American people never wanted to be in Afghanistan to “help” to begin with, it was only deception and misrepresentation of reality by generals and other to policymakers that kept us mostly ignoring what was going on there for two decades.
As the article in the Jerusalem Post shows (as one example) they were corrupt all the way through, signing off on Afghan soldiers and projects to ‘help the Afghans’ that didn’t exist, while money by the shitload was funnelled to contactors – who will no doubt see to it that the US generals who funnelled all that money their way are properly rewarded.
The one thing the US military-industrial complex in general, and the Afghan war in particular, can really teach the Afghans about is sophisticated corruption. The US makes the Afghans look like rank amateurs as far as corruption is concerned.
This is kind of the elephant in the room for me. The one that we are so used to, that has been there so long growing in the corner, we just assume it should be, never noticing that it’s grown to a size as to make the room almost uninhabitable. What if liberal democracy failed to take hold in Afghanistan not because the Afghans are so incapable of functional government, but because liberal democracy is such an awful and unsound basis for an enduring system of government? “Liberal” and “democracy” is like an ideological house of cards stacked against itself.
And here note I am referring to “liberal” in the sense of “liberalism,” which is its own set of ideological assumptions. When I express my skepticism of “liberal democracy,” rest assured the doubt is grounded more in what I increasingly perceive as shortcomings in liberalism than in democracy. We can have democracy or whatever kind of representative republic you want independent of liberalism.
Anyway, my point is that it’s just possible that we repeatedly fail to remake nations in our own image not because the people we invade and occupy are so deficient and unworthy of aid, but because we are ourselves deeply flawed. With exhibit A being our history of invading and occupying countries, and exhibit B being how such manufactured or magnified conflicts tend to serve industry and politicians at the expense of the citizenry (and the residents, and the undocumented immigrants, etc., etc.).
So, in one breath you argue that the US military presence is corrupt and worked to create an unwinnable situation for the ANA. While in the previous breaths you argued that the US abandoned the ANA and that they should have remained to continue to assist them in fighting the Taliban.
Either you want to see an end to corruption or you want to see it continue on for a while longer. Which is it?
The Pashtun represent 40-50 per cent of Afghanistan’s population, making them the largest ethnic group and a plurality of the population. The first US-backed Afghanistan president, Hamid Kharzai, is a Pashtun.
I don’t think excluding half the population from the Army would have worked. That’s open racism, a bit like excluding [insert race here] from the US Army. Furthermore leaving the ANA unsupported would cause their defeat anyway.
The ICF (International Coalition Forces) used this approach by recruiting people from various non-Pashtun tribes to function as interpreters and liaisons. The commonly reported issue there was that the largely Pashtun civilian population did not trust their fellow Afghans from other tribal areas any more than they trusted the ICF. As a fighting force, these non-Pashtun fighters are formidable and there are areas in the north of Afghanistan that have never fallen under Taliban control. But they are relatively few in numbers and will have a hard time of it now that Taliban has taken the majority of the territories and the ICF are no longer there to intervene and assist. Some of those who abandoned the ANA are said to be joining the anti-Taliban resistance but it remains to be seen how quickly and to what extent that happens.
I’m curious what point you believe you are arguing against. I haven’t said anything one way or another about corrupt influences in the American side of things.
I think it should 100% be understood that Western style democracy is not for every people. Modern Western style democracy in almost all cases in the actual “West” developed gradually from undemocratic predecessor forms of government. Social changes over a few hundred years combined with political reforms gradually giving us sort of the liberal democratic order we have today. Expecting that you can jump to the end result starting from zero, I think is probably questionable as a premise. It’s also arguably colonialist and imperialist. I’m fine in situations where it overlaps with a broad national interest, to help stabilize unstable countries. It shouldn’t really be our job to impose forms of government on them, it should be left to the people of the country to decide.
The first Loya Jirga held after the U.S. toppled the Taliban, one of the most popular candidates to be the temporary President was the former King of Afghanistan, the U.S. literally stepped in to ask him to remove his name from contention as they didn’t want the monarchy to potentially be restored. However, the monarchy is one of the few things in modern Afghan history that had a unifying effect on the country and that people of all tribes had been willing to ally with. The King at the time was very old, he died in 2007, but there’s at least some argument maybe a blended monarchy with limited democratic rights at some levels of government may have been a much better option, who knows. The thing is that should have been for Afghanistan to decide, not America.
To my knowledge we’ve done this successfully exactly one time–during our post-war occupation of Japan MacArthur was pressuring the Japanese to come up with a new constitution. They proposed a slightly revised version of the Imperial Meiji constitution, MacArthur rejected this and basically tasked two American lawyers with drafting a new constitution. They did so in like a week, and with a few edits and additions by Japanese legal scholars, their draft constitution was more or less approved in full by the Imperial Diet, as an amendment to the Meiji constitution (that essentially removed that constitution from force), and it has continued on as the longest active unamended constitution in the world (having never been amended since its initial passage.) In occupied Germany we gave the Germans a broad outline of principles: democratic rule, respect for Federalism etc, but the Federal Republic’s “constitution” or rather its Basic Law, was primarily a German undertaking albeit due to the nature of the occupation required Allied approval.
There were probably unique things to why us basically giving Japan a constitution and government has worked out, that we shouldn’t expect to just be fine to repeat all over the world.
Used to be the Taliban were almost entirely Pashtun. But in recent years they have very smartly started recruiting among other ethnic groups and promoting some of them into leadership positions. One analysis around 2016 estimated it was ~25% non-Pashtun at that point, who knows now. Remember the government was mostly Pashtun-dominated as well. Certain ethnic minorities like the Tajiks and Turkmen/Uzbeks have their own grievances with the government and their own homegrown rural conservatism. It is not the case that minorities in Afghanistan are substantially more urban, sophisticated, secularized or Westernized - far as I can tell they mostly are not.
Indeed traditionally (at least pre-Soviet invasion) the regular army grunts was largely recruited from minorities (with a royalist Pashtun officer corps), as the Pashtun tribes resisted and were often de facto exempted from conscription. And as it happens the regular army recently was apparently still heavily minority-based. As you can see that didn’t amount to much in the end.
For the substantially Shi’a Hazaras the Taliban are a hell of a lot less attractive in general, however even here the Taliban have done some footwork, at least for propaganda purposes. In 2020 they appointed a Shi’a Hazara cleric as one of their shadow governors. Most analysts considered this as an outlier and tokenism, rather than any major diplomatic breakthrough. But it shows the Taliban, or at least some of their leadership, are starting to paying more attention to this stuff.
Regardless the Pashtun-dominated, tribal/feudal chief-dominated, Sunni government was sure as fuck not going to tolerate an army consisting only of socially inferior, religiously distinct Hazara army to defend them. There were Hazaras in the army, but there certainly weren’t the majority.
And yes, female soldiers would be a total non-starter in that society. It’s just not going to happen in an Afghanistan, assuming you could find any significant number of women that wanted to.
Non-Muslims? There almost aren’t any. Afghanistan is estimated at 99.7% Muslim, heavily Sunni. The relative handful of non-Muslims are quite incapable of affecting anything.
Not sure I’d agree that the people wanted the Taliban, but it does seem plausible that they didn’t really give a shit whether the ANA folded and they probably never took the national government very seriously. So when you’ve got a central government that people in the far flung reaches of the country regard as a comical hand puppet of a foreign hegemon going up against a local militia that has historically acted as a quasi national government, it’s pretty evident which horse people are going to put their money on once the hegemon announces that it’s wrapping up its little adventure.
When I was in the Canadian Forces, troops coming back from Afghanistan were all saying something to the effect “The second we leave, the ANA will collapse.” This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, and certainly wasn’t to me. A lot of the Afghan troops would tell us that the reason they joined is because “we pay reliably on time”. These were not people largely dedicated to defending their country. The Afghan National Army had very little success without allied support throughout the war and the troops knew it. No allied support and their morale just collapsed because they had no confidence that they could be successful without that support.