“Military planners sounding the alarm about Afghanistan’s imminent collapse failed to predict the speed with which the Taliban would overrun the country, leaving the Biden administration scrambling to evacuate thousands of American citizens, embassy staffers and vulnerable Afghans from Kabul’s international airport.
Though officials warned repeatedly over the past few weeks that the Afghan government could fall far sooner than previous estimates — weeks or months after the last American troops depart the country — they overestimated the capability and will of the Afghan security forces to fight back as the Taliban seized city after city in recent days, defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning, told POLITICO.
In fact, DoD officials briefed lawmakers last month on the intelligence assessment that the combination of Afghan special commandos, air force and local militias could hold off the Taliban long enough for a political settlement, according to a senior Democratic aide with knowledge of the briefings.”
“As Afghanistan’s rural districts, and then its cities, fell in quick succession to the Taliban, official U.S. talking points settled on a common refrain: Afghanistan’s security forces had all the people and equipment they needed to battle the Taliban, and all that was missing was leadership. President Joe Biden has been saying this since mid-July.”
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“”They have modern equipment. They have organizational structure. They have the benefit of the training that we have provided them over 20 years. They have the material, the physical, the tangible advantages; it’s time now to use those advantages … as I’ve said from the beginning, we want to see the will and the political leadership, the military leadership that’s required in the field.”
The following day, the United States began evacuating its embassy in Kabul in preparation for the fall of the country’s last and most important city.”
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“So where was the Afghan leadership that U.S. officials kept saying was the key to stemming the Taliban’s advance? The answer is that it didn’t exist. For years, commanders of the Afghan National Army and National Police — the elements most critical to securing the country — failed to lead, often stealing the salaries and fuel that their forces needed to be effective, and more recently failing to even provide their forces with edible food.
What’s more, the United States government has known — and publicly stated—this fact for years. In an official 2008 assessment of the war, the Pentagon stated that Afghanistan’s government “is hampered by … a lack of sufficient leadership and human capital.” Fast forward to 2020, when the DOD’s most recent assessment acknowledged that “improving the quality of leadership at all echelons remains the most challenging issue” for the country’s security forces.”
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“the U.S. military’s preferred approach to advising foreign militaries centers on rapport, coaching and mentorship. While this focus on developing specific people has produced some impressive individual leaders — such as General Sami Sadat, whom former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani put in charge of the defense of Kabul before fleeing the country — it failed to reliably produce the quantity of high-quality leaders that the Afghan army and police needed to defend the country.
To do that, the United States and its partners would have had to recognize that the absence of leadership in the Afghan security forces was a symptom. The root cause was the lack of sufficient and effective institutions, especially those required for education, training, and the recruitment and management of human capital. Had we invested in these institutions, the army and police would have had the ability to accrue, develop, and retain good leaders. Unfortunately, as DOD’s own budgeting documents and internal assessments of the war revealed, efforts to develop these institutions were under-prioritized and under-resourced relative to investments in tangible items like helicopters and armored vehicles.”
““Is the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan inevitable?”
That’s the question a reporter put to President Joe Biden this week at a press conference on the US’s drawdown in Afghanistan.
“No, it is not,” Biden said, noting that Afghan government troops greatly outnumber the Taliban and are “as well-equipped as any army in the world.”
That may be true, but numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. The Taliban has rapidly expanded its territorial control over the last week and is closing in on the capital, Kabul. On Monday, more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers reportedly fled into neighboring Tajikistan to escape a Taliban advance. A US intelligence assessment has said the Afghan government could fall in six months once US and other international troops leave.
It makes it hard to see a Taliban takeover as anything other than extremely likely”
“rockets struck Ayn al-Asad air base, a military facility in Iraq that hosts American troops. U.S. Army Colonel Wayne Marotto, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, tweeted that the attack did not result in casualties. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the action.
Even without human loss, Monday’s hostilities highlight the risks associated with a continued U.S. troop presence and ongoing military engagement in the Middle East. The attack came just one week after President Joe Biden’s June 27 airstrikes on facilities used by Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, which prompted rocket attacks against U.S. troops in Syria the very next day. There have been many tit-for-tat exchanges between the U.S. and Iran-linked parties since former President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Though it’s unclear who ordered the Monday attack, it is clear that U.S. strikes and troops have failed to deter further antagonism from hostile parties in the region.
While Biden has made the Afghanistan troop withdrawal a centerpiece of his presidential agenda, his plans for the U.S. presence in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East are far vaguer. Following the Soleimani assassination on Iraqi soil, the Iraqi Parliament passed a resolution to expel U.S. troops from the country. No timetable for that withdrawal has emerged during bilateral negotiations, however, leaving the fate of the roughly 3,500 remaining U.S. troops in Iraq unsettled. Roughly 900 are still in Syria and their future is similarly murky.”
“It would be a mistake to get caught up in the collapse of provincial capitals because what has happened this week is just the continuation of what we’ve seen over the last three months.
Starting about three months ago, in late May and then June, picking up speed in July, the Taliban launched an offensive campaign that has swept across the country in a way that has been unprecedented since the US intervened in late 2001.”
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“it’s not accurate to say the Taliban now controls all of the districts they’ve captured, because in many places they haven’t set up a shadow government. They haven’t left a garrison of their fighters to control the area. In some places, they cause the Afghan troops or police to run away, to surrender, to retreat, to simply go home.
In the end, what we can say is not how much the Taliban controls, but how much the Afghan government has lost.”
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“the government has either been kicked out of or abandoned more than 200 of the 400 districts in the country. That’s happened in just the last three months.”
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“For the longest time, the Afghan government has pointed to this district center map as a means of demonstrating their authority, when in reality, their only presence or assertion of authority might be a district center where they have a couple buildings that are protected by a small military or police force, or sometimes just a militia that’s outfitted and paid by the government. And that’s it. That is the only government that exists in that entire district, for miles around in any direction.”
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“So when we ask, “How did we get here?” — where all of a sudden in one week, nine out of 34 provincial capitals fall to the Taliban, or seem like they’re on the verge of falling — the answer is, well, half of the country slipped out of the government’s control in the last three months, and it no longer had a buffer protecting those provincial capitals, which were these village outposts and district centers standing in the way.”
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“The New York Times ran a piece and got someone to go on the record with something I’ve been told over the last couple of weeks. One Afghan government official told them some of these districts fell when 10 Taliban fighters showed up. A lot of this was just the collapse of government authority, and if it could collapse in the face of 10 Taliban fighters, we have to be honest: It was barely there to begin with.”
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“It’s still too fluid to say they’re consolidating anything. What we can say is that they’re amassing huge numbers of their fighters to try and encircle or surround some of these cities. They’re doing it in multiple regions of the country: in the north, in the southwest. In some places, the government is pushing them back more effectively than others.”
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“What they seem to be doing seems to be something they planned on for quite some time, which is to cut off the government’s ability to resupply other areas of the country, to cut off the government’s ability to move from point A to point B on the country’s roads, and to surround and choke off the country’s cities — not to fight their way through each and every city of the country, but to pressure the government to collapse.”
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“Some people will say it’s because of the US withdrawal. And if that is true, it’s based on the psychological impact of that withdrawal, not the military effect that it had. The US had several thousand troops to help cover an area of the size of Texas. The US troops were not what was holding the Taliban back in 200 districts around the country. The US troops weren’t even out there at any of those villages.
Now, since the US-Taliban agreement was signed early last year, the US really scaled back its airstrikes against the Taliban, though they’ve picked them back up as the Taliban has gone on their offensive in the last three months. But for most of 2020, and the early months of this year, the US really wasn’t bombing the Taliban. That gave them a major reprieve from what had been a really intensive bombing campaign in 2018 and in 2019.”
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“It’s too early to see the outcome. What is clear is that if the Afghan government is able to mount a strong defense of cities, if it is able to take back some of these border crossing points and maybe other strategic stretches of the country’s major roads and highways, if the Afghan government can put a stop to the Taliban’s advance and can stand firm — then it might be able to fight its way back to a stalemate, a military situation where there’s no clear winner, at least in the foreseeable future.”
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“since the Obama administration, there was an acknowledgment among senior policymakers that the war was already unwinnable.”
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“What we’ve seen in recent years was a situation that was clearly slipping out of the Afghan government’s control. And for much of that time, the US solution was to ramp up airstrikes to help keep the scales leveled out. But with the US’s thumb on the scale, that meant the years went by and nobody really wanted to acknowledge how much they had tilted out of the government’s favor.”
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“Even in Biden’s remarks in mid-April, there was the suggestion that this withdrawal decision was made based on how hopeless the situation seemed. It was not the withdrawal that created an unwinnable situation. The withdrawal decision was made because in Biden’s assessment, the situation already was unwinnable.”
“Joe Biden is starting to do what every administration talks about but never manages to really do: Get U.S. forces out of the Middle East. His administration has removed Patriot missiles from the region, curtailed B-52 shows of force against Iran, and is preparing to bring home U.S. aircraft carriers after decades of dangerous Gulf deployments. In addition, of course, Biden is ending what he himself called the “forever war” in Afghanistan.
But if the goal is to reduce military involvement in the Middle East, then it should be alarming that the Biden administration has bombed Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria more times in the last three months than the Trump administration did in all of 2020. If the current exchange rate continued, we would expect a total of nearly 50 attacks on U.S. bases by militias with ties to Tehran, a handful of U.S. deaths, and half a dozen U.S. retaliatory strikes by the end of the year. On Monday and Tuesday, the United States hit back for the second and third times since Biden took office, striking militia targets in Iraq and Syria in response to increased drone and rocket attacks on U.S. troops in those two countries.”
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” The dilemma for the White House is that it sees maintaining a small, focused counter-terrorism mission in Iraq and Syria as a worthwhile alternative to a full withdrawal, which would benefit adversaries like the Islamic State and Iranian hardliners. But Iran-backed groups will not stop attacking those outposts. Now, it seems the administration is caught in a vicious cycle of using small, pinprick strikes in an effort to deter the militias while avoiding escalation, but these half-measures achieve neither intended outcome. The Biden team needs to end the tit-for-tat cycle by hitting back smarter, harder and less openly.”
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“The Biden team has been periodically hitting back at a time and place of its choosing, wisely separating provocation from retaliation in time. But the strikes have not been inventive or bold enough to affect the calculations of the militia leaders, instead hitting targets that just don’t matter. The administration seems fixated on sending clear and unambiguous deterrent messages that are anything but clear and unambiguous to Iran and her militias. This is because U.S. strikes are deliberately limited in order to avoid escalation — but this means they are too weak to deter. Each U.S. strike has been calibrated to roughly mirror the prior militia strike in destructiveness, but when 11 of every 12 militia attacks go unanswered, the cost exchange is still heavily in the group’s favor.”
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“to reduce the risk of escalation, do not announce U.S. involvement. The U.S. was criticized by Iraq’s government for the recent strike inside Iraq, yet Iran and the militias it backs in Iraq were not criticized for their rocket and drone strikes because they do not openly claim such attacks. Israel has, for years, not claimed many of its deterrent strikes, which has given its enemies some leeway to ignore, prevaricate over or delay retaliation. Although unclaimed strikes will raise valid concerns about oversight and transparency, the U.S. government has procedures not only for undertaking strikes using Title 50 intelligence community and covert action authorities, but also for informing Congress of these actions in closed session.”
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“Iran must understand that there is a cost to giving advanced drones to their militia proxies. Send messages to Iran’s security establishment — separately from the nuclear talks happening in Vienna — that the U.S. will match Iranian covert action with its own.”
“In recent weeks, the Taliban have advanced across the north of the country. Bereft of U.S. support, the Afghan army and police have reportedly lost more than two dozen districts over the course of a month and are now fighting on the outskirts of key cities such as Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif. Senior U.S. officials have warned of a civil war, while intelligence reports are said to forecast the fall of the Afghan government — which the United States has worked to strengthen for two decades — within a year.”
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“I have found no single answer to why we lost the war. While various explanations address different parts of the puzzle, the one I want to highlight here can perhaps be seen most clearly in the conversations I’ve had with the Taliban themselves, often in their native Pashto. “The Taliban fight for belief, for janat (heaven) and ghazi (killing infidels). … The army and police fight for money,” a Taliban religious scholar from Kandahar told me in 2019. “The Taliban are willing to lose their head to fight. … How can the army and police compete?”
The Taliban had an advantage in inspiring Afghans to fight. Their call to fight foreign occupiers, steeped in references to Islamic teachings, resonated with Afghan identity. For Afghans, jihad — more accurately understood as “resistance” or “struggle” than the caricatured meaning it has acquired in the United States — has historically been a means of defense against oppression by outsiders, part of their endurance against invader after invader. Even though Islam preaches unity, justice and peace, the Taliban were able to tie themselves to religion and to Afghan identity in a way that a government allied with non-Muslim foreign occupiers could not match.
The very presence of Americans in Afghanistan trod on a sense of Afghan identity that incorporated national pride, a long history of fighting outsiders and a religious commitment to defend the homeland. It prodded men and women to defend their honor, their religion and their home. It dared young men to fight. It sapped the will of Afghan soldiers and police. The Taliban’s ability to link their cause to the very meaning of being Afghan was a crucial factor in America’s defeat.”
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“More Afghans were willing to serve on behalf of the government than the Taliban. But more Afghans were willing to kill and be killed for the Taliban. That edge made a difference on the battlefield.”
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“A popular tale related to me in 2018 by an Afghan government official illuminates the reality:
“An Afghan army officer and a Taliban commander were insulting each other over their radios while shooting back and forth. The Taliban commander taunted: “You are puppets of America!” The army officer shouted back: “You are the puppets of Pakistan!” The Taliban commander replied: “The Americans are infidels. The Pakistanis are Muslims.” The Afghan officer had no response.””
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“in a country where people have eagerly tried to convert me to Islam, where religion defines daily life, and where insults to Islam instigate riots. The largest popular upheaval I witnessed firsthand in Afghanistan was not over the government’s mistreatment of the people or Pakistani perfidy. It was hundreds of angry villagers marching miles to the dusty bazaars of Garmser, protesting a rumor that an American had damaged a Koran.”
“Will the situation change with U.S. departure? Will the credibility of the Taliban’s war against the government weaken when we are gone, allowing Ghani’s government to stem the tide of their advance? Maybe, but I am skeptical. Twenty years of foreign support has tarred the government in Kabul. It is all too easy for the Taliban to paint it as a puppet. In the summer of 2014, I was eating dinner, cross-legged in a garden, with two old friends — one a tribal leader, the other a security official — in Lashkar Gah, a town that is today surrounded by Taliban forces. We were talking about the pending departure of U.S. troops, which was then the plan, and I mentioned the dangers of Afghans appearing too frequently alongside Americans. They rolled up their sleeves, pointed to their arms, and said: “The paint is already all over us. There is nothing we can do.””
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“If any U.S. leader wanted to leave Afghanistan, they had to confront the prospect that the Afghan government was likely to fail, a humiliating future.”
“The Taliban on Monday took control of another provincial capital in Afghanistan, an official said. The city’s fall was the latest in a weekslong, relentless Taliban offensive as American and NATO forces finalize their pullout from the war-torn country.
The militants have ramped up their push across much of Afghanistan, turning their guns on provincial capitals after taking large swaths of land in the mostly rural countryside. At the same time, they have been waging an assassination campaign targeting senior government officials in the capital, Kabul.”