The argument that we cannot stay and help the Afghans, because they are unwilling themselves to fight, is an attempt at obfuscation.
“Americans cannot and should not be fighting in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” said President Biden in his latest go-to-argument.
Yes, much of the blame for the failure of the Afghan military lies with the Afghan military itself. And much of the blame can also be attributed to the failure of American military professionals to form a fully trained military force. This isn’t the first time an American-trained army has fallen to religiously dedicated fighters, only to leave a surplus of American military equipment and technology to the enemy.
“We did not successfully build the Iraqi and Afghan forces as institutions,” writes Mike Jason in the Atlantic. “We failed to establish the necessary infrastructure that dealt effectively with military education, training, pay systems, career progression, personnel, accountability—all the things that make a professional security force.”
Jason is a retired US Army colonel who commanded combat units in Germany, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He cites numerous unresolved problems in training foreign armies, including a lack of morale, drug use, corruption, as well as poor maintenance of equipment and less-than-adequate logistics, among many others. They could teach a platoon to operate checkpoints and conduct basic raids, but the lack of infrastructure behind these platoons was never fully addressed. He remarks, “It is telling that today, the best forces in Afghanistan are the special-forces commandos, small teams that perform courageously and magnificently—but despite a supporting institution, not because of one.”
But there is more to this narrative. The sudden collapse of the Afghan military cannot only be attributed to systemic problems within. There was also plenty of incompetence emanating from Washington from the moment the Biden Administration decided to wash its hands of Afghanistan.
In early July the US military had left Bagram air base, which was the “centerpiece of American military operations in Afghanistan” for the entire 20-year campaign. When President Biden was asked to quantify the remaining American support for the Afghan government, he replied, “The Afghans are going to have to do it themselves with the Air Force they have."
Clearly, we should have been providing more air support to the Afghan military as it took on the rapidly advancing Taliban, if only to slow down their advance and to provide more time for US personnel and Afghan compatriots to fully evacuate. But the Biden administration, which wanted to “dial back on strikes against the Taliban before Aug. 31,” had already moved all combat aircraft out of Afghanistan, thus making air support far more difficult to access for the Afghan forces engaging the Taliban. In July, the Wall Street Journal reported:
Without Bagram, the U.S. has no existing remaining capability for providing combat air support to U.S. or coalition forces, including Afghan troops, from inside the country.Future air support operations must come from bases in Qatar and other installations in the Middle East, or from an aircraft carrier in the region. All of those are hours away from Afghanistan, diminishing their immediate effectiveness, officials have said.
But we didn’t just remove air support. We removed the contractors that maintain the Afghan air force.
[The Afghan military] is heavily reliant on American and other foreign contractors for repairs, maintenance, fueling, training and other jobs necessary to keep their forces operating, and those contractors are now departing along with the American military, leaving a void that leaders on both sides say could be crippling to Afghan forces as they face the Taliban alone.The problem is especially acute for the Afghan Air Force. Not only does the small but professional fleet provide air support to beleaguered troops, but it is also essential to supplying and evacuating hundreds of outposts and bases across the country — the quickly thinning line that separates government and Taliban-controlled territory.With their ability to maintain their aircraft diminishing, Afghan pilots who fly over Taliban-held territory are finding that the condition of their aircraft upon their return is as pressing a concern as the success of their mission.There are “a lot of problems” in the Afghan Air Force and it needs “American support,” one pilot said bluntly shortly before he flew to retrieve Afghan troops in a besieged district. His helicopter was hit with several bullets and narrowly missed a rocket-propelled grenade.The Pentagon’s command to train, advise and assist the Afghan Air Force, known as TAAC-Air, concluded in January that no Afghan aircraft could be sustained as combat effective for more than a few months in the absence of contractor support [emphasis added].
American contractors provided the Afghan military with “its main advantage over the Taliban,” and their departure was predicted to be a “game-changing shift."
Did no one tell the president?