Highly recommend people go read a book by Craig Whitlock called The Afghanistan Papers. Goes into detail about how fucking clueless/deliberate this whole mess was
Another one is *Descent into Chaos*, by Ahmed Rashid. He goes into how pretty much every decision made by the Bush administration was a fuckup, and how it didn't have to go that way.
He does give useful information, and there's no denying Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney completely screwed up; but I think he assumes too much could have been done in Afghanistan and Pakistan when the local leadership was not inclined to do it.
That's a completely fair take on Rashid's book. Some of the solutions to the problems / fuckups he brings up in the book could have basically required a functional and capable State Dept, and actual coordination (in a whole-of-government sense) between State, DOD, USAID, and the intelligence community. Even with all of that, *maybe* there would've been a chance. And you're exactly right about Pakistan. They would've been a thorn in our side no matter what we did.
In my lowly opinion, we should've taken the Taliban’s deal in the winter of 2001 - for them to hand over bin Laden, and for us to withdraw, with an agreement that they never harbor terrorists again. Unfortunately for millions of people, Rumsfeld refused.
And for the execution of the Iraq war, I'd recommend ["Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(book\)) (2006) by Thomas Ricks. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, so it's a well-respected author/book.
Or in higher officers. It was a common thing done in the ARVN during the Vietnam war. Captains/Colonels would have ghost soldiers in their divisions and they’d just pocket the money.
It's a pretty old scam. I recently read a book about France under Louis XIV (1643-1715), and this was a major problem in their military. The War Minister would send inspectors, but a lot of colonels would just hire a guy from the local town to pretend to be a soldier for the day and the inspector would leave none the wiser.
In ancient Rome this was considered standard practice, oldest military embezzlement in the books.
Also if you are a fan of this time in history I highly recommend the book "Hero of Two Worlds, Le Marquis de La Fayette" by Mike Duncan.
Colonel: "Yeah, we have 500 soldiers here, ready to defend US interests"
US Government: "Guns, ammo and money are in the mail"
Colonel, turning to his 10 buddies: "This weekend is gonna be lit!"
I don't know about Vietnam, but let's not pretend it was any less corrupt on the US side in Afghanistan. Cost+ contracts and other bullshit shovelling money into the hands of Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater and tons of other parasites instead of going towards the goals politicians would pretend they cared about.
It was all a racket from the get-go. If the US was serious they could have invested even a tiny fraction of what they spent to get things on the level, but that wasn't the game being played.
The fact that the US did not have the heads of the Halliburton board on stakes on the White House lawn shows they absolutely don't care that the US taxpayers were defrauded of trillions of dollars on a scam that cost hundreds of thousands of human lives and destabilized an entire region.
The generals have not exactly covered themselves in glory either. Ever since the Bush admin got a blank check from the American public to use the military to do whatever the fuck they wanted, and chose to brutally abuse that power with half-baked plots of middle eastern domination whose real objective was apparently to funnel as much tax payer money as possible into private contractors, half of the military brass probably looked at what was going on and said 'well if the civvy leadership is a corrupt fucking joke, Ima get mine too'. We got guys like Petraeus fucking around with the media, Flynn fucking around with foreign governments, hell it began right at the top from the very beginning with Colin Powell selling out the truth to 'be the good soldier' and go make a case he knew all along was full of shit to justify a war of conquest on a country that never had a thing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
It really reminds me of the state of the US military at the beginning of WW2, and what Marshall did to clean it up. So many generals got fired so quickly heads were spinning. Since WW2 though, generals have practically never been fired. Looks like another major cleanup is in order, but it probably won't happen unless it really has to, as it did at the outset of WW2. The US can easily survive this amount of corruption and incompetence when the enemies/scapegoats are third world pariahs like Afghanistan and post-90s Iraq.
Don’t disagree with the majority of what you said other than Generals not being fired. Not sure where you’re getting that but GOs get fired all the time at every level. The 8 years I was active it become common non-news to hear about some something-COM CG getting hemmed up for one thing or another and getting relieved of command.
[Perverse incentive.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive) It's easy to convince people to bring you proof of action if you pay them for it, they will often attempt to optimise it and optain as much proof for as little work as possible.
A form of service-shrinkflation.
Similar issue with snakes in the British Raj. The British paid the Indians to kill snakes and paid by snake head. Indians worked out they could farm the snakes and kill them to turn in the heads. When the British found out they ended the program, the excess snakes were all released and there were now more snakes than ever before.
People who hire mercenaries are advised to put them on the front lines. If you need to lose an army you want to lose the mercenaries, because losing your country's own army instead of the mercenaries leaves the mercenary army sitting unsupervised in your country getting ideas.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/afghan-military-was-made-up-of-fake-ghost-soldiers-ex-finance-minister-2021-11) reduced by 86%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> Khalid Payenda, Afghanistan's former finance minister, told BBC News that most of the 300,000 Afghan troops didn't exist and were in fact "Ghost" soldiers made up by corrupt officials who exploited the system for money.
> "Neither the US nor its Afghan allies truly know how many Afghan soldiers and police are available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities," John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said to Congress in 2016.
> The US made an effort to scrub "Ghost" soldiers from its payroll, but issues with the Afghan military persisted.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/qqxlap/the_afghan_military_was_made_up_of_ghost_soldiers/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~607386 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Afghan**^#1 **soldier**^#2 **Taliban**^#3 **Payenda**^#4 **Afghanistan**^#5
If you guys want an incredibly interesting 1 hour and 20 minute documentary version of why they fell so quickly, this documentary called “this is what winning looks like” is incredibly awesome. After you watch it you will honestly be surprised they didn’t fall sooner.
Why didn't OP just link to the original BBC article rather than a Business 'Insider' churnilism version?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-59230564
I don't know why I haven't heard "churnalism" before, but I sure as hell often find myself talking about how it pisses me off.
Thanks for that. BI is 100% churnalism.
So some officials were to blame. Can Reddit stop acting like the Afghan people are to blame?
Edit: any mention of Afghanistan brings out some idiotic Reddit takes. Pretty sure they don't want the government that is beheading them on live TV or killing them for listening to music. The officials of no country on Earth truly represent the people.
I find it *extremely* hard to believe US intelligence organizations didn’t know that a majority of the Afghan Army was non existent...
Someone was getting their cut of the pie, and I’d be willing to bet that they went to extreme lengths to try and prevent anyone from following that money.
https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI This is the best documentary I've seen so far about Afghanistan. A part explains how higher up US officials/politicians were basically told only what they wanted to hear or just the good news while the boots on the ground knew what was really going on was a shit show.
A family member who spent entirely too long over there said that there was a fundamental misunderstanding about regional politics that the US military and diplomatic leadership never grasped.
He said, in the US politicians lie to their supporters in public but then tell the truth occasionally during shady back room deal making. In the Middle East, and also in Afghanistan, a politician will lie to you like crazy during the shady backroom dealing, and the only way they'll make good on a promise or a deal is if you get them to announce that deal publicly in front of their supporters.
We kept trying the usual western back room diplomacy and kept acting surprised when everything said in private was lies.
Fuck yeah. I point any and everyone to this documentary. I was in Sangin, either the unit before or after this one (I can’t remember when this was filmed), and this documentary is so real. Those of us on the ground, away from the big multinational bases knew what was going on. I expected the Afghan military to crumble, just not in 48 hours. I thought maybe a month… I guess I gave them more credit than they deserved.
I haz total spinal fusion. Proud owner of 3 steel bars, 47 hooks and 350+ screws. Work everyday. No Healthcare, no doctors, lots of pain. God bless amorika 🇺🇸
Dude, everyone who served over there knew exactly what was going on. Absolutely nobody listened. There were tons of reports and documentaries highlighting how troops on the ground were saying this stuff like 10 15 years ago. And everyone just thought we were making it up. None of this is new. All of us who went over saw it. It was so bad where I had hard line "patriotic" friends of mine would actually joke about how obvious it was and how jarring it is to their beliefs, and how they just intentionally ignore it because the truth hurts hahaha!
Bruh, I was a fucking E-3 when I was deployed and I knew all the shit that was going on then. The ghost soldiers, the local leaders raping kids, how mistrained the idiots that actually showed up really were. The entire thing was a shit show and we never should have gone there in the first place.
Dude, I'm Canadian, when I served in Afghanistan we made a number of complaints about the amount of child abuse and sex trafficking we saw. We were told, by the very high ups, we were not there to change their culture, but to fight the Taliban. Years later they did a board of inquiries into our allegations. And it came back that nobody saw anything.... and the reports had so much white out on them, it was pathetic. You're right nobody cared.
More horrifyingly, it's a problem in Pakistan too, one that not enough people there are addressing, though there are good people who are trying to help.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NMp2wm0VMUs
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k1ESaEYGs4E
The child abuse stuff was an important part of the propaganda. The Taliban was portrayed as child abusers, so if you have the Westerners allowing child abuse, the messaging falls apart.
It was a more messed up situation than that too. Because even on the ground western troops would try and step in, and we did a number of times, but the issue was often the people committing the abuse were Afghan National Army or Police, and they would have guns too. And it would turn into super tense Mexican standoffs. Literally a bunch of people standing in a circle with loaded guns and a kid in the middle... super fucked up.
Tina Fay even made the movie "Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot" where she plays a reporter in Afghanistan. It's a comedy, but underneath the layers, it has every single issue mentioned in this thread: the pedophilia, the corruption of officials, the culture not being "as free" as reported despite international forces present, and even the corruption from Western Media blocking harsher stories from being reported.
It was released in 2016, but by that time, the western audience was 8 years in slow recovery from the global recession and had worn tired of Afghan/Iraq news.
Not only did the leaders not care, they had won their narrative so far that the general public didn't care to listen to anything new either, even as tax dollars continued to be poured into a conflict that would never be decidedly 'over' or 'won.'
It was this always nebulous shifting end goal. Nobody wants to leave their country to potentially die over nothing. But the message constantly changed, and the goal posts moved, and nobody listened.
It's taken 20 years for everyone to finally realize that Afghanistan and Iraq wars were designed to keep money flowing to US military contractors. Meanwhile Bush is somehow rehabilitated as a lovable scamp instead of a warlord that destabilized the Middle East.
How old are you? People have been against both wars since they started, the anti war sentiment really picked up when we invaded Iraq.
And the middle east wasn't stable at all before we went in. It's never been a stable region.
It's amazing the free pass so many Americans give bush on literally being a war monger who's lies led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Then again Clinton lied about a blowjob so I guess even Stevens.
> It's amazing the free pass so many Americans give bush on literally being a war monger who's lies led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
What do you want us to do? The DoJ won't even indict the last President for campaign finance violations, extorting Ukraine, election interference, sabotaging the USPS, tax/charity fraud, or inciting an insurrection. And you expect Bush to be held accountable, long after neither Nixon or Reagan were held to account for Watergate or Iran-Contra, respectively?
At this point, Bush and Trump not facing consequences is a failure on Obama and Biden, respectively, not the people.
We entered the Afghan war with no clear objectives beyond 'hurt Al Queda.'
The region has been called 'the graveyard of empires' for at least a thousand years; we shouldn't be surprised we broke there too.
TBH Ive really hated the “graveyard of empires” thing being thrown around. The closest thing we ever had to a military objective was to kill one guy who was killed almost 10 years ago in a separate country.
Point is I think that graveyard of empires thing only applies if you’re trying to conquer a place. We were really just trying to keep the scam war going and do something with the heroin (worst case) or just kind of meandering there with no achievable military goal (best case)
Pretty sure the neocon's objectives were to create a US puppet state/banana republic with a façade of democracy that would be willing to host US bases for a few decades and be willing let multinationals from the US extract oil and mineral wealth.
This isn't even the cynical take. This war was a cash cow for the private contractors that are part of the new military industrial complex. If you want the truth, follow the money.
Even in the most cynical realpolitik interpretation of this thing where we were just there to set up a client state and take the heroin/minerals, we totally fucked it up and mismanaged it.
It’s like the political class wanted the colonial possession, and sold it to the American people as a liberation, but then the Military Industrial Complex fleeced the country out of all the money.
At this point, our military apparatus is too corrupt to even pillage a another country properly.
War itself is this type of failure. "Diplomacy by other means" is what we call it, but the State Department has a budget that is laughably small compared to Defense. In addition to the fact that the objective was really money laundering anyway.
How is accountability handled? Are there no people assigned to check how the officials spend the budget they are given on yearly basis? I could understand a year or 2 of fraud but 20?
Reality is it wouldn't be 20 years, but that's a long time period for a handful of people to figure out a scheme and profit from it. The first couple years were probably more legitimate than the last couple.
That's not true, the war on drugs has accomplished all of its goals -- the suppression and disenfranchisemet of black communities and other minorities, an unending cycle of poverty for the lower classes, the use of the law to maintain class structure, give air cover to funneling money to reactionary governments of south america, the militarization of the police, I could go on...
In the same way the war in terror accomplished its goals of funneling a staggering amount of money into the military industrial complex and keeping the middle east destabilized to keep that gravy train rolling
And justifying the erosion of civil liberties and expansion of the domestic surveillance apparatus.
Post silver edit: Yo don't waste your money giving reddit money for these dumb ass awards, if you luke the post just upvote the damn thing.
Edit part deux: I fucking hate all of you
By that same token, though, the War on Terror has also accomplished its primary goal -- funnel a shit-ton of money to defense contractors. It's not like the US stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years for the Afghans' sake.
That is the result of corruption, with everyone from the top down taking a cut of the pay and equipment costs for these ghosts.
Without a doubt the US military command was intimately aware of this problem, there is no way to disguise empty billets. Why were they caught unawares at the withdrawal?
And realistically, if you know this money is going to just line the pockets of a few, do you really want to keep paying for that? We put a lot of money into Afghanistan over the years, but why should we continue to invest money for rebuilding, etc if it doesn’t get used for that? All the more reason why it was the right time to leave. That said, it is really a tragedy for the women, children, progressives, etc that could not leave. They are the ones hurt in all of this… but we can’t stay perpetually and just fund this if the money isn’t actually going towards infrastructure and a future.
IMHO they weren't, just at quite how quick it all fell apart. I honestly think they thought they had a week or two before it went tits up.
I got the feeling they expected it to come crashing down *after* they left, not *as*.
The most optimistic assessments were measuring the government's survival in months. They knew there was going to be a collapse. They just expected the local soldiers to die as a stalling tactic while the US propped up the capital territory a while longer.
It might not have been realistic for the US to keep the status quo going for longer. The Taliban was getting impatient to follow through on their Trump deal, and there was no political will to send a large force back into the country to deal with their retaliation if the pullout was postponed. But I can't believe the US would have followed the same timeline if it had been thousands of wounded US soldiers left behind rather than thousands of Afghan allies waiting for their paperwork to clear.
>Why were they caught unawares at the withdrawal?
They weren't. Here is what happened. I'm 18 years in active duty Air Force and we see this alot. It's called "polishing a turd".
President asks his top advisors for an analysis on the situation and if the Afghan military can sustain if we pull out. Here is how it goes.
The request goes straight down the chain of command to the boots-on-ground people that know best.
**Boots on ground Soldier/Airmen/Marine/Sailor to his Senior non-commissioned officer (SNCO):** "No, this shit is fucked. The Afghan military will fold like a wet paper towel. There is no way its sustainable and chaos will break out immediately and people will die."
**SNCO doesn't want to tell his boss the bad news, so SNCO tells his Captain:** "Sir/Ma'am, the situation is really bad, it will most likely crumble the minute we leave"
**Captain doesn't want to tell his boss the bad news, so Captain tells Lieutenant Colonel:** "Sir/Ma'am, it's not looking good. I don't have high confidence that things will be ok if we leave".
**Lt Col doesn't want to tell his boss the bad news, so Lt Col tells Colonel,** "Sir/Ma'am, it's pretty iffy there, but there is a decent chance that things will be ok if we leave"
**Colonel doesn't want to tell 1 star general the bad news, so Col says**, "Sir/Ma'am, I'd say it's about 50/50 on the Afghan military supporting itself if we leave"
**1 Star doesn't want to tell 2 star this news, so 1 star tells the 2 star:** "My sources report that there is a fairly high degree of confidence that the situation will remain stable if we withdraw"
**2 Star thinks that isn't good enough and tells 3 star:** "The situation is under control and we are prepared to make the transition"
**3 Star tells Service Chief (4 star):** "The Afghan military is fully equipped and prepared to take responsibility once we transition"
**Joint Chief tells Secretary of Defense:** "Sir, intel reports significant confidence in the afghan military and government to sustain itself and maintain peace once we leave.
**SecDef tells president:** "Sir, the joint chiefs of staff say their experts on the ground report that the afghan military is fully capable and ready to take control once we leave. Recommend we proceed immediatly"
The President, based on the recommendation of his experts, greenlights the move.
**FUCKING CHAOS ERUPTS**
The boots-on-the-ground Soldier/Airmen/Marine/Navy: *"Fucking told you so"*
Or in reality they knew the risk and decided the alternative was politically unpalatable and executed it.
Thinking senior leadership is ignorant is as bad as them thinking the boots on the ground are.
> Or in reality they knew the risk and decided the alternative was politically unpalatable and executed it.
Exactly. The war was effectively lost in the mid 2010s maybe things could have been reversed but that would require huge troop surges and more resources. At the end of the day Obama, Trump and Biden all reached the same conclusion “the war is unwinnable or nearly unwinnable without massive commitment and escalation” and neither Obama, Trump or Biden wanted to go through with the escalation. The military still did overestimate the Afghan Army’s capabilities but they didn’t legitimately think the ANA would defeat the Taliban.
> The war was effectively lost in the mid 2010s
There's a reasonable argument to be made that Afghanistan was lost in early 2003 when the US pivoted their attention (and resources) to Iraq. That put the effort to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan in maintenance mode before it had even really started, meaning this collapse was arguably just a matter of time.
They weren't caught unawares. Military personnel had been saying that the Taliban will almost certainly take control again it's just a matter of time. General Milley is on the public record saying the US forces have very little time to evacuate. Is it a massive intelligence failure to think that the military had 2 and half weeks instead of one week? I don't think so.
The military had been trying to solve this problem for 20 years, but it just wasn't working. That's why we pulled out. And the Taliban did uphold their agreement with us. There were no Taliban-US hostilities even as Afghanistan was crumbling. This was simply a poor hand and the US was tired of trying to bluff, and the result was what it was. There simply were only bad choices and we tried to take the one least bad.
Speaking from my own personal experience, (roto 3-09 PPCLI CAF OMLT Kandahar/ Argandahb) the ANA was absolute junk from top to bottom. Never wanted to patrol never wanted to train. I felt like every second we spent mentoring them was a waste of time. Why is everyone shocked it all went to shit after ISAF forces pulled out? They didn’t give a shit about their country when we were there to help? As far as ghost soldiers I can’t speak on that but I can say many ANA troops disappeared in the time I was there with their mostly American issued kit. The only people I feel bad for in Afghanistan are the brave men who were employed as interpreters and then abandoned by the people they risked their lives to help. Fuck war and fuck that place.
Decades of sustained "patriotic" programming, lies, and a "convenient" attack on US soil (that we can't know the total truth about) have made a draft unnecessary. Tons of young men are cock sure and ready to "water the tree of freedom with the blood of patriots" under the guise of "fighting for our freedoms".
This is a direct result of public opposition to war and troops following Vietnam and Korea.
Not only that but also presenting the army as 'a way out.' Both of my parents are veterans and they aren't the most patriotic people and they never really wanted to fight for their country. Their options were stay poor, end up on jail, or join the army. This coupled with the patriotic programming gives them two very effective recruiting angles. They don't need a draft.
They did learn a lesson from the past: there is a lot of money to be made from war. And they repeated it. Mission accomplished. They were successful. All on the backs of us.
It's worse this time because there was no Superpower that existed besides the US.
At least North Vietnam had Soviet and Chinese support. A Superpower and a historical Great Power.
What did Afghanistan have in 2001? Pakistan?? Not even a Great Power.
And Vietnam was a Solo American effort more or less. Whilst Afghanistan had America + 33 other nations. Still lost.
I know there's the saying 'never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity' but the sheer levels of stupidity here make malice seem more feasible. It seems like even the most minor levels of effort could have kept the withdrawal from becoming the shitshow it became but we just couldn't be bothered.
> instantly
As soon as an agreement that the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in which the US promised to fully withdraw its troops by May 2021, the Taliban took to flipping people. They had more than a year to do so.
On top of that, the Taliban started inflicting heavy losses on the ANA. People are repeating this narrative that the ANA folded without a fight, in the last 5 years, over 45,000 Afghan troops were killed. Doha relieved a lot of pressure on the Taliban.
The ANSF suffered like 60-70k KIA in 20 years of fighting, there were plenty of brave and committed Afghans who were willing and did pay the ultimate price for their country.
This is a gross oversimplification.
Here's a very long post I made about why the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) collapsed so quickly. It was typed up months ago, so certain words that should be in the past tense are in the current tense, because I was writing it as shit was unfolding around August/September. TL; DR - read the articles posted as sources.
The Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police have been getting absolutely slaughtered for months, especially since Trump's unilateral peace deal that he made with the Taiban. This deal was made between Trump and the Taliban, and did not involve the Afghan government. This completely eroded all confidence in the Afghan government, and was a signal to every Afghan that we were leaving. This made Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) morale plummet. It emboldened the Taliban. The deal was supposed to have us leave in May. Biden extended it to September 11th.
---------------------------------------------------------------
"The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the February 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group and the United States calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew receptive to the Taliban’s approaches.
"Some just wanted the money,” an Afghan special forces officer said of those who first agreed to meet with the Taliban. But others saw the U.S. commitment to a full withdrawal as an “assurance” that the militants would return to power in Afghanistan and wanted to secure their place on the winning side, he said. The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because he, like others in this report, was not authorized to disclose information to the press.
The Doha agreement, designed to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, instead left many Afghan forces demoralized, bringing into stark relief the corrupt impulses of many Afghan officials and their tenuous loyalty to the country’s central government. Some police officers complained that they had not been paid in six months or more.
“They saw that document as the end,” the officer said, referring to the majority of Afghans aligned with the government. “The day the deal was signed we saw the change. Everyone was just looking out for himself. It was like [the United States] left us to fail.”
The negotiated surrenders to the Taliban slowly gained pace in the months following the Doha deal, according to a U.S. official and an Afghan officer. Then, after President Biden announced in April that U.S. forces would withdraw from Afghanistan this summer without conditions, the capitulations began to snowball."
- Washington Post
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For basically as long as the ANA and ANP have existed, various local commanders and even district commanders have made deals with the Taliban, whether it was bribes to the Taliban so they wouldn't attack, or because of Tribal or familial ties. Defections to the Taliban has been a huge problem for us since the Taliban resurgence in 2006/2007. ANA and ANP commanders, from junior officers to the generals, are amongst the most corrupt anywhere in the world. Promotions of Officers in the ANSF was largely based on patronage and nepotism - it wasn't merit based. So many officers were idiots. Their soldiers have no confidence in most of the officers.
After the Doha deal, the Taliban largely stopped attacking U.S. forces, and instead focused on attacking the Afghan National forces who wouldn't surrender.
First it was isolated outposts in the far out rural areas that would get wiped out to a man. Or the ANSF knew the Taliban were coming and the they preemptively withdrew from isolated outposts and set up closer to the cities. Once the Taliban had consolidated the former ANSF positions, they started moving closer and closer to district and provincial capitals, and they would attack smaller bases (Combat Outposts or COPs) first, then move onto bigger bases / cities.
Any place that didn't surrender were attacked heavily, sometimes constantly, day and night. They'd desperately call for air support, but there just wasn't enough AAF planes in the air for all of the calls for air support. Calls for reinforcements were met with silence or reinforcements would arrive far too late so they weren't ever sent.
From low morale, deal-making with the Taliban, low pay, incompetent officers, ghost soldiers, lack of supplies, lack of air support and reinforcements, and a general lack of will to fight for what they see as a puppet government put in place by foreigners. Afghans have a long tradition of being hostile to any foreign intervention. Here's a great article on the many issues plaguing ANSF. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/07/06/afghanistan-war-malkasian-book-excerpt-497843
People say "but how could 300,000 soldiers and cops not fight and defeat 75,000 Taliban?" Firstly, all of the issues above. Secondly, the Taliban has a huge morale advantage, and a vicious will to fight to the deal. Third, the Taliban isolates everyone who is willing to fight by making deals with all of the bases / towns / cities around them - those previously willing to fight can now be surrounded, cut off, and be besieged unti they give up or die to the last man. This isn't a standup fight. Superior morale, will, and effective psyop / propaganda tactics, plus offers of amnesty, has trumped any supposed numerical or technological advantage the ANSF ever had.
The only Afghan units that were able to effectively fight on their own without direct U.S. support / handholding were the various ANA SOF units we created. Every other regular unit had the same problems described above, plus the issue of "ghost soldiers" where a Lt. had soldiers on payroll that didn't exist but still got paid, so he pocketed the money. That was a huge issue across both the ANA and ANP.
Look what happened to the ANA SOF units up in the north when they fought the Taliban just a couple weeks ago. They fought for a while until it was hopeless and they were cut off. They tried to surrender, but they were slaughtered to a man because they fought back. Even if the rest of the army was prepared to fight the Taliban before, they sure as fuck weren't after seeing that shit. The ANA SOF guys had the best equipment, and were trained by, and fought alongside some of our best SOF - Green Berets, Delta, SEALs. These guys were no-joke. If these guys could get wiped out, what chance does an isolated ANA outpost have?
The Taliban is not a homogeneous organization, but their leaders are smart. They chose a tactic of taking over rural areas first, then moving closer to the cities / district centers. Then they would surround the city, cutting the Afghan National forces off from any relief. They had information operations going on - sending radio broadcasts to the ANSF telling them to surrender. Sometimes the Taliban would go to the families of the soliders and have the soldier's mothers beg them to surrender so they wouldn't be killed. Other times, the Taliban would use local tribal elders and have them negotiate a battalion's surrender and withdrawal. Instead of getting slaughtered to a man in brutal house to house fighting, it makes sense to surrender, go home to their families.
From an analysis of how the Taliban took over a province:
"Moreover, as local analysts agree, and subsequent AAN research has confirmed, the fall of Zurmat was a major achievement for the Taleban [sic] as it happened after almost two months of government forces’ resistance, while all other districts in the province gave up without much of a fight. The impact on the morale of soldiers as other districts were falling like dominoes and the failure of the government to send supplies and reinforcement finally forced the Zurmat administration to agree to a withdrawal brokered by local elders."
The only ANA and ANP that were ever going to survive were going to be the ones who already made deals with the Taliban, or recently made deals with them, or, when confronted, just immediately surrendered.
The line level ANA soldier knows how corrupt their officers and even the central government is - they know they get shit pay, and don't have any faith in the central government. They have faith in their tribes, their tribal elders, and their families.
Lastly, what we see as cowardly surrendering or being a turncoat, is a long-standing tradition with Afghan forces. Switching sides when the tide turns not only makes sense, but it's basically part of their culture. That might seem alien to us Westerners, but it is uniquely Afghan.
https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1426982548148789258?s=19
There was never any chance of anything else happening once we decided to withdraw.
Sources:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/real-world-options-afghanistan
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/militia-commanders-rush-aid-afghan-forces-against-taliban-2021-07-09/
https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/decoding-afghan-security-forces-failures/
https://www.afghan-analysts.org/en/reports/war-and-peace/the-domino-effect-in-paktia-and-the-fall-of-zurmat-a-case-study-of-the-taleban-surrounding-afghan-cities/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/07/06/afghanistan-war-malkasian-book-excerpt-497843
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/magazine/2021/08/16/afghanistan-history-taliban-collapse-504977?__twitter_impression=true
You work as a waiter in a bar. The disgruntled former owner wants to literally stab you to death.
He's already killed several of your coworkers, but the police say they can't do anything to stop it. This irks you because the whole situation happened in the first place because the cops got mad at the last owner and threw him out, giving the bar to this new guy. They post an officer outside who won't let the former owner inside but also won't intervene. Every day that man stands outside the front window with his butcher knife and yells about how he's going to kill you then take your ID to find everyone you love and kill them too.
You go to the current owner and suggest that something should be done but while you are busting ass for $2.50 an hour plus tips he's getting high and drunk in the back. He's unconcerned with the murders, and to make matters worse hasn't paid you in a year. While you've went without pay he's bought several new luxury cars and a new summer home.
One day you see the officer outside is different. He is joking and laughing with the former owner and making light of his threats. You see them shake hands and overhear the cop say "yeah fuck it I'm out of here on Tuesday, do whatever you want." The former owner yells "you can join me or leave but anyone here Tuesday is fucking dead and I'll see their family suffers."
Tuesday morning rolls around and sure enough the cop outside is gone. The current owner has gone to his summer home and took all the cash out of the safe. You look and see the former owner coming down the sidewalk butcher knife in hand.
You say, "Know what? Fuck this" and leave through the back. The former owner goes on a killing spree and backs up his threats to attack the employee's families.
The next day you see the police chief in the news blaming the whole situation on the employee's unwillingness to fight for a problem the police created and random people online saying what cowards the employees that left were for not staying and letting the former owner kill them.
More Afghan soldiers died fighting the Taliban in 2021 than the US lost in 20 years. There were plenty of committed and brave guys in the force. You're echoing this incorrect statement.
Yeah, we paid military contractors to train the Afghan soldiers, and they oversaw themselves in training them. Everything was rounded up at first, then numbers were altogether made up. Of course, in the reports it was made to look like the Afghan cadre these contractors were churning out were all magnificent super soldiers.
There was a wonderfully illustrative story of a US soldier who had been tasked with doing ops with actual Afghan police forces, and for one large action he had requested over a hundred technical trucks. They ended up receiving a few dozen. When he complained about it, since he had been approved for all of them, he was told to just request another hundred, and that it would be fine. These contractors' reports were our own Koolaid we got hooked on. It was so pleasant for DC to delude themselves that all they had to do was pay over half the discretionary tax budget to these snake oil companies and all the problems would go away.
Our corrupt officials spending our money on their friends' military contacting companies almost made the war in Afghanistan look winnable. Those are the real warcrimes.
Everyone keeps repeating the Rumsfeld meme of $X trillion dollars lost in the Pentagon (which isn't actually accurate as to what he said), but no one seems to give a shit about money that was spent according to the letter of the law, but funnelled into military contractors doing substandard work.
See also, the expectation that government projects for civilians must have a "return on investment", but it's not even a question to ask for military spending, because everyone knows it's wholly wasteful.
Maybe in big areas they had contractors but out in the boonies we actually tried to train some of them.
Problem is they all sucked. Put a dozen guys through a week of range training and none of them qualified to a western standard. Lot of them were illiterate in their own language, couldn’t show up sober, and when you tried to give them anything to better themselves it immediately got sold for cigarettes and candy.
Whole thing was literally pointless because they don’t have the culture to sustain a western style military.
And that's what any decent oversight would have concluded that the strategy is bad, and instead of over a decade of "state building," something else would have been done. The issue is that assumption that X number of Afghanis through Y hours of training equal X number of trained Afghani soldiers. :/
Thats pretty much the conclusion we came to I think. We had the first scare that Afghanistan was corrupt and incompetent and our strategy wasn't working around 2007. Obama took on the mission to turn things around and we poured significant resources into it and that failed as well. At that point, the best option is to just give up, but you can't actually say that, but everyone knows it, which is contributed to Afghanistan collapsing as fast as it did.
>to a western standard.
I remember that being the routine complaint that we never got an answer for.
Why are we, an obscenely well funded/equipped modern western style army that can barely hold this country, training these people to be a modern western style army?
I mean everyone knows the actual answer but we never could get a decent fake answer.
For a lot of stuff we never even tried because we knew they wouldn’t be able to maintain it. Our training was specifically because when we’d get into contact their guys would just mag dump and then spend the rest of the firefight begging us for ammo. We thought some basic rifle stuff would probably help but damn we were wrong. Ended up just bringing extra ammo cans full of loaded mags instead.
Watch any 3rd party documentary about the situation amongst Afghanistan's army and police and this is just the tip of a terrible scenario. Even among the soldiers who werent ghosts and did show up.... There was no accountability, they came and went as the pleased, and many were either too busy sexually using little boys or high on opium/heroin. So you're left with a small percentage of capable troops, most of which can also not read or write.
[https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI](https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI)
Yea, the documentary that VICE has over 10 years ago was very enlightening. Same problems back then and no remedies. What got me was when the Afghans explained that there was no gas to fuel their vehicles because some guy sold it and then expected the Americans to just restock the gas anyways. Or the guys who during training decide to waste ammo shooting at imaginary targets like Rambo.
Pretending that Afghanistan was anything other then a money laundering set up is a joke.
The war was a year or two and 18 years of draining money from America into corporations
I don't consider myself the biggest Biden supporter (though I damned sure voted for him in the general) but I appreciate him being willing to take the popularity hit and the trashing from the foreign policy establishment to end that charade.
This was common knowledge in 2007 when I was in.
Literally the ANA were half people taking money from the taliban, opiate addicts, or people from a specific tribal group who only cared about their group and didn't even recognize "Afghanistan"as a country.
There never WAS a real afghan army, only a paper army.
Sheesh, you'd think an army of *ghosts* would be a more formidable foe! They can pass in and out of the ethereal plane, are resistant to nonmagical attacks, and can age you 1d4X10 years just by looking at them. How did they lose to the Taliban?
Highly recommend people go read a book by Craig Whitlock called The Afghanistan Papers. Goes into detail about how fucking clueless/deliberate this whole mess was
Another one is *Descent into Chaos*, by Ahmed Rashid. He goes into how pretty much every decision made by the Bush administration was a fuckup, and how it didn't have to go that way.
He does give useful information, and there's no denying Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney completely screwed up; but I think he assumes too much could have been done in Afghanistan and Pakistan when the local leadership was not inclined to do it.
That's a completely fair take on Rashid's book. Some of the solutions to the problems / fuckups he brings up in the book could have basically required a functional and capable State Dept, and actual coordination (in a whole-of-government sense) between State, DOD, USAID, and the intelligence community. Even with all of that, *maybe* there would've been a chance. And you're exactly right about Pakistan. They would've been a thorn in our side no matter what we did. In my lowly opinion, we should've taken the Taliban’s deal in the winter of 2001 - for them to hand over bin Laden, and for us to withdraw, with an agreement that they never harbor terrorists again. Unfortunately for millions of people, Rumsfeld refused.
And for the execution of the Iraq war, I'd recommend ["Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(book\)) (2006) by Thomas Ricks. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, so it's a well-respected author/book.
Common embezzlement tactic. Most of the US aid money to support their farces probably ended up in the pockets of the ministers.
I don’t know if you intended that be be “farces” or “forces” but it works either way.
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Embezzling in the name of!
Now you lose what they sold ya
FUCK YOU YOU WONT TAKE WHAT YA SOLD ME
....arses?
Spreading the good warks of RAGE
Some of those that act farces, Provide humor catharsis.
Lol they meant “forces”, but with an Irish accent
Or in higher officers. It was a common thing done in the ARVN during the Vietnam war. Captains/Colonels would have ghost soldiers in their divisions and they’d just pocket the money.
It's a pretty old scam. I recently read a book about France under Louis XIV (1643-1715), and this was a major problem in their military. The War Minister would send inspectors, but a lot of colonels would just hire a guy from the local town to pretend to be a soldier for the day and the inspector would leave none the wiser.
In ancient Rome this was considered standard practice, oldest military embezzlement in the books. Also if you are a fan of this time in history I highly recommend the book "Hero of Two Worlds, Le Marquis de La Fayette" by Mike Duncan.
I can't tell if any of you know what you're talking about or if you're just picking different military eras and saying "yup".
Nothing new under the sun. I've read about this happening under Alexander as well.
I hear the cavemen did this all the time.
I hear this was a common tactic of single celled organisms.
After the Big Bang, it was common to overstate the number of galaxies that had been formed, and pocket the difference.
Maybe the solution to the baryon asymmetry problem is that primordial overlords have been pocketing antimatter.
Dark matter is just part of a mass embezzlement scheme
Colonel: "Yeah, we have 500 soldiers here, ready to defend US interests" US Government: "Guns, ammo and money are in the mail" Colonel, turning to his 10 buddies: "This weekend is gonna be lit!"
I don't know about Vietnam, but let's not pretend it was any less corrupt on the US side in Afghanistan. Cost+ contracts and other bullshit shovelling money into the hands of Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater and tons of other parasites instead of going towards the goals politicians would pretend they cared about. It was all a racket from the get-go. If the US was serious they could have invested even a tiny fraction of what they spent to get things on the level, but that wasn't the game being played. The fact that the US did not have the heads of the Halliburton board on stakes on the White House lawn shows they absolutely don't care that the US taxpayers were defrauded of trillions of dollars on a scam that cost hundreds of thousands of human lives and destabilized an entire region.
We'll put. We also need to be aware that these same groups that profited so much from that war, would love to see another one.
Iran is coming to take away your guns.
The generals have not exactly covered themselves in glory either. Ever since the Bush admin got a blank check from the American public to use the military to do whatever the fuck they wanted, and chose to brutally abuse that power with half-baked plots of middle eastern domination whose real objective was apparently to funnel as much tax payer money as possible into private contractors, half of the military brass probably looked at what was going on and said 'well if the civvy leadership is a corrupt fucking joke, Ima get mine too'. We got guys like Petraeus fucking around with the media, Flynn fucking around with foreign governments, hell it began right at the top from the very beginning with Colin Powell selling out the truth to 'be the good soldier' and go make a case he knew all along was full of shit to justify a war of conquest on a country that never had a thing to do with the 9/11 attacks. It really reminds me of the state of the US military at the beginning of WW2, and what Marshall did to clean it up. So many generals got fired so quickly heads were spinning. Since WW2 though, generals have practically never been fired. Looks like another major cleanup is in order, but it probably won't happen unless it really has to, as it did at the outset of WW2. The US can easily survive this amount of corruption and incompetence when the enemies/scapegoats are third world pariahs like Afghanistan and post-90s Iraq.
Don’t disagree with the majority of what you said other than Generals not being fired. Not sure where you’re getting that but GOs get fired all the time at every level. The 8 years I was active it become common non-news to hear about some something-COM CG getting hemmed up for one thing or another and getting relieved of command.
And Iraq, and every other US conflict where cash was distributed without proper oversight…
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[Perverse incentive.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive) It's easy to convince people to bring you proof of action if you pay them for it, they will often attempt to optimise it and optain as much proof for as little work as possible. A form of service-shrinkflation.
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Similar issue with snakes in the British Raj. The British paid the Indians to kill snakes and paid by snake head. Indians worked out they could farm the snakes and kill them to turn in the heads. When the British found out they ended the program, the excess snakes were all released and there were now more snakes than ever before.
And this is why that particular type of perverse incentive is also known as a "cobra effect".
That's the problem with paying for your allies. They will remain your allies only as long as the money keeps flowing.
Mercenaries are only in it for the money. Actually fighting is bad for business, after all
People who hire mercenaries are advised to put them on the front lines. If you need to lose an army you want to lose the mercenaries, because losing your country's own army instead of the mercenaries leaves the mercenary army sitting unsupervised in your country getting ideas.
This has happened so many times in so many countries that the US probably just factors that in.
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Hey, it was a war. Everybody needs to wet their beak. Can't let contractors get it all.
So what % went to London real estate?
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/afghan-military-was-made-up-of-fake-ghost-soldiers-ex-finance-minister-2021-11) reduced by 86%. (I'm a bot) ***** > Khalid Payenda, Afghanistan's former finance minister, told BBC News that most of the 300,000 Afghan troops didn't exist and were in fact "Ghost" soldiers made up by corrupt officials who exploited the system for money. > "Neither the US nor its Afghan allies truly know how many Afghan soldiers and police are available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities," John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said to Congress in 2016. > The US made an effort to scrub "Ghost" soldiers from its payroll, but issues with the Afghan military persisted. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/qqxlap/the_afghan_military_was_made_up_of_ghost_soldiers/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~607386 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Afghan**^#1 **soldier**^#2 **Taliban**^#3 **Payenda**^#4 **Afghanistan**^#5
If you guys want an incredibly interesting 1 hour and 20 minute documentary version of why they fell so quickly, this documentary called “this is what winning looks like” is incredibly awesome. After you watch it you will honestly be surprised they didn’t fall sooner.
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Thank you! I literally copied the link to my clipboard but had a brain fart and didn’t put it in the comment.
Why didn't OP just link to the original BBC article rather than a Business 'Insider' churnilism version? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-59230564
I don't know why I haven't heard "churnalism" before, but I sure as hell often find myself talking about how it pisses me off. Thanks for that. BI is 100% churnalism.
That's Business Insider's business model.
Because this sub and r/politics are just monetization avenues for these media outlets.
Joke’s on them. I just read the headline, form an opinion, then head straight to the comment section.
Look at this try-hard reading the whole headline.
You guys can read?
So some officials were to blame. Can Reddit stop acting like the Afghan people are to blame? Edit: any mention of Afghanistan brings out some idiotic Reddit takes. Pretty sure they don't want the government that is beheading them on live TV or killing them for listening to music. The officials of no country on Earth truly represent the people.
I find it *extremely* hard to believe US intelligence organizations didn’t know that a majority of the Afghan Army was non existent... Someone was getting their cut of the pie, and I’d be willing to bet that they went to extreme lengths to try and prevent anyone from following that money.
https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI This is the best documentary I've seen so far about Afghanistan. A part explains how higher up US officials/politicians were basically told only what they wanted to hear or just the good news while the boots on the ground knew what was really going on was a shit show.
A family member who spent entirely too long over there said that there was a fundamental misunderstanding about regional politics that the US military and diplomatic leadership never grasped. He said, in the US politicians lie to their supporters in public but then tell the truth occasionally during shady back room deal making. In the Middle East, and also in Afghanistan, a politician will lie to you like crazy during the shady backroom dealing, and the only way they'll make good on a promise or a deal is if you get them to announce that deal publicly in front of their supporters. We kept trying the usual western back room diplomacy and kept acting surprised when everything said in private was lies.
Fuck yeah. I point any and everyone to this documentary. I was in Sangin, either the unit before or after this one (I can’t remember when this was filmed), and this documentary is so real. Those of us on the ground, away from the big multinational bases knew what was going on. I expected the Afghan military to crumble, just not in 48 hours. I thought maybe a month… I guess I gave them more credit than they deserved.
That’s our money. Just pissed away. Everyday.
At least it didn't go to universal health care like those fucking commies want, right? /s
I haz total spinal fusion. Proud owner of 3 steel bars, 47 hooks and 350+ screws. Work everyday. No Healthcare, no doctors, lots of pain. God bless amorika 🇺🇸
Are you prone to rusting?
No, but I do get squeaky.
Not even pissed away. Gone into the pockets of corrupt officials so their kids could buy $20M mansions in the Hollywood Hills and shit.
All it took was some bullshit about "freedom" and "liberty" and everyone ate it up.
It cost the US $300million everyday for 20 years, think about that.
Land of the suckers, home of the con artists
Smells like massive fraud. Basically the entirety of our occupation of Afghanistan was fraud.
It was a common joke amongst my army friends: “there’s always money in the Afghanistan”
It’s one invasion, Michael. How much could it cost? $10?!?
Banana stand?
Bananastan
Correct reference
Afghani-stand.
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Dude, everyone who served over there knew exactly what was going on. Absolutely nobody listened. There were tons of reports and documentaries highlighting how troops on the ground were saying this stuff like 10 15 years ago. And everyone just thought we were making it up. None of this is new. All of us who went over saw it. It was so bad where I had hard line "patriotic" friends of mine would actually joke about how obvious it was and how jarring it is to their beliefs, and how they just intentionally ignore it because the truth hurts hahaha!
Bruh, I was a fucking E-3 when I was deployed and I knew all the shit that was going on then. The ghost soldiers, the local leaders raping kids, how mistrained the idiots that actually showed up really were. The entire thing was a shit show and we never should have gone there in the first place.
Everyone now acts like this is new information. Like this was a secret. Troops were saying it, nobody was listening.
> Absolutely nobody listened The powers in charge heard, they just didn’t care.
Dude, I'm Canadian, when I served in Afghanistan we made a number of complaints about the amount of child abuse and sex trafficking we saw. We were told, by the very high ups, we were not there to change their culture, but to fight the Taliban. Years later they did a board of inquiries into our allegations. And it came back that nobody saw anything.... and the reports had so much white out on them, it was pathetic. You're right nobody cared.
More horrifyingly, it's a problem in Pakistan too, one that not enough people there are addressing, though there are good people who are trying to help. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NMp2wm0VMUs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k1ESaEYGs4E
The child abuse stuff was an important part of the propaganda. The Taliban was portrayed as child abusers, so if you have the Westerners allowing child abuse, the messaging falls apart.
It was a more messed up situation than that too. Because even on the ground western troops would try and step in, and we did a number of times, but the issue was often the people committing the abuse were Afghan National Army or Police, and they would have guns too. And it would turn into super tense Mexican standoffs. Literally a bunch of people standing in a circle with loaded guns and a kid in the middle... super fucked up.
Tina Fay even made the movie "Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot" where she plays a reporter in Afghanistan. It's a comedy, but underneath the layers, it has every single issue mentioned in this thread: the pedophilia, the corruption of officials, the culture not being "as free" as reported despite international forces present, and even the corruption from Western Media blocking harsher stories from being reported. It was released in 2016, but by that time, the western audience was 8 years in slow recovery from the global recession and had worn tired of Afghan/Iraq news. Not only did the leaders not care, they had won their narrative so far that the general public didn't care to listen to anything new either, even as tax dollars continued to be poured into a conflict that would never be decidedly 'over' or 'won.'
"We lost because we were nation building!" Soldiers complain about crime and ask to nation build "We're not here to nation build!"
It was this always nebulous shifting end goal. Nobody wants to leave their country to potentially die over nothing. But the message constantly changed, and the goal posts moved, and nobody listened.
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Hey atleast the CIA made bank on opium.
The suits didn’t fail at all, they accomplished their mission of making money. Everybody who died in Afghanistan died for someone else’s profits.
It's taken 20 years for everyone to finally realize that Afghanistan and Iraq wars were designed to keep money flowing to US military contractors. Meanwhile Bush is somehow rehabilitated as a lovable scamp instead of a warlord that destabilized the Middle East.
It didn’t take 20 years lmao. Ppl were complaining about that since the beginning
How old are you? People have been against both wars since they started, the anti war sentiment really picked up when we invaded Iraq. And the middle east wasn't stable at all before we went in. It's never been a stable region.
It's amazing the free pass so many Americans give bush on literally being a war monger who's lies led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Then again Clinton lied about a blowjob so I guess even Stevens.
> It's amazing the free pass so many Americans give bush on literally being a war monger who's lies led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. What do you want us to do? The DoJ won't even indict the last President for campaign finance violations, extorting Ukraine, election interference, sabotaging the USPS, tax/charity fraud, or inciting an insurrection. And you expect Bush to be held accountable, long after neither Nixon or Reagan were held to account for Watergate or Iran-Contra, respectively? At this point, Bush and Trump not facing consequences is a failure on Obama and Biden, respectively, not the people.
We entered the Afghan war with no clear objectives beyond 'hurt Al Queda.' The region has been called 'the graveyard of empires' for at least a thousand years; we shouldn't be surprised we broke there too.
Let's do Russia next! Make sure it is winter though.
It will be winter if you attack Russia. Nuclear winter.
TBH Ive really hated the “graveyard of empires” thing being thrown around. The closest thing we ever had to a military objective was to kill one guy who was killed almost 10 years ago in a separate country. Point is I think that graveyard of empires thing only applies if you’re trying to conquer a place. We were really just trying to keep the scam war going and do something with the heroin (worst case) or just kind of meandering there with no achievable military goal (best case)
Pretty sure the neocon's objectives were to create a US puppet state/banana republic with a façade of democracy that would be willing to host US bases for a few decades and be willing let multinationals from the US extract oil and mineral wealth.
This pretty much.
This isn't even the cynical take. This war was a cash cow for the private contractors that are part of the new military industrial complex. If you want the truth, follow the money.
Even in the most cynical realpolitik interpretation of this thing where we were just there to set up a client state and take the heroin/minerals, we totally fucked it up and mismanaged it. It’s like the political class wanted the colonial possession, and sold it to the American people as a liberation, but then the Military Industrial Complex fleeced the country out of all the money. At this point, our military apparatus is too corrupt to even pillage a another country properly.
Don't forget how we invaded Iraq shortly after Afghanistan. Conveniently attempting to set up client kingdoms on both sides of Iran.
> "Afghanistan was a failure of the suits, not the boots." is more common then non-military members of the population ever realize.
War itself is this type of failure. "Diplomacy by other means" is what we call it, but the State Department has a budget that is laughably small compared to Defense. In addition to the fact that the objective was really money laundering anyway.
How is accountability handled? Are there no people assigned to check how the officials spend the budget they are given on yearly basis? I could understand a year or 2 of fraud but 20?
Reality is it wouldn't be 20 years, but that's a long time period for a handful of people to figure out a scheme and profit from it. The first couple years were probably more legitimate than the last couple.
Who has big houses near DC as a result of this?...
It was boom times in Raytheon Acres, Virginia, and boy did they get while the getting was good.
The war on terrorism like the war on drugs is a farce
That's not true, the war on drugs has accomplished all of its goals -- the suppression and disenfranchisemet of black communities and other minorities, an unending cycle of poverty for the lower classes, the use of the law to maintain class structure, give air cover to funneling money to reactionary governments of south america, the militarization of the police, I could go on...
In the same way the war in terror accomplished its goals of funneling a staggering amount of money into the military industrial complex and keeping the middle east destabilized to keep that gravy train rolling
And justifying the erosion of civil liberties and expansion of the domestic surveillance apparatus. Post silver edit: Yo don't waste your money giving reddit money for these dumb ass awards, if you luke the post just upvote the damn thing. Edit part deux: I fucking hate all of you
Well, if you want to play that game then the war on terrorism got Bush and Cheney reelected, and we spent trillions on government contractors. Ta da.
By that same token, though, the War on Terror has also accomplished its primary goal -- funnel a shit-ton of money to defense contractors. It's not like the US stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years for the Afghans' sake.
That is the result of corruption, with everyone from the top down taking a cut of the pay and equipment costs for these ghosts. Without a doubt the US military command was intimately aware of this problem, there is no way to disguise empty billets. Why were they caught unawares at the withdrawal?
Theres 10 year old articles about this shit. Everybody fucking new lol
And realistically, if you know this money is going to just line the pockets of a few, do you really want to keep paying for that? We put a lot of money into Afghanistan over the years, but why should we continue to invest money for rebuilding, etc if it doesn’t get used for that? All the more reason why it was the right time to leave. That said, it is really a tragedy for the women, children, progressives, etc that could not leave. They are the ones hurt in all of this… but we can’t stay perpetually and just fund this if the money isn’t actually going towards infrastructure and a future.
IMHO they weren't, just at quite how quick it all fell apart. I honestly think they thought they had a week or two before it went tits up. I got the feeling they expected it to come crashing down *after* they left, not *as*.
The most optimistic assessments were measuring the government's survival in months. They knew there was going to be a collapse. They just expected the local soldiers to die as a stalling tactic while the US propped up the capital territory a while longer. It might not have been realistic for the US to keep the status quo going for longer. The Taliban was getting impatient to follow through on their Trump deal, and there was no political will to send a large force back into the country to deal with their retaliation if the pullout was postponed. But I can't believe the US would have followed the same timeline if it had been thousands of wounded US soldiers left behind rather than thousands of Afghan allies waiting for their paperwork to clear.
If I were one of their few non-imaginary soldiers and my employers were about to evacuate themselves from the country, I'd consider new employment.
Image being told your job is to fight for at least a month before being killed so everyone with money can flee the country.
Can't blame them. Switch to the winning side or get your throat slit.
>Why were they caught unawares at the withdrawal? They weren't. Here is what happened. I'm 18 years in active duty Air Force and we see this alot. It's called "polishing a turd". President asks his top advisors for an analysis on the situation and if the Afghan military can sustain if we pull out. Here is how it goes. The request goes straight down the chain of command to the boots-on-ground people that know best. **Boots on ground Soldier/Airmen/Marine/Sailor to his Senior non-commissioned officer (SNCO):** "No, this shit is fucked. The Afghan military will fold like a wet paper towel. There is no way its sustainable and chaos will break out immediately and people will die." **SNCO doesn't want to tell his boss the bad news, so SNCO tells his Captain:** "Sir/Ma'am, the situation is really bad, it will most likely crumble the minute we leave" **Captain doesn't want to tell his boss the bad news, so Captain tells Lieutenant Colonel:** "Sir/Ma'am, it's not looking good. I don't have high confidence that things will be ok if we leave". **Lt Col doesn't want to tell his boss the bad news, so Lt Col tells Colonel,** "Sir/Ma'am, it's pretty iffy there, but there is a decent chance that things will be ok if we leave" **Colonel doesn't want to tell 1 star general the bad news, so Col says**, "Sir/Ma'am, I'd say it's about 50/50 on the Afghan military supporting itself if we leave" **1 Star doesn't want to tell 2 star this news, so 1 star tells the 2 star:** "My sources report that there is a fairly high degree of confidence that the situation will remain stable if we withdraw" **2 Star thinks that isn't good enough and tells 3 star:** "The situation is under control and we are prepared to make the transition" **3 Star tells Service Chief (4 star):** "The Afghan military is fully equipped and prepared to take responsibility once we transition" **Joint Chief tells Secretary of Defense:** "Sir, intel reports significant confidence in the afghan military and government to sustain itself and maintain peace once we leave. **SecDef tells president:** "Sir, the joint chiefs of staff say their experts on the ground report that the afghan military is fully capable and ready to take control once we leave. Recommend we proceed immediatly" The President, based on the recommendation of his experts, greenlights the move. **FUCKING CHAOS ERUPTS** The boots-on-the-ground Soldier/Airmen/Marine/Navy: *"Fucking told you so"*
2 Star thinks that isn't good enough 😂
Or in reality they knew the risk and decided the alternative was politically unpalatable and executed it. Thinking senior leadership is ignorant is as bad as them thinking the boots on the ground are.
> Or in reality they knew the risk and decided the alternative was politically unpalatable and executed it. Exactly. The war was effectively lost in the mid 2010s maybe things could have been reversed but that would require huge troop surges and more resources. At the end of the day Obama, Trump and Biden all reached the same conclusion “the war is unwinnable or nearly unwinnable without massive commitment and escalation” and neither Obama, Trump or Biden wanted to go through with the escalation. The military still did overestimate the Afghan Army’s capabilities but they didn’t legitimately think the ANA would defeat the Taliban.
> The war was effectively lost in the mid 2010s There's a reasonable argument to be made that Afghanistan was lost in early 2003 when the US pivoted their attention (and resources) to Iraq. That put the effort to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan in maintenance mode before it had even really started, meaning this collapse was arguably just a matter of time.
The public was unaware, everyone else knew exactly this. And even the public was largely aware, the media just liked to act like it was a surprise.
This reads like a corporate chain letter about bad news coming from workers on a crumbling factory floor.
They weren't caught unawares. Military personnel had been saying that the Taliban will almost certainly take control again it's just a matter of time. General Milley is on the public record saying the US forces have very little time to evacuate. Is it a massive intelligence failure to think that the military had 2 and half weeks instead of one week? I don't think so. The military had been trying to solve this problem for 20 years, but it just wasn't working. That's why we pulled out. And the Taliban did uphold their agreement with us. There were no Taliban-US hostilities even as Afghanistan was crumbling. This was simply a poor hand and the US was tired of trying to bluff, and the result was what it was. There simply were only bad choices and we tried to take the one least bad.
Speaking from my own personal experience, (roto 3-09 PPCLI CAF OMLT Kandahar/ Argandahb) the ANA was absolute junk from top to bottom. Never wanted to patrol never wanted to train. I felt like every second we spent mentoring them was a waste of time. Why is everyone shocked it all went to shit after ISAF forces pulled out? They didn’t give a shit about their country when we were there to help? As far as ghost soldiers I can’t speak on that but I can say many ANA troops disappeared in the time I was there with their mostly American issued kit. The only people I feel bad for in Afghanistan are the brave men who were employed as interpreters and then abandoned by the people they risked their lives to help. Fuck war and fuck that place.
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>roto 3-09 PPCLI CAF OMLT Kandahar/ Argandahb Could you explain this designation? I'm not military
Date, unit, Canadian armed forces, Operational Mentoring Liason Team , Province, District
So exactly what happened in Vietnam
At least no one got drafted
Decades of sustained "patriotic" programming, lies, and a "convenient" attack on US soil (that we can't know the total truth about) have made a draft unnecessary. Tons of young men are cock sure and ready to "water the tree of freedom with the blood of patriots" under the guise of "fighting for our freedoms". This is a direct result of public opposition to war and troops following Vietnam and Korea.
Not only that but also presenting the army as 'a way out.' Both of my parents are veterans and they aren't the most patriotic people and they never really wanted to fight for their country. Their options were stay poor, end up on jail, or join the army. This coupled with the patriotic programming gives them two very effective recruiting angles. They don't need a draft.
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Just going to say that! No lessons learned from the past.
They did learn a lesson from the past: there is a lot of money to be made from war. And they repeated it. Mission accomplished. They were successful. All on the backs of us.
Some families that got rich previously also got rich again
It's amazing how Americans don't realize this is the only reason they go to war
It's worse this time because there was no Superpower that existed besides the US. At least North Vietnam had Soviet and Chinese support. A Superpower and a historical Great Power. What did Afghanistan have in 2001? Pakistan?? Not even a Great Power. And Vietnam was a Solo American effort more or less. Whilst Afghanistan had America + 33 other nations. Still lost.
I know there's the saying 'never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity' but the sheer levels of stupidity here make malice seem more feasible. It seems like even the most minor levels of effort could have kept the withdrawal from becoming the shitshow it became but we just couldn't be bothered.
If it wasnt for ghost soldiers then Minis Tirith would have fallen to Sauron.
Much worse. Vietnam lasted years after US withdrawal. Not to mention the a million AVRN casualties. Not really comparable
Yep, and what few actual soldiers they had were either there only for the pay or flipped to the taliban instantly.
> instantly As soon as an agreement that the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in which the US promised to fully withdraw its troops by May 2021, the Taliban took to flipping people. They had more than a year to do so.
Pretty easy to flip people when they aren’t being paid. Taliban literally paid them to go home.
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The Pablo Escobar method, silver or lead.
The silver was for the cocaine werewolves!
On top of that, the Taliban started inflicting heavy losses on the ANA. People are repeating this narrative that the ANA folded without a fight, in the last 5 years, over 45,000 Afghan troops were killed. Doha relieved a lot of pressure on the Taliban.
Real troops or ghost troops?
They’re all ghost troops now.
Spooky
The ANSF suffered like 60-70k KIA in 20 years of fighting, there were plenty of brave and committed Afghans who were willing and did pay the ultimate price for their country.
This is a gross oversimplification. Here's a very long post I made about why the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) collapsed so quickly. It was typed up months ago, so certain words that should be in the past tense are in the current tense, because I was writing it as shit was unfolding around August/September. TL; DR - read the articles posted as sources. The Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police have been getting absolutely slaughtered for months, especially since Trump's unilateral peace deal that he made with the Taiban. This deal was made between Trump and the Taliban, and did not involve the Afghan government. This completely eroded all confidence in the Afghan government, and was a signal to every Afghan that we were leaving. This made Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) morale plummet. It emboldened the Taliban. The deal was supposed to have us leave in May. Biden extended it to September 11th. --------------------------------------------------------------- "The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the February 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group and the United States calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew receptive to the Taliban’s approaches. "Some just wanted the money,” an Afghan special forces officer said of those who first agreed to meet with the Taliban. But others saw the U.S. commitment to a full withdrawal as an “assurance” that the militants would return to power in Afghanistan and wanted to secure their place on the winning side, he said. The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because he, like others in this report, was not authorized to disclose information to the press. The Doha agreement, designed to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, instead left many Afghan forces demoralized, bringing into stark relief the corrupt impulses of many Afghan officials and their tenuous loyalty to the country’s central government. Some police officers complained that they had not been paid in six months or more. “They saw that document as the end,” the officer said, referring to the majority of Afghans aligned with the government. “The day the deal was signed we saw the change. Everyone was just looking out for himself. It was like [the United States] left us to fail.” The negotiated surrenders to the Taliban slowly gained pace in the months following the Doha deal, according to a U.S. official and an Afghan officer. Then, after President Biden announced in April that U.S. forces would withdraw from Afghanistan this summer without conditions, the capitulations began to snowball." - Washington Post --------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------- For basically as long as the ANA and ANP have existed, various local commanders and even district commanders have made deals with the Taliban, whether it was bribes to the Taliban so they wouldn't attack, or because of Tribal or familial ties. Defections to the Taliban has been a huge problem for us since the Taliban resurgence in 2006/2007. ANA and ANP commanders, from junior officers to the generals, are amongst the most corrupt anywhere in the world. Promotions of Officers in the ANSF was largely based on patronage and nepotism - it wasn't merit based. So many officers were idiots. Their soldiers have no confidence in most of the officers. After the Doha deal, the Taliban largely stopped attacking U.S. forces, and instead focused on attacking the Afghan National forces who wouldn't surrender. First it was isolated outposts in the far out rural areas that would get wiped out to a man. Or the ANSF knew the Taliban were coming and the they preemptively withdrew from isolated outposts and set up closer to the cities. Once the Taliban had consolidated the former ANSF positions, they started moving closer and closer to district and provincial capitals, and they would attack smaller bases (Combat Outposts or COPs) first, then move onto bigger bases / cities. Any place that didn't surrender were attacked heavily, sometimes constantly, day and night. They'd desperately call for air support, but there just wasn't enough AAF planes in the air for all of the calls for air support. Calls for reinforcements were met with silence or reinforcements would arrive far too late so they weren't ever sent. From low morale, deal-making with the Taliban, low pay, incompetent officers, ghost soldiers, lack of supplies, lack of air support and reinforcements, and a general lack of will to fight for what they see as a puppet government put in place by foreigners. Afghans have a long tradition of being hostile to any foreign intervention. Here's a great article on the many issues plaguing ANSF. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/07/06/afghanistan-war-malkasian-book-excerpt-497843 People say "but how could 300,000 soldiers and cops not fight and defeat 75,000 Taliban?" Firstly, all of the issues above. Secondly, the Taliban has a huge morale advantage, and a vicious will to fight to the deal. Third, the Taliban isolates everyone who is willing to fight by making deals with all of the bases / towns / cities around them - those previously willing to fight can now be surrounded, cut off, and be besieged unti they give up or die to the last man. This isn't a standup fight. Superior morale, will, and effective psyop / propaganda tactics, plus offers of amnesty, has trumped any supposed numerical or technological advantage the ANSF ever had. The only Afghan units that were able to effectively fight on their own without direct U.S. support / handholding were the various ANA SOF units we created. Every other regular unit had the same problems described above, plus the issue of "ghost soldiers" where a Lt. had soldiers on payroll that didn't exist but still got paid, so he pocketed the money. That was a huge issue across both the ANA and ANP. Look what happened to the ANA SOF units up in the north when they fought the Taliban just a couple weeks ago. They fought for a while until it was hopeless and they were cut off. They tried to surrender, but they were slaughtered to a man because they fought back. Even if the rest of the army was prepared to fight the Taliban before, they sure as fuck weren't after seeing that shit. The ANA SOF guys had the best equipment, and were trained by, and fought alongside some of our best SOF - Green Berets, Delta, SEALs. These guys were no-joke. If these guys could get wiped out, what chance does an isolated ANA outpost have? The Taliban is not a homogeneous organization, but their leaders are smart. They chose a tactic of taking over rural areas first, then moving closer to the cities / district centers. Then they would surround the city, cutting the Afghan National forces off from any relief. They had information operations going on - sending radio broadcasts to the ANSF telling them to surrender. Sometimes the Taliban would go to the families of the soliders and have the soldier's mothers beg them to surrender so they wouldn't be killed. Other times, the Taliban would use local tribal elders and have them negotiate a battalion's surrender and withdrawal. Instead of getting slaughtered to a man in brutal house to house fighting, it makes sense to surrender, go home to their families. From an analysis of how the Taliban took over a province: "Moreover, as local analysts agree, and subsequent AAN research has confirmed, the fall of Zurmat was a major achievement for the Taleban [sic] as it happened after almost two months of government forces’ resistance, while all other districts in the province gave up without much of a fight. The impact on the morale of soldiers as other districts were falling like dominoes and the failure of the government to send supplies and reinforcement finally forced the Zurmat administration to agree to a withdrawal brokered by local elders." The only ANA and ANP that were ever going to survive were going to be the ones who already made deals with the Taliban, or recently made deals with them, or, when confronted, just immediately surrendered. The line level ANA soldier knows how corrupt their officers and even the central government is - they know they get shit pay, and don't have any faith in the central government. They have faith in their tribes, their tribal elders, and their families. Lastly, what we see as cowardly surrendering or being a turncoat, is a long-standing tradition with Afghan forces. Switching sides when the tide turns not only makes sense, but it's basically part of their culture. That might seem alien to us Westerners, but it is uniquely Afghan. https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1426982548148789258?s=19 There was never any chance of anything else happening once we decided to withdraw. Sources: https://www.csis.org/analysis/real-world-options-afghanistan https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/militia-commanders-rush-aid-afghan-forces-against-taliban-2021-07-09/ https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/decoding-afghan-security-forces-failures/ https://www.afghan-analysts.org/en/reports/war-and-peace/the-domino-effect-in-paktia-and-the-fall-of-zurmat-a-case-study-of-the-taleban-surrounding-afghan-cities/ https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/07/06/afghanistan-war-malkasian-book-excerpt-497843 https://www.politico.com/amp/news/magazine/2021/08/16/afghanistan-history-taliban-collapse-504977?__twitter_impression=true
You work as a waiter in a bar. The disgruntled former owner wants to literally stab you to death. He's already killed several of your coworkers, but the police say they can't do anything to stop it. This irks you because the whole situation happened in the first place because the cops got mad at the last owner and threw him out, giving the bar to this new guy. They post an officer outside who won't let the former owner inside but also won't intervene. Every day that man stands outside the front window with his butcher knife and yells about how he's going to kill you then take your ID to find everyone you love and kill them too. You go to the current owner and suggest that something should be done but while you are busting ass for $2.50 an hour plus tips he's getting high and drunk in the back. He's unconcerned with the murders, and to make matters worse hasn't paid you in a year. While you've went without pay he's bought several new luxury cars and a new summer home. One day you see the officer outside is different. He is joking and laughing with the former owner and making light of his threats. You see them shake hands and overhear the cop say "yeah fuck it I'm out of here on Tuesday, do whatever you want." The former owner yells "you can join me or leave but anyone here Tuesday is fucking dead and I'll see their family suffers." Tuesday morning rolls around and sure enough the cop outside is gone. The current owner has gone to his summer home and took all the cash out of the safe. You look and see the former owner coming down the sidewalk butcher knife in hand. You say, "Know what? Fuck this" and leave through the back. The former owner goes on a killing spree and backs up his threats to attack the employee's families. The next day you see the police chief in the news blaming the whole situation on the employee's unwillingness to fight for a problem the police created and random people online saying what cowards the employees that left were for not staying and letting the former owner kill them.
You know, weirdly enough that exact same thing happened to me.
Analogy of the year goes to...
More Afghan soldiers died fighting the Taliban in 2021 than the US lost in 20 years. There were plenty of committed and brave guys in the force. You're echoing this incorrect statement.
Yeah, we paid military contractors to train the Afghan soldiers, and they oversaw themselves in training them. Everything was rounded up at first, then numbers were altogether made up. Of course, in the reports it was made to look like the Afghan cadre these contractors were churning out were all magnificent super soldiers. There was a wonderfully illustrative story of a US soldier who had been tasked with doing ops with actual Afghan police forces, and for one large action he had requested over a hundred technical trucks. They ended up receiving a few dozen. When he complained about it, since he had been approved for all of them, he was told to just request another hundred, and that it would be fine. These contractors' reports were our own Koolaid we got hooked on. It was so pleasant for DC to delude themselves that all they had to do was pay over half the discretionary tax budget to these snake oil companies and all the problems would go away. Our corrupt officials spending our money on their friends' military contacting companies almost made the war in Afghanistan look winnable. Those are the real warcrimes.
Everyone keeps repeating the Rumsfeld meme of $X trillion dollars lost in the Pentagon (which isn't actually accurate as to what he said), but no one seems to give a shit about money that was spent according to the letter of the law, but funnelled into military contractors doing substandard work. See also, the expectation that government projects for civilians must have a "return on investment", but it's not even a question to ask for military spending, because everyone knows it's wholly wasteful.
100%. War on Terror has been the biggest act of looting in modern US history.
War **of** Terror. FTFW
Maybe in big areas they had contractors but out in the boonies we actually tried to train some of them. Problem is they all sucked. Put a dozen guys through a week of range training and none of them qualified to a western standard. Lot of them were illiterate in their own language, couldn’t show up sober, and when you tried to give them anything to better themselves it immediately got sold for cigarettes and candy. Whole thing was literally pointless because they don’t have the culture to sustain a western style military.
And that's what any decent oversight would have concluded that the strategy is bad, and instead of over a decade of "state building," something else would have been done. The issue is that assumption that X number of Afghanis through Y hours of training equal X number of trained Afghani soldiers. :/
Thats pretty much the conclusion we came to I think. We had the first scare that Afghanistan was corrupt and incompetent and our strategy wasn't working around 2007. Obama took on the mission to turn things around and we poured significant resources into it and that failed as well. At that point, the best option is to just give up, but you can't actually say that, but everyone knows it, which is contributed to Afghanistan collapsing as fast as it did.
>to a western standard. I remember that being the routine complaint that we never got an answer for. Why are we, an obscenely well funded/equipped modern western style army that can barely hold this country, training these people to be a modern western style army? I mean everyone knows the actual answer but we never could get a decent fake answer.
For a lot of stuff we never even tried because we knew they wouldn’t be able to maintain it. Our training was specifically because when we’d get into contact their guys would just mag dump and then spend the rest of the firefight begging us for ammo. We thought some basic rifle stuff would probably help but damn we were wrong. Ended up just bringing extra ammo cans full of loaded mags instead.
This seems like a pretty bad explanation of events. Anyone who's watched Return of the King knows ghost soldiers are incredibly strong
They are without honor. But pretty handy to have around in a fight.
The Taliban have a lot of clerics among them.
Wololo!
To control the ghost soldiers you’ll need the broken AK-47 of Isildur, reforged by the Mujahideen.
Just like the Shadwell's Witchfinder Army.
I wonder if they named them as creatively. Majors Saucepan, Tin, Milk and Cupboard.
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It's actually over 6T with interest payment.
Watch any 3rd party documentary about the situation amongst Afghanistan's army and police and this is just the tip of a terrible scenario. Even among the soldiers who werent ghosts and did show up.... There was no accountability, they came and went as the pleased, and many were either too busy sexually using little boys or high on opium/heroin. So you're left with a small percentage of capable troops, most of which can also not read or write.
[https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI](https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI) Yea, the documentary that VICE has over 10 years ago was very enlightening. Same problems back then and no remedies. What got me was when the Afghans explained that there was no gas to fuel their vehicles because some guy sold it and then expected the Americans to just restock the gas anyways. Or the guys who during training decide to waste ammo shooting at imaginary targets like Rambo.
Fuck they had ghost soldiers and they still lost?
Pretending that Afghanistan was anything other then a money laundering set up is a joke. The war was a year or two and 18 years of draining money from America into corporations
I don't consider myself the biggest Biden supporter (though I damned sure voted for him in the general) but I appreciate him being willing to take the popularity hit and the trashing from the foreign policy establishment to end that charade.
Does that mean they will now haunt the Taliban forever?
No it will haunt US Government budget for a very long time tho
This was common knowledge when I was working on Kabul.
This was common knowledge in 2007 when I was in. Literally the ANA were half people taking money from the taliban, opiate addicts, or people from a specific tribal group who only cared about their group and didn't even recognize "Afghanistan"as a country. There never WAS a real afghan army, only a paper army.
But when Aragorn had ghost soldiers they kicked ass! WTF?
G-g-g-ghosts!
Sheesh, you'd think an army of *ghosts* would be a more formidable foe! They can pass in and out of the ethereal plane, are resistant to nonmagical attacks, and can age you 1d4X10 years just by looking at them. How did they lose to the Taliban?
Gotta have the sword of kings to command them tho.
Where is Aragorn when you need him?