By Scott Taylor
It has been just over a week since the Taliban shocked the world with their blitzkrieg speed overthrow of the Afghan regime. The first major shock was the fact that the Taliban accomplished their victory without having to fight any battles.
The 350,000 strong Afghan security forces, simply disappeared. No western military analyst predicted such a complete and instant collapse of a fighting force, into which the U.S. and NATO had invested two decades of training and equipping. The U.S. supplied Afghan military arsenal was valued at nearly $100 billion and included armoured vehicles, artillery and even combat aircraft. That impressive collection of weaponry and munitions is now in the hands of the Taliban.
While U.S. President Joe Biden was quick to scapegoat the Afghan army for their lack of will to fight, in all honesty no one can blame them for this defeat.
No one can ever question the courage of the average Afghan fighter. Afghanistan has shed a lot of blood over the centuries to earn itself the moniker the graveyard of empires. Courage was not the problem.
As for professionalism and combat proficiency, the Afghan army has twenty years of top-level international instruction, including that of many Canadian soldiers. Compared to their Taliban counterparts the Afghan army were by far better trained, and certainly far better equipped with modern weapons. Firepower was not the problem.
In terms of opposing numbers, estimates of the Taliban’s current strength vary greatly but they are thought to have between 30,000 to 60,000 fighters. That means that at the start of the Taliban offensive on August 5th, the Afghan army outnumbered them – on paper – by at least a six to one margin.
Owing to the widespread corruption in the ranks of the Afghan army and police, the actual number of government security forces may have been as low as 100,000 at the start of the Taliban campaign.
The reason for the discrepancy is the phenom of what he became known as the employment of ‘Ghost soldiers.’
This was not a legion of spectral warriors, but rather a term applied to the artificial inflation of the strength of Afghan military units. When soldiers died or deserted, they were kept active on the duty roster so that commanders could continue drawing pay and rations for non-existent ‘Ghost soldiers’.
This brings us to the real reason why the Afghan army proved to be so absolutely useless in the face of the Taliban.
They had no will to fight and they certainly had no will to die for the corrupt puppet government which the U.S. had established in Kabul.
With the abrupt withdrawal of the last of the U.S. combat forces on July 2, the Afghan military knew the plug had been pulled on the regime of President Ashraf Ghani.
During the peace negotiations in Doha, Qatar, the U.S. military leaders had met with the Taliban to ostensibly broker a power-sharing agreement with the Ghani government.
The problem with that scenario was that there were no representatives from the Ghani regime at those talks.
For his part, Ghani understood that he’d been cut from the team and as such his 11th hour departure to safety is understandable. Loyalty is a two-way street. In the end, he owed the U.S. nothing, ditto for the Afghan army.
Sure, they could have put up a fight and delayed the Taliban advance. Their American trainers probably thought that they would resist based purely out of martial pride and esprit de corps.
Unfortunately it is not enough to simply fight against something – in this case the Taliban, if you cannot believe in the cause you are fighting for.
For the two decades the Americans spent occupying Afghanistan they did not realize that the Afghans never considered the presence of foreign troops on their soil as a liberation.
Had we focused on developing a progressive, functioning central government, instead of arming and training a military force to prop up the most corrupt regime on earth, the tragic ending may have been different.
The crazy part is that Afghans always knew this and they predicted exactly how the American withdrawal would play out. In 2008, I interviewed tribal leader Akbar Bey and he forecast “If the U.S and NATO troops leave Afghanistan at 4:00pm, by 6:00pm the [Afghan] government will collapse. They will not last two hours.”
His prediction was bang on.
