It's America’s longest war. It’s also one that’s been largely forgotten in the media until now. Afghanistan got its place in the spotlight, but intermittently over the last decade of this conflict. It never got the incessant coverage during our venture in Iraq, where things did go off the rails for a bit especially in 2005 and 2006. Iraq and Afghanistan decimated the neoconservative argument about exporting democracy as a facet of American foreign policy. It killed nation-building. The American people don’t have the time or patience for these expeditions that have become ruinously expensive and at a great cost to American military resources.
After two decades of war in the Middle East, we have Afghanistan that’s back in the Taliban's hands and Iraq is pretty much a client state of Iran. Not a good return on investment. There are limits to American power. Yet, the pace of the collapse appears to have stunned the liberal media. How did this happen? Well, for quite some time the Taliban just paid off local Afghan officials including the national army. RedState's Hollie McKay had the scoop:
In less than a week, Afghanistan has fallen. How could this happen so quickly after US officials assured everyone that the Afghan military was fully capable of defending the country against the Taliban?
[...]
From my understanding, the level of corruption within the Afghanistan military and the government, that is part of how the Taliban won a lot of this, is they paid the commanders off to surrender a city before. So those who genuinely do want to fight – and there are a lot of men that wanted to genuinely fight – they were basically kept in the dark and ANA commanders were paid off by the Taliban in advance to surrender the city. They were just left with, you have no choice but basically to run.
The level of corruption that’s enabled the Taliban to come back into power is just mind-blowing. It’s mind-blowing to see that and to see all of the weapons that have now gone into the Taliban’s hands when the Afghan army runs away, we paid for.
The Washington Post also wrote about this disaster (via WaPo):
The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into the Afghan capital Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.
The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a U.S. official.
Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.
Within a little more than a week, Taliban fighters overran more than a dozen provincial capitals and entered Kabul with no resistance, triggering the departure of Afghanistan’s president and the collapse of his government. Afghan security forces in the districts ringing Kabul and in the city itself simply melted away. By nightfall, police checkpoints were left abandoned and the militants roamed the streets freely.
[…]
“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.
Yeah, the Post tried to hurl in the Doha agreement under Trump as a catalyst. Truth be told, this force was never what they were cracked up to be—and money as an incentive is not new. There are Vietnam parallels here. Forget the fiasco at Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul right now, we tried the exact same thing with the South Vietnamese army. Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization sought to beef up the government in Saigon’s military capabilities so they can do the fighting and we can leave. It worked in the sense that we're able to withdraw our footprint massively under the Nixon administration, who wanted peace with honor. The problem was a) Saigon’s government was always corrupt especially after Diem was killed in the 1963 coup, and b) these troops had no will to fight. The same can be said for the Afghans. And regarding the government, you cannot defeat an insurgency when the population views the national government as corrupt. The 2009 Afghan election, where Karzai totally stuffed the ballot boxes was a long list of incidents that killed credibility—and we stood by.
***If*** this is true— that the Taliban has been quietly buying off Afghan officials & military members to prep its sweep across the country — then U.S. intel either knew & wildly incompetently miscalculated what it meant for reality on the ground, or it didn’t know & is useless. https://t.co/9vx5lmvLUZ
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) August 15, 2021
Yet, worst of all—where was our intelligence community in all of this? They didn’t know. They didn’t act. When Biden confidently said that the Afghan national government won’t collapse eight weeks ago, was he briefed on these Taliban-led cash payouts to officials that led to mass surrenders all over the country? Worthless. That’s the only word that could describe this fiasco if the IC didn’t know. Were they too busy making stuff up about Russian collusion and leaking it to the press to bother with these incidents? I don’t know, but there’s no way to spin this; it’s a fiasco.
What good is this institution if they missed something like this?
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