How is the Afghan army so inept?

I guess the question I have is:

Why do we care?

lawirip wrote:

Delta Variant of Covid wrote:

Option A. Do some bare minimum to staff an army/security force to keep some medieval criminals in check. After receiving 20y of training and equipping from the richest nation on earth.

Option B. Medieval criminals come for you daughters, kill or conscript your sons, and take any valuables you have.

This is a colossal bipartisan clustefook. We could have left that skeleton crew in Afg forever, had a presence, forward base for ops, intel, etc.

How would that skeleton crew of 2000 or so have prevented the Taliban form taking over the country? Short of fully occupying the country permanently this result was inevitable.

I guess it depends on the size of the skeleton crew, but it would just cede the countryside to the Taliban and keep control of the cites. Use Kandahar as an example: when the Taliban started to surround the city, the US skeleton crew would call in massive air strikes, kill a hundred, and scare them away for a few months. Rinse and repeat.

I was in Afghanistan from 2017-18 in Helmand Province and then in Kandahar. You can take or leave whatever I have to say as you see fit, but from what I observed and learned:

- Afghani military leaders are corrupt. Stolen equipment and lying to Americans to get more funding, then using it for their own personal benefit, were the things I saw first hand. I'm sure there's a lot more that I didn't see.

- Their soldiers are inherently lazy. Don't arrive on time. No accountability. Smoke weed on military and police bases. They live by the 'inshallah' motto, i.e whatever happens, happens. If it's Allah's will, then it's meant to be. They're able to scrub their hands of any adverse consequences when they live by this belief.

- There's little loyalty. Guys will join to get what they need and then just leave. Maybe they need a place to stay for a bit, or get some money, or get access to weapons, whatever. Once they see greener pastures then they desert their fellow fighters.

Now I do think there are exceptions. The Afghan Commandos are legit and receive great training from Green Berets. However, they make up a small percentage of the forces responsible for securing the country.

I think it's a humanitarian travesty. The lives that will be ruined now and for generations to come from the Taliban's malevolent interpretations of the Quran is awful to even think about. And watching the world turn its back on Afghanistan as a wave of evil engulfs the population fills me with despair and disgust.

I don't have an answer to the problem, and there are many men and women who are much more intelligent than me who couldn't solve this either. It's just sad. Really, really sad.

It's located at the heart of Asia at a crossroads between multiple regional powers.

Pakistan to the east and particularly Iran to the west share considerable cultural and linguistic ties with Afghanistan. The US and its allies were hostile to their involvement and they were hostile to the US in return.

You can't help a country by isolating it from its neighbors.

big daddy wrote:

The Taliban is going to take Kabul just in time for the 20th anniversary of September 11th. Is this the most humiliating US defeat of all-time?

Even worse than 4/30/75.

Kobbs Hessler wrote:

Because "Afghans" are purely tribal. Dumb Americans look on a map and see a country with borders. The people who live there identify by their local tribe as they've done for thousands of years. That won't change. Hopefully the last 20 years have taught all of us, regardless of political leanings, that we can't fix the world, tribal societies in particular. But hey, defense contractors made trillions. Future wars should be wipe them off the map in an hour, or don't engage at all.

I'd love to know someone here in the defense contract industry--what is it like and how do you break into it? Those people and their families probably live lives almost as wealthy as Hollywood stars. But under the radar.

Afghanistan is a multi ethnic and mostly tribal society. The population of the country consists of numerous ethnolinguistic groups: Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimaq, Turkmen, Baloch, Pashai, Nuristani, Gujjar, Arab, Brahui, Qizilbash, Pamiri, Kyrgyz, Sadat and others. Good luck with that.

The problems in Afganistan are explained in Spiral Dynamics, a concept pioneered by Graves and later a book by Don Beck. Nelson Mandela used the concepts in Spiral Dynamics to help heal South Africa when he came to power.

Individuals and societies progress through stages. Stages cannot be skipped with unhealthy consequences. The stages in order of progression are:

Beige: Clans, basic survival

Purple: Tribal, magic, inshallah

Red: Feudal warlords (Genghis Khan), brute power, Taliban

Blue: Nation states, kings, absolute right and wrong, Ayatollahs, Puritanism

Orange: Democracy, progression based on merit, capitalism

Higher levels: Not pertinent to this discussion.

To progress to the next stage, a society must have a certain percentage of the population in that higher stage. The problem is that we are trying to get the majority in the tribal stage to jump all the way up two stages to democracy. The people aren't ready for it.

There are lots of websites on Spiral Dynamics, but I couldn't find one that gave a great explanation of societal development. One of the gurus is Ken Wilber's and his Integral Theory. Most articles on spiral dynamics focus on the higher stages of development, whereas much of Afganistan is still at the level just above the very bottom.

Interesting perspective. Thanks for that contribution. Seriously.

CountChocula wrote:

lawirip wrote:

How would that skeleton crew of 2000 or so have prevented the Taliban form taking over the country? Short of fully occupying the country permanently this result was inevitable.

I guess it depends on the size of the skeleton crew, but it would just cede the countryside to the Taliban and keep control of the cites. Use Kandahar as an example: when the Taliban started to surround the city, the US skeleton crew would call in massive air strikes, kill a hundred, and scare them away for a few months. Rinse and repeat.

Sure but to what end? Ceding the countryside would certainly not stop another version of Al-Qaeda from forming. And it's not that the Afghan army is not well-equipped or trained and they outnumber the Taliban. They simply have no will to fight so they are dropping their weapons and going home to protect their families. They have no allegiance to the government.

yeah I think it's totally unwinnable unless you are prepared to go really really old school, like "kill everyone that lives there and seed the area with YOUR people" kinda old school.

nobody has the stomach for that level of brutality any more.

Taliban are not a single united army. They are a confederation of different tribal militias. They are facing very little resistance from the Afghan army because the army draws soldiers from all over the country and has no relationship with local tribal leaders. So, the Afghan army soldiers are basically fighting in a part of the country that is almost completely foreign to them and are generally rejected and resented by locals as being tools of the corrupt US backed central government. Local tribal leaders and warlords are happy to cut deals with the Taliban in exchange for peace and retention of their power.

There may be much better resistance around Kabul. The Taliban are at their best fighting in remote areas where they can benefit from local knowledge of the terrain and easily blend back in with the locals to hide and prepare for the next battle. Kabul is the best chance for Afghan forces to mount a serious defense and make use of air superiority and better armaments. But it may also be a breaking point where the Afghan army goes into full desertion mode to scamper back to their home towns to try to avoid capture and execution by the Taliban.

The US has completely failed in Afghanistan and there is absolutely no reason or benefit to continuing to have a military presence in Afghanistan. There is no issue with the country harboring Al Qaeda because Pakistan has been doing that for the past two decades. The central government is widely hated, seen as corrupt and a pawn of the US.

While many Afghans have benefitted from the liberalization that came with the defeat of the Taliban, many Afghans do not care and are generally aligned with the Taliban's ultra conservative version of Islam. Most Afghans just want an end to violence, drone strikes, suicide bombs and US special forces running around the country, killing at will.

US took out 2,500 and out in 3.000

Call this a withdrawal.'

Let's say China put troops into America to free us.

And then bribed some Americans to help with the occupation.

Meanwhile some Americans formed an armed resistance.

Who would fight better?

The Americans who had been paid off (= the Afghan military)?

Or the resistance (= the Taliban)

[quote]Precious Roy wrote:

The US has completely failed in Afghanistan.

How do you know?

Nobody, including the generals, had any idea what the mission was

ClubRunnah wrote:

I guess the question I have is:

Why do we care?

Because Afghanistan will now be a recruiting and training ground for extremists to plan their next attack on the US and other Western nations. Just as they planned and trained for Sept 11. We certainly weren't there because we care about the Afghan people. We were there to protect US citizens. Unfortunately there was no way to "win" this war. Tribalism, corruption and shifting allegiances were held in check while US and coalition forces were there but now it's a free-for-all.

Interesting. Thanks.

ClubRunnah wrote:

yeah I think it's totally unwinnable unless you are prepared to go really really old school, like "kill everyone that lives there and seed the area with YOUR people" kinda old school.

nobody has the stomach for that level of brutality any more.

Are you lamenting the absence of a genocide?

from bad to worse wrote:

CountChocula wrote:

I guess it depends on the size of the skeleton crew, but it would just cede the countryside to the Taliban and keep control of the cites. Use Kandahar as an example: when the Taliban started to surround the city, the US skeleton crew would call in massive air strikes, kill a hundred, and scare them away for a few months. Rinse and repeat.

Sure but to what end? Ceding the countryside would certainly not stop another version of Al-Qaeda from forming. And it's not that the Afghan army is not well-equipped or trained and they outnumber the Taliban. They simply have no will to fight so they are dropping their weapons and going home to protect their families. They have no allegiance to the government.

There is no end. It would just be a way to permanently avoid admitting failure in Afghanistan by saying "See? We control the international airport!" rather than accepting that the Taliban is the de facto ruler of most of the country (as has been the case for several years, at least).