Anatol Lieven explains how the failure to anticipate the collapse of Afghan government forces illustrates how little the US understands Afghanistan even after twenty years:
I remembered this episode three years later, when the Communist state eventually fell to the mujahedeen; six years later, as the Taliban swept across much of Afghanistan; and again this week, as the country collapses in the face of another Taliban assault. Such “arrangements” – in which opposing factions agree not to fight, or even to trade soldiers in exchange for safe passage – are critical to understanding why the Afghan army today has collapsed so quickly (and, for the most part, without violence). The same was true when the Communist state collapsed in 1992, and the practice persisted in many places as the Taliban advanced later in the 1990s.
The Biden administration has said that the collapse of Afghan government forces is proof that they were unwilling to fight for their country, but this misses the point. It is true that these forces were not willing to fight for their corrupt government, and they had no interest in dying in a failing cause, so it made more sense for them to cut deals. A weak and corrupt government kept afloat with foreign money and military power is not going to command the loyalty of many people, and no one is going to want to risk dying to defend it when there is another option available. The fact that our government apparently didn’t understand this in Afghanistan is just more proof that our leaders never knew what they were doing there and were never going to learn.
Furthermore, the Afghan military had been designed to rely on the US The UShaphazardly built up an Afghan military modeled on ours and trained to fight in the same way, but that model and training make no sense when US air support isn’t available. The US built up an Afghan military on the assumption that our forces would never fully leave. That was a very poor assumption.
The U.S.-backed government was also always at a political disadvantage in part because it was U.S.-backed. Carter Malkasian commented on this last month:
The Taliban had an advantage in inspiring Afghans to fight. Their call to fight foreign occupiers, steeped in references to Islamic teachings, resonated with Afghan identity. For Afghans, jihad – more accurately understood as “resistance” or “struggle” than the caricatured meaning it has acquired in the United States – has historically been a means of defense against oppression by outsiders, part of their endurance against invader after invader. Even though Islam preaches unity, justice and peace, the Taliban were able to tie themselves to religion and to Afghan identity in a way that a government allied with non-Muslim foreign occupiers could not match.
Read the rest of the article at SubStack
Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.