From Military.com:
“US Troop Pullout Was Key
Factor in Afghan Collapse, Watchdog Says”
A government watchdog says
decisions by Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden to pull all U.S. troops out
of Afghanistan were the key factors in the collapse of that nation's military. The
new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or
SIGAR, mirrors assertions made by senior Pentagon and military leaders in the
aftermath of the U.S. troop withdrawal that ended last August in the chaotic
evacuation of Americans and other civilians from the embattled country.
Military leaders have made it clear that their recommendation was to leave
about 2,500 U.S. troops in the country, but that plan was not approved.
In February 2020, the Trump
administration signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in which
the U.S. promised to fully withdraw its troops by May 2021. The Taliban
committed to several conditions, including stopping attacks on American and
coalition forces. The stated objective was to promote a peace negotiation
between the Taliban and the Afghan government, but that diplomatic effort never
gained traction before Biden took office in January 2022.
Just a few months later, Biden
announced he would complete the U.S. military withdrawal. The announcement
fueled the Taliban's campaign to retake the country, aided by the Afghans'
widespread distrust of their government and entrenched corruption that led to
low pay, lack of food and poor living conditions among the Afghan troops. “Many
Afghans thought the U.S.-Taliban agreement was an act of bad faith and a signal
that the U.S. was handing over Afghanistan to the enemy as it rushed to exit
the country,” the interim report said. “Its immediate effect was a dramatic
loss in (Afghan troops’) morale.”
U.S. officials have said they
were surprised by the quick collapse of the military and the government,
prompting sharp congressional criticism of the intelligence community for
failing to foresee it. At a congressional hearing last week, senators
questioned whether there is a need to reform how intelligence agencies assess a
foreign military's will to fight. Lawmakers pointed to two key examples: U.S.
intelligence believed that the Kabul government would hold on for months against
the Taliban, and more recently believed that Ukraine's forces would quickly
fall to Russia's invasion. Both were wrong.
Military and defense leaders have
said that the Afghanistan collapse was built on years of missteps, as the U.S.
struggled to find a successful way to train and equip Afghan forces. In a blunt
assessment of the war, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
told Congress last fall that the result was years in the making. “Outcomes in a
war like this, an outcome that is a strategic failure — the enemy is in charge
in Kabul, there’s no way else to describe that — that is a cumulative effect of
20 years,” Milley said, adding that lessons need to be learned, including
whether the U.S. military made the Afghans overly dependent on American
technology in a mistaken effort to make the Afghan army look like the American
army. Indeed, in the end, the new report said that the Afghans were still
heavily dependent on U.S. air support for strikes and emergency evacuations,
and also on U.S. contractors to maintain and repair aircraft and other systems.
But all agree that the Doha
agreement was a lynchpin in the collapse. “The signing of the Doha agreement
had a really pernicious effect on the government of Afghanistan and on its
military — psychological more than anything else, but we set a date-certain for
when we were going to leave and when they could expect all assistance to end,”
Gen. Frank McKenzie told Congress last year. McKenzie, who was then the top
U.S. general in the Middle East and has since retired, argued to keep 2,500
U.S. troops there, as did Milley. The Doha agreement, said the SIGAR report,
led the Afghan population and its military to feel abandoned. And the Trump
administration's decision to limit U.S. airstrikes against the Taliban stopped
any progress the Afghans were making, and left them unable and eventually
unwilling to hold territory, it said.
According to the report, a former
U.S. commander in Afghanistan said the U.S. built the Afghan army to rely on
contractor support. “Without it, it can’t function. Game over,” the commander
told SIGAR. "When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all
the sticks out of the Jenga pile and expected it to stay up.” More broadly, the
SIGAR report said that both the U.S. and Afghan governments “lacked the
political will to dedicate the time and resources necessary to reconstruct an
entire security sector in a war-torn and impoverished country.” Neither side,
it said, “appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take
to address the challenges.” As a result, it said, the Afghan military couldn't
operate independently and never really became a cohesive force.
^ Trump and Biden are both to
blame for the chaotic and deadly US Withdrawal from Afghanistan as well as the
Taliban’s coming back to power and all the deaths and discrimination that has
led to. ^
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