The Collapse of ANSF
With 14 provincial capitals in North, West & South including Kandahaar and Herat, biggest cities after the capital, Kabul; it’s not in consequence to Taliban’s strategy, but the result of disintegrated structure of Kabul Regime.
What happened to ANDSF?
Before taking into account the ANSF role, let’s have a look at US claims about ANSF.
In 2011, Chairman Armed Services Committee Sen Carl Levin testified, ANSF; “bringing us [the US] closer to the success of the mission.”
Sen John McCain said, ANSF; “growing in quantity and improving in quality even faster than planned.”
In 2013, Gen Milley, present US Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff claimed ANSF to be “very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day.”
Gen Mattis called ANSF, “the worst nightmare for the Taliban.”
As per an article published by NATO’s ISAF, ANSF were slated to take full responsibility for security throughout Afghanistan by 2014.
Link: http://www.isaf.nato.int/
But, ANSF, trained by US, India & NATO turned out to be a huge failure. In addition to ANSF's micromanagement by Kabul Regime, lack of will to fight, corruption, dependence on US for training, logistics & airpower, appear to be the major reasons.
According to the Reports of World Bank, Afghan society's reciprocal patronage expectations led to constant interference attempts into standard merit-based appointment processes by govt members Pres office, Parliamentarians, individual commanders, & influential political personnel of all origins.”
As concerns troop withdrawal, Trump & Biden aren’t the only US Presidents pulling troops from unfulfilled peace & reconstruction missions; Reagan withdrew forces from Lebanon in 1984. Thus, the same has been the case with Afghanistan. ANSF has two main bodies; Afghan National Police (ANP), which reports to Interior Ministry, and Afghan National Army (ANA), which reports to Defence Ministry.
Details provided by “Afghanistan Papers” and “Lessons Learned” reports are significant in this regard.
Data suggests, since 2002, the US has invested $83 billion in Afghan security.
In 2011 alone, $11 billion was provided which was $3 billion more than Pakistan’s expenditure on the military that year. In estimation, the United States alone contributed more than $73 billion in economic and military assistance to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2012.
According to the World Bank, foreign aid and spending by foreign troops accounted for 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, or GDP, in 2012. The World Bank has also estimated that 70 percent of overall public spending in Afghanistan occurs outside the formal government budget. SIGAR audit found incomplete tracking information for more than 200,000 weapons that the US Defense Department had provided for the Afghan National Security Forces, or ANSF, which encompasses both the police and military forces.
On paper, ANSF numbers are 352,000 (262,000 Afghan National Army, ANA, & 90,000 ANP), but Afghan government never had more than 254,000 all ranks on the ground. Afghan commanders used to exaggerate numbers to pocket salaries of ghost soldiers. As per SIGAR officials, ANP is “the most hated [Afghan] institution”. They also revealed ANP’s 30% desertion rate among recruits. Run-aways keep official weapons with them along to “set up their own private checkpoints” and extort money.
Ryan Crocker, Ex-US Ambassador to Kabul said, ANP was “corrupt down to the patrol level.”
Despite public praise, the confidential report titled, “ANP Horror Stories” reflects the Bush administration’s anxieties about the ANP.
ANP training arrangement between Pentagon, the State Department, and later NATO member states remained “tangled”.
White House war czar for Afghanistan, 2007-2013, Gen Douglas Lute, advisor to George W Bush & Obama, in Lessons Learned interview, (2/20/2015) says, “A fundamental impact of the surge was to westernize the fight - we committed to do it ourselves, not through Afghans. So who was doing the advisory effort? We economized. We got the ANSF we deserve.
If we started with ANSF in 2002- 2006 when the Taliban was weak and disorganized, things may have been different. Instead, we went to Iraq. If we committed money deliberately and sooner, we could have a different outcome.
We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan - we didn't know what we were doing.”
Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and USAID have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion. This is according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the "Cost of War Project" at "Brown University".
Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.
“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders, and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers.
"Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
“We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it weren't properly tailored to Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than physical presence of coalition troops and civilians”, a report released in May 2018.
In contrast to the public statements of US officials, the "Lessons Learned" interviews revealed their admittance about the fact that the US government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers, allies of Washington, plundered with impunity. Lessons Learned interviews suggest, US military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated, and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries, paid by U.S. taxpayers, for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.” Also, not a single US official expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 Afghan security forces have been killed; A casualty rate, US commanders declared "unsustainable".
One unidentified U.S. soldier said Special Forces teams “hated” the Afghan police whom they trained and worked with, calling them “awful — the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel.”
A US military officer estimated that one-third of police recruits were “drug addicts or Taliban.” Another one called them “stealing fools” who looted so much fuel from U.S. bases that they perpetually smelled of gasoline.
“Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an unnamed senior USAID official told government interviewers.
A 2012 survey by the Asia Foundation found that more than half of Afghans who had contact with an ANP officer over the previous year were forced to pay a bribe.
A 2013 Transparency International survey found that one-fifth of Afghans viewed their military as corrupt.
As per the JCOA assessment, corruption in Afghanistan was intensified due to US Govt’s “initial support of warlords, [and] reliance on logistics contracting,” in addition to the lack of understanding by US and coalition officials of the scale or nature of Afghan corruption.
As per RAND and CSIS reports, 'ANA will not be able to hold onto areas cleared of "insurgents" unless the ANSF and other government entities can establish an effective presence and earn the people’s trust, particularly by reducing corruption.'
Hence, today’s Afghanistan is a consequence of the collective failure of US, NATO & Kabul Regime; Unaccounted aid the US spent on Afghanistan became the major factor that gave rise to historic levels of corruption, hence ANSF failure, and the Rise of the Taliban.
References:
3. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/
4. tribune.com.pk/story/2255031/
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