The $90 Billion Question

W hy did the Afghan National Army collapse almost instantly, despite nearly two decades of training and $90 billion in cash from the American people?

Failure has a thousand authors. A cursory reading of the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has led people to conclude that the full collapse of Afghanistan into the hands of the Taliban is the fault of Donald Trump, with a little assistance from Joe Biden. This is the independent reporting body empowered by Congress to get the story straight. Foreign Policy summed up the top-line finding: “Former President Donald Trump’s bilateral deal with the Taliban, and President Joe Biden’s decision to stick to it, caused the disintegration of Afghanistan’s security forces.”

Scapegoating the presidents suits the Pentagon, the State Department, the congressional committees, and the vast industry of military contractors perfectly. All of these bodies would prefer that American foreign policy be conducted without the annoying input of presidents. Why? Because the president has a political attachment, via democratic elections, to the true enemy of the foreign-policy establishment, the American people.

That is the inescapable conclusion if one reads the report carefully. There is much detail, color, and solid reporting throughout, and SIGAR lays blame at the feet of nearly everyone, including the Afghan National Army, NATO commanders, the Afghan government, and the Pentagon itself. But one thread connecting many of their miscalculations was the belief that all of them could evade American public opinion and the presidents who occasionally claimed to serve it. Many of them believed that Afghanistan simply was “the great game” — a fulcrum point between India, China, and Russia that Americans could never simply abandon. The Afghan government did not believe Presidents Trump and Biden really meant what they said in public, and instead believed the unelected officials or senators who assured them that all the hard decisions would be delayed and new plans could be drawn up.

Were they fools? Or had not the great foreign-policy blob moved George W. Bush away from his initial hesitation about nation building? Had the blob not prevented President Obama from executing his promises for swift withdrawal after the surge? Had it not constantly cajoled, outmaneuvered, and openly misled Donald Trump?

Certain politically difficult questions are avoided in the report, but their answers are hinted at throughout. For instance: Why did President Trump negotiate that withdrawal agreement with the Taliban and without the participation of the Afghan national government? Put simply, because the Taliban had gained and held ground consistently ever since the end of Obama’s Afghan surge. Not only that, but in the most damning part of the report, the Taliban established a reputation among many Afghans for better, more peaceful, and less corrupt government than what was on offer from the government in Kabul, sponsored by America. “The Afghan government, a non-signatory to the agreement, bore the greatest costs. Kabul was excluded from negotiations, legitimating the Taliban on the world stage and further undercutting the Afghan government’s credibility, which many Afghans already viewed as illegitimate,” SIGAR reports.

The Afghan National Army had suffered from low morale and low capability for almost its entire existence. It was staffed by wayward sons, considered unfit for Afghan family enterprises or a career as a cleric. It was a way of collecting paychecks and getting fed, though even the paychecks and food were skimmed by corrupt commanders. This made for a poor contrast with the high morale of the Taliban, which were an ethnically coherent force, motivated both by deep religious convictions and by a traditional Afghan national ethic of expelling foreign military powers.

Fatally, the Afghan National Army was taught to “mirror” the U.S. military. It was organized along lines that had no basis in Afghan military history or tradition, and the U.S. imposed on it a style of fighting with combined arms that worked very well for Americans but that the Afghan National Army could not be trained to do without overwhelming amounts of assistance and expertise provided by the U.S. military and its contractors. “Indeed, during the U.S. military surge, ‘the Americans were doing all the fighting, and the [Afghan National Army] were sitting by the side of road, doing very little,” General David Barno told SIGAR in a recent interview. ‘The Afghans and Americans both liked it that way.’” It would have required at least another decade, massive reforms, and unthinkably large investments to remediate these problems.

One helpful section outlines why the U.S. succeeded in Korea at standing up a force to take the bulk of operations but failed to stand up militaries to replace itself in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. The difference was that in Korea, the United States and the force it was standing up did not remain under siege. The United States was thus able to keep at the mission for decades, and had the good luck of seeing its own imperatives align very neatly with those of Korean president Syngman Rhee.

The presence of an ongoing and active zone of combat with uncertain outcomes, and goals receding over the time horizon, caused U.S. policymakers to try to set deadlines for the Afghan government, its military, and the U.S. government.

SIGAR:

After 20 years of training and development, the ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] never became a cohesive, substantive force capable of operating on its own. The U.S. and Afghan governments share in the blame. Neither side appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take to address the challenges, including devoting the time and resources necessary to develop a professional ANDSF, a multi-generational process. In essence, U.S. and Afghan efforts to cultivate an effective and sustainable security sector were likely to fail from the beginning. The February 2020 decision to commit to a rapid U.S. military withdrawal sealed the ANDSF’s fate.

In other words, everyone failed; they all needed a generation or more to un-fail, assuming that all the systemic mistakes in training and equipping the Afghan National Army and un-corrupting the Afghan national government were ever possible at all. The lack of “political commitment” that is blamed ends up being a glancing and shy reference to the American people themselves. From the perspective of the Pentagon, it is quite annoying that America’s citizens want to know what their nation’s honor and young men and women are being risked to do. Worse still that they want to know they are getting something for their dollars, all 90 billion of them.