Eleven Days in Kabul: Institutional Failures in Afghanistan

The rapidity of the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan in August 2021 surprised much of the world. The US-led coalition was also surprised by the rapidity with which the Taliban gained ground as they swept through the country, although they fully expected that Afghanistan would fall in the wake of their withdrawal. (Seligman, August, 2021; Fürstenau) Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in a hearing on 28 September 2021 that the “consensus intelligence view” indicated a fracture and collapse of the Afghan National Security and Defence Forces (ANSDF, also known as ANA – Afghan National Army) and an inability to defend the provincial and national capitals, which would in turn lead to a capture of these cities by the late autumn or early December. GEN Milley also maintained that the “speed, scale and scope of the collapse was a surprise.” Intelligence officials within the coalition, to a greater extent, seemed to have been accurate in their estimations about the fall of Afghanistan, if somewhat imprecise about the timelines.

Successive governments, especially in London and DC, maintained for the longest time that the project in Afghanistan was going well, that the situation was under control and that it would keep the “West” safe. (Clarke) Why then did coalition intelligence officials estimate that Afghanistan would indeed fall if the coalition left? Was the project doomed from the start? Or was it a string of failures along the way that went unacknowledged by policymakers?

Civilian government

There have been numerous reports across the years which have detailed in some form that the Afghan government was corrupt at all levels, and that it therefore lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the public and the various provinces which sought greater autonomy; this corruption amongst civilian leaders also trickled down into the military, with senior staff and flag officers taking kickbacks from military procurement contractors, private military contractors and from government funds - and in turn preventing their troops from being paid. (Cordesman)

There is, moreover, some evidence to suggest that the post-invasion government might have been remarkably more successful if they had involved the Taliban in the early days, and worked out some manner of power-sharing arrangement. Failure to do so further alienated the Taliban and their supporters, and over time, such resentment fomented into a revanchist desire to depose the government in Kabul and re-instate the Islamic emirate from the 1990s. (Rahimi) As such, come the time of the coalition withdrawal, political conditions on the ground were ripe for the Taliban to sweep through and swiftly capture the country. The early departure of Ashraf Ghani and much of his cabinet from Kabul and their moves out of the country or into hiding in Afghanistan also did little to inspire confidence in militias loyal to the government and indeed the ANA. (McMaster & Bowman) Though there was significant evidence to suggest that the civilian government in Kabul was an unreliable partner, there is no obvious evidence that suggests that Ghani and his cabinet would have fled the country when push came to shove. Granted, this would have been difficult for anyone to predict without an established pattern of behaviour for Ghani and his cabinet.

ANA training and collapse

The long and the short of the discussion around the inability and unwillingness of the Afghan forces to fight back against the Taliban is that they were simply not trained to do so. First and foremost, the US, which trained the bulk of conventional Afghan forces, trained them to fight like US Army and Marine Corps infantry, that is, with significant artillery fire support, tactical air support, and abilities to mobilise and assault either by helicopter or motorised vehicles, in conjunction with a massive logistical machine that included civilian contractors to ensure the upkeep of equipment. (Trofimov) It is difficult to instruct a military force to be something which one is not, and for the US, it was simply expedient to instruct the ANA to fight like the US armed forces. In light of the US withdrawal however, their supporting assets did not remain in theatre. (Trofimov) Thus, their air support, artillery fire support, mobility assets, all disappeared as the Americans collapsed back from the peripheral bases back to their main bases, and then in towards Kabul, leaving the ANA to fend for themselves with a far less capable war fighting machine than the one they had been trained to operate with. (Trofimov)

Secondly, it should also be noted that at the peak of the Taliban’s fighting strength, the primary agents opposing their forces were never ANA forces, but coalition, and, specifically, American forces. At the onset of the ISAF mission, the ostensible role of the American troops became to train Afghan soldiers, but many American veterans of Afghanistan have indicated that this was not the case. They note that they often engaged in kinetic operations with a small complement of Afghan troops to other act as a public face or to meet bureaucratic troop ratios, instead of fulfilling the advisory role that they had been brought to Afghanistan to fulfil. Naturally, this left a fighting force that became highly reliant on US infantry support to execute missions, and therefore unable to pose any serious resistance to the Taliban because they were not exposed to combat in sufficient degree to qualify as combat capable. (Atwell & Bailey)

In light of this lack of support with which to fight, ANA soldiers when confronted with Taliban guns, dropped their own weapons and went home, especially with Taliban promises of amnesty to anyone who surrendered. Many ANA soldiers chose the option of surrounding their weapons and going home in peace rather than fight the Taliban, lose, and end up at the mercy of the Taliban’s infamous treatment of prisoners of war. Furthermore, many ANA soldiers chose not to fight in the wake of Ashraf Ghani’s early exodus from Kabul, as they felt they owned no loyalty or fealty to a government, that on top of escaping to save themselves, also had failed to pay its soldiers on time, slipping the money to staff officers and medium-level bureaucrats instead. (Cordesman)

Support problems notwithstanding, it is also important to note that the ANA was severely overextended. It had been deployed to the furthest reaches of the country with the understanding that coalition support networks would be available to ferry troops around as well as support remote troop deployments. (Worsnop) However, a coalition drawdown left many of these troops defending larger swathes of land than they had been prepared for. Combined with an army with only a partially combat capable cadre (save for the Afghan special forces, beyond capable but very limited in number and overused by Kabul in preceding years of counterinsurgency operations), it is unsuprising that the outer reaches of the country collapsed as quickly as they did. (Kugelman) It is worth mentioning that many Afghan special forces operators have since gone underground and have embedded themselves with resistance groups such as the National Resistance Front. (Kugelman)

This inability of the ANA to fight back did not go unnoticed in defence and intelligence circles in Washington and London. As early as 2010, American military advisors on training missions have noted that the ANA were unwilling to fight, whereupon it became the responsibility of the US troops in theatre to conduct the kinetic operations that the ANA should have been responsible for. (Atwell and Baily). This pressure point should also have been fairly easy to predict, considering the abundance of information and precedence suggesting the fallibility of the ANA.

Internal Politicking and governance

Policymakers in the main coalition countries, especially in the US, were more bound to their political commitments than actual actionable intelligence. Their failure to account for less than-successful counterinsurgency operations (such as the failure of Operation Herrick, the British counterinsurgency operation in Helmand Province, to met mission objectives) ensured a steady stream of support for the government in Afghanistan while also maintaining to their respective publics, the need for a continued presence in theatre. (Clarke) Furthermore, Presidents Trump and Biden were both bound to their political commitments to extricate themselves from Afghanistan whatever the cost, that they ignored the recommendations of their generals to maintain some level of troop presence. (Seligman, September 2021)

On the Afghan side, the inability of both Presidents Karzai and Ghani to build governing coalitions with broad power-bases is also indicative of a systematic failure in the governance structure which the coalition had tried to build. The imposition of pure Western-style democracy that did not account for the power and legacy of traditional governance and dispute resolution structures (such as the Loya Jirga), led to significant disputes over power sharing among the many ethno-political and tribal groups in government. This lack of broad consensus left many Afghans and groups vying for power, feeling no sense of belonging in or loyalty to the government in Kabul; as a result they did not put up much resistance when the Taliban came through, opting for the devil they knew rather than the devil they did not.

Conclusion

The reasons for the recapture of Afghanistan by the Taliban in August 2021 are as varied and complex as the country itself. Further arguments that the Afghan Government's collapse was purely fueled by institutional failures on the coalition side, or immutable power on the Taliban side would however be highly reductionist. The coalition governments and American leadership failed to recognise, or admit, that they were in bed with a regime in Kabul which was corrupt and had little legitimacy in most of the country. Moreover, American military strategists failed to recognise that they had trained Afghan forces to be far too reliant on US forces and technical support. In so doing, they also failed to consider the lack of motivation for Afghan troops to fight when deprived of the coalition support they had received most of the last twenty years.

Indeed, even this examination of just the institutional failures is by no means exhaustive, not considered the particularly problematic counterinsurgency operations undertaken in Helmand Province, or the consequences of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. One might well ask then, if the project was doomed from the start, a question to which the answer remains unclear: There are just far too many historical hypotheticals involved. We may however, draw clear lines of cause and effect between these examined institutional issues and the eventual fall of Kabul.

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Atwell, Kyle and Paul Bailey, “WANNA FIGHT? PUSHING PARTNERS ASIDE IN 12 AFGHANISTAN”, War on the Rocks, 11 October 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/10/we wanted-to-fight-incentivizing-advising-over-fighting-in-afghanistan-and-beyond/

Clarke, Michael. “Afghanistan and the UK’s Illusion of Strategy”, Royal United Services 4 Institute, 16 August 2021, https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/ afghanistan-and-uks-illusion-strategy

Cordesman, Anthony H. “The Reasons for the Collapse of Afghan Forces” (working paper), Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 17 August 2021, p.5-6, https://www.csis.org/ analysis/reasons-collapse-afghan-forces

Fürstenau, Marcel. “Afghanistan: Debacle for Germany's intelligence services”, Deutsche 2 Welle, 19 August 2021, https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-debacle-for-germanys intelligence-services/a-58909121

Kugelman, Michael. “What went wrong in Afghanistan?”, Al Jazeera, 16 August 2021, https:// 15 www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/16/what-went-wrong-in-afghanistan

McMaster, H.R., Bradley Bowman. “In Afghanistan, the Tragic Toll of Washington 8 Delusion”, Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan withdrawal-biden-human-rights-terrorist-jihadist-islamist-taliban-kabul-11629044191

Milley, Mark A. Senate Armed Services Committee. “STATEMENT OF GENERAL MARK A. MILLEY, USA”. September 28, 2021, https://www.armed services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Printed%2028%20Sep%20SASC%20CJCS%20Written%20Statement.pdf

Seligman, Lara. “Kabul’s collapse followed string of intel failures, defense officials say”, 1 Politico, 16 August 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/16/kabul-afghanistan collapse-intel-failures-505101.

Seligman, Lara. “Top generals contradict Biden, say they urged him not to withdraw from 19 Afghanistan”, Politico, 28 September 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/28/top generals-afghanistan-withdrawal-congress-hearing-514491

Rahimi, Haroun. “Lessons From Afghanistan’s History: How Not to Fix a Failed State”, The 7 Diplomat, 06 October 2021, https://thediplomat.com/2021/10/lessons-from-afghanistans history-how-not-to-fix-a-failed-state/

Trofimov, Yaroslav. “How the Taliban Overran the Afghan Army, Built by the U.S. Over 20 9 Years”, Wall Street Journal, 14 August 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-army collapse-taliban-11628958253

Worsnop, Alec. “HOW THE TALIBAN EXPLOITED AFGHANISTAN’S HUMAN GEOGRAPHY.” War on the Rocks, 02 September 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/09/how-the-taliban exploited-afghanistans-human-geography/

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This article is a modified version of an intelligence brief submitted in fulfilling coursework requirements and will be developed into a graduate thesis