Afghanistan probably never stood a chance, reports show

Meghann Myers

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On July 29, the Pentagon’s independent inspector general for Afghanistan told a group of reporters that with 20 years in and trillions dollars spent, Afghan security forces were not confident enough to do basic route clearance or checkpoint management.

Two weeks later, the Taliban had taken nearly all of Afghanistan and was preparing to launch its campaign into Kabul, the capital. Video would show Afghan forces laying down their weapons as the insurgents rolled into city after city, shocking many, but certainly not everyone.

“You know, you really shouldn’t be surprised if you’ve been reading our reports for at least the nine years ... that I’ve been there,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said in late July. “We’ve been highlighting problems with our train, advise and assist mission with the Afghan military.”

After the Taliban took Kabul on Aug. 15, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stood in the Pentagon briefing room and said that no one saw the country unraveling in that way.

“... the timeframe of a rapid collapse, that was widely estimated and ranged from weeks to months and even years following our departure,” Army Gen. Mark Milley said. “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”

Milley, along with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, will be forced to revisit that assessment this week, as the two take questions from both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

While they may not have seen it taking a week and a half, there is a long trail of public reporting that Afghanistan was making little, if any, progress as a self-sustaining, democratic nation, despite public assurances that the U.S. was winning the War on Terror and that Afghanistan was a key front.

“The administration firmly believes that we’re about to turn the corner, and that we just need to give our policy a chance to work,” now-President Joe Biden, then a senator not yet selected as a running mate from Barack Obama, said during a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing in January 2008. “I am curious as to what that policy is, because, quite frankly, I tell you, I’m somewhat ― I’m ― it’s not clear to me.”

In the Navy, they call it gundecking ― when your people or equipment aren’t up to snuff but you have to keep things moving, so you write up reports as if everything is going swimmingly.

The strategy was on the verge of success again several years later, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the National Press Club in 2012.

“That has been in my book, the significant turning point.” Panetta said. “For the first time, we saw the transition working, the Afghan army able to do its job, and violence going down.”

But dozens of SIGAR reports detail the underwhelming prowess of the Afghan National Army and National Police, despite the growing competence of its pilots and special operations forces. The most recent came out July 30, the first to be released after President Joe Biden’s April announcement of a full withdrawal.

With that in mind, the SIGAR focused on how the Afghan forces would handle their own logistics, especially fuel. It didn’t look great.

“Fuel remains a major area for theft and corruption in Afghanistan,” according to the report.

Rank-and-file troops weren’t properly trained on fuel handling and quality testing, the report continued, and there was no oversight in place to require the defense or interior ministries to accurately report how much fuel they used ― necessary to make sure security forces received the fuel that they needed, rather than getting extra that could be stolen or sold.

The corruption of Afghan government and military officials was well-documented by the SIGAR, as was the slow progress in building and maintaining a force that could fight off the Taliban, though the Pentagon did not adopt any of the reports’ findings into its own messaging.

“It really depends on the kind of political and military leadership that the Afghans can muster, to turn this around,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Aug. 11. “They have the capability, have the capacity, and now it’s really time to use those things.”

To that end, the U.S. was prepared to continue helping the Afghan National Security Forces from afar, both by footing their payroll and procurement bills, but also through logistics and maintenance.

What went wrong

Backlash throughout the drawdown pointed to the chasm between years of rosy public assessments and the situation that played out in mid-August, but to call the whole thing a charade doesn’t quite describe the situation.

You might think “one of two things is true. They’re either stupid, or they’re dishonest. They’re either too stupid to understand what’s happening, or they’re dishonest in their reporting,” retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded the NATO mission in Afghanistan from between 2009 and 2010, told Military Times in a Sept. 7 interview. “I didn’t see either of those. What I saw was people given tasks. They are trying to get those tasks done.”