Overestimation of the Afghan army capabilities

Corruption, ghost soldiers, low morale, dysfunctional logistics and two decades of bad policies

Carlos Marcelles de la Casa

Article published in Spanish at The Political Room

On July 8, 2021, President Biden declared that "there will be no circumstances in which you will see people being evacuated from the roof of the US embassy" (Forbes Breaking News, 2021) -avoiding comparisons with Saigon in 1975.- On August 16, a little more than a month later, the same Black-Hawks prototypes that participated in the capture of Osama Bin Laden moved diplomats from the US embassy in Afghanistan to the Kabul airport. With this action, it materialized how two decades of progress, achieved by means of an enormous war (3500 dead of the international coalition) and multimillionaire investments, vanished in a week. The obvious humiliation of the United States and its NATO allies could not be greater. Once the evacuation of their nationals - and of the few fortunate Afghan collaborators - has been completed, Western governments will have no choice but to accept the consecration of an Islamic Emirate with the Taliban at the helm. This contrasts with the fact that, in the late 1990s, the Taliban government was barely recognized by a handful of countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Back then, the Northern Alliance, a grouping of militias concentrated in northern Afghanistan, resisted and served as a hope and hero for the West; twenty years later and trapped in the Panjshir Valley, they are once again the only steadfast resistance to the Taliban. Afghanistan is back to square one.

Western governments will have no choice but to accept the consecration of an Islamic Emirate led by the Taliban.

This fiasco begs the question, how did a government with an army of 350,000 troops (Spain has less than 133,000), trained and supplied by NATO's best armies and contractors, collapse so quickly? In 1975, the North Vietnamese army, backed by the Soviet Union, took months to advance through South Vietnam. In contrast, the Taliban, numbering no more than 200,000 troops, and armed mostly with captured materiel, have taken almost the entire country in little more than a week, generally with little resistance (McMaster, 2021). The answer seems to be that what they lacked in strength, they made up for in brains, determination, and political savvy. The Trump administration signatory to the Doha Accords with the Taliban, hoped that the Taliban would be forced to negotiate with the Ghani government to enshrine a power sharing (Boone, 2021). However, they soon realized that it was more profitable for them to overthrow the Afghan government, and occupy the power vacuum under the cover of the Coalition's withdrawal. So what has happened?

Image 1: U.S. representative Zalmay Khalilzad (left) and Taliban representative Abdul Ghani Baradar (right) sign the Doha agreement on February 29, 2020. Source: Middle East Monitor, 2020.

The most striking miscalculation by the Coalition, and especially the US, has been the continued overestimation of Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (NDSF) capabilities. The most recent case demonstrating this is found in Biden's July 8, 2021 speech in which the US president asserted that "Afghan NDSF military capabilities are not comparable to that of the Taliban" (Forbes Breaking News, 2021) The Pentagon claimed at the time that even without US tactical support, the Afghan NDSF would be able to hold major urban centers and major military installations. As President Biden pointed out, on paper, Afghan government forces were significantly superior in numbers, training, equipment, and organization (Boone, 2021). Likewise, Afghan Special Forces commandos were on par with their regional counterparts. Against this backdrop, U.S. intelligence services were warning in March 2021 that the Taliban would need at least two to three years to take control of the country. In the end, less than two weeks were enough (McMaster, 2021).

On paper, Afghan government forces were significantly superior in numbers, training, equipment and organization.

This overestimation of the operational capabilities of the FNDS was a constant, which in part justified the progressive decline of the American presence. The U.S. Department of Defense's semi-annual presentations to Congress periodically highlighted the increasing professionalization and combat capability of the Afghan military. For example, the November 2013 "Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan" recounted that "Afghan security forces are now successfully providing security for their own people, fighting their own battles" (Ibid, 2021), and could sustain the gains "achieved by a 50-nation coalition of the best trained and equipped forces in the world" (IEEE, 2013,p.7). All in all, by 2014 NATO forces ceased their combat missions to be left to the NDSF. Even as the situation on the ground deteriorated, a 2017 report described the FNDS as "generally capable of protecting major population centers...and responding to Taliban attacks" (McMaster, 2021).

Only in recent years have reports begun to reflect the true state of these forces. In 2017 and 2019, "ghost" soldiers were reported, with the fate of their salaries unknown. This suggests that there were never 350,000 soldiers available to take on the Taliban. The December 2020 DoD report to Congress noted that the actual number of NDSF personnel hovered around 298,000 (Figure 1), thereby hinting at the serious and recurring problem of "ghost" soldiers and desertions (Kazmin, Parkin, & Manson, 2021).

Figure 1: Actual composition of Afghan NDSFs in 2020 according to the U.S. Department of Defense in December 2020. Source: own elaboration based on data from Kazmin, Parkin, & Manson, 2021.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) also regularly highlighted problems with equipment tracking and salaries. Waste, fraud and mismanagement of resources earmarked for the modernization of the Afghan army further undermined the combat capability of the NDSF. Waste and fraud amount to billions of dollars and corruption involves senior government officials (McMaster, 2021). As a result of this corruption, Afghan soldiers went months without pay and without the supplies needed to defend themselves, which fostered the idea of desertion in the event of combat.

Waste, fraud and mismanagement of resources earmarked for the modernization of the Afghan army further undermined its combat capability.

More recently, provincial capitals were not adequately reinforced, even though it was clear that the U.S. intended to withdraw within a year of the February 2020 Doha Agreement. As the Taliban advance intensified in recent weeks, Afghan soldiers were also let down by their commanders and political leaders, who over two decades have failed to win national loyalty. The Afghan government's inability and lack of survival instinct to raise a general rallying cry to the nation against the besieging Taliban is striking (Kazmin, Parkin, & Manson, 2021). All of this context helps to explain why the NDSF decided not to fight. It is thus not the fault of the NSDF as such, but of its low morale, lack of military support and cohesion, poor policies, and widespread institutional corruption in the government and the senior military and police leadership.

In addition, the Washington-led coalition repeatedly made several mistakes that delayed the creation of a modern military. During the early years of the 2001 invasion, the lack of investment in the NSDF was a valuable waste of time at a time when the Taliban were on the defensive. Moreover, the creation of an air force of its own was not prioritized, as this task was entrusted to the USAF. For this reason, it was not until 2009 that Afghan pilots were trained (McMaster, 2021). Add to this the loss of Afghan Area Force capabilities following the withdrawal of its U.S. contractors in 2019. This decision severely eroded the logistical capabilities not only of the air force (Table 1), but of all Afghan NDSFs. For this reason, it is not surprising that after the takeover of the country, some pilots switched sides, allowing the Taliban to have helicopters of their own for the first time (image 2).

Vehículo	Número
Helicóptero UH-90 Black Hawk	33
Helicóptero MD-530	43
Helicóptero Mi-17 (fabricación soviética)	32
Avión C-208/ AC-208	33
Avión de ataque ligero A-29	​23

Table 1: Aircraft of the Afghan Air Force on June 30, 2021. Source: own elaboration with data from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), 2021.

Image 2: Afghan Army Black Hawk captured by the Taliban. Source: Fox, 2021.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan played a key role in undermining the Coalition war effort (Ibid, 2021). Washington never obtained Islamabad's support in the two decades of the conflict; in fact, Pakistan will be among the first countries to recognize the new Taliban government. This attitude of the Asian country made the counterinsurgency work of the U.S. and the Afghan NDSF difficult. The Taliban maintained training camps, raised funds and planned attacks from across the Durand line. Most famously, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad, a mere two-hour drive from Pakistan's capital.

Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan played a key role in undermining the Coalition war effort.

Thus, the rapid collapse of the Afghan government was not exclusively the fault of the FNDS's lack of will or ability, but of twenty years of institutional corruption and implementation of bad policies that fostered a framework of overestimation of the Afghan army's operational capabilities and low morale. The latter was especially contributed to by the sudden total withdrawal of US troops ordered by President Biden. Ghani and the rest of his government hoped that the worsening situation would change the Americans' minds, but it did not.

Bibliography

Boone, J. (2021). The last days of the ‘New Afghanistan’. Obtenido de Financial Times el 20/08/21: https://www.ft.com/content/4a276093-cf85-4da7-9093-6af6443bb53a

Forbes Breaking News. (2021). Biden In July: 'No Circumstance' Where People Are 'Lifted Off The Roof Of An Embassy' In Afghanistan. Obtenido de Forbes Breaking News el 20/08/21: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_e8oSxQtSk

IEEE. (2013). Informe sobre el progreso hacia la seguridad y la estabilidad en Afganistán. Obtenido de Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos el 20/08/21: http://www.ieee.es/Galerias/fichero/docs_analisis/2013/DIEEEA60-2013_Analisis_Informe_Afganistan_Nov13_MLI.pdf

Kazmin, A., Parkin, B., & Manson, K. (2021). Low morale, no support and bad politics: why the Afghan army folded. Obtenido de Financial Times el 19/08/21: https://www.ft.com/content/b1d2b06d-f938-4443-ba56-242f18da22c3

McMaster, H. (2021). We all lost Afghanistan. Obtenido de Foreign Affairs el 20/08/21: https://reader.foreignaffairs.com/2021/08/16/we-all-lost-afghanistan/content.html

Middle East Monitor. (2020). Taliban calls on Joe Biden to adhere to Doha peace agreement. Obtenido de Middle East Monitor el 19/08/21: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20201112-taliban-calls-on-joe-biden-to-adhere-to-doha-peace-agreement/

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). (2021). Quarterly report to the United States Congress (30/07/21). Obtenido de Middle East Monitor el 19/08/21: https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2021-07-30qr.pdf

Fox, D. (2021). Taking Black Hawk on victory flight, Taliban parade plundered US hardware. Obtenido de The Times of Israel el 10/10/2021: https://www.timesofisrael.com/taking-black-hawk-on-victory-flight-taliban-parade-plundered-us-hardware/