How the Afghan Army Collapsed Under the Taliban’s Pressure

U.S. Military Mistakes
The fall of Afghanistan rightly raises serious questions about the mistakes the United States made during its twenty-year effort to train the Afghan military. The U.S. armed forces will need to process lessons learned, and there will need to be a great deal of critical self-examination. The U.S. training effort had many shortcomings, such as deficiencies in language and cultural knowledge and lack of expertise in training police rather than soldiers, which hurt local-level security. In addition, the U.S. effort concentrated too much on teaching tactical infantry skills while neglecting the kind of higher-level expertise in logistics, planning, training, and command and control that is needed to maintain a military force.

The U.S. training effort was also hindered by factors beyond its control, including the lack of education in one of the world’s poorest countries and the pervasiveness of corruption. As a police officer in Kandahar recently told the New York Times, “We are drowning in corruption.”

All of that corruption meant Afghan troop numbers, such as the one cited by Biden, were vastly exaggerated. The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers project found that of the 352,000 soldiers and police counted as members of the country’s security forces, only 254,000 could be confirmed by the Afghan government. Commanders not only created “ghost soldiers” to pad their payrolls but also skimmed the pay of serving soldiers and failed to deliver necessary supplies, the Post reported. To a large extent, that corruption was enabled by the United States’ free-spending ways. U.S. attempts to fight corruption were, by contrast, half-hearted and ineffectual.

Who’s to Blame?
Many now criticize the U.S. military for building an Afghan force in its own image—heavily reliant on airpower and technology that the Afghans could not maintain by themselves. The criticism has some validity, but there is a logic to the U.S. approach: The Afghan forces were far too small to defend a far-flung nation of thirty-eight million people, and no U.S. administration wanted to fund a larger force. There was no way to maintain a security-force presence across such a vast country without supplying outposts by air. Once U.S. troops and contractors abruptly pulled out, the Afghans simply lost the ability to keep their military machine functioning, and the military disintegrated.

Although it’s easy to blame Afghan troops for not fighting harder, it’s important to remember that more than sixty thousand Afghan security-force members were killed in the past twenty years—that’s twenty-seven times more than U.S. fatalities in the war. While some three thousand U.S. advisors remained in the country, the Afghan military still controlled every city. It was the U.S. pullout that brutally exposed the shortcomings of the Afghan forces and precipitated the military’s collapse.

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at CFR.This article is published courtesy of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).