Afghan army was low on discipline and high on drugs.. their collapse is a shock but not a surprise
Phil Coburn, a photographer for our sister paper the Daily Mirror, was in a US Marine armoured personnel carrier in Afghanistan in 2010 when it hit a Taliban bomb. He lost the lower part of both legs. The Sunday Mirror’s defence
correspondent, Rupert Hamer, and a US Marine were killed instantly. Phil gives his view on the crisis in Afghanistan…
LIKE everyone else, I’ve been shocked at how quickly the Taliban have returned to power in Afghanistan.
Shocked but not surprised – after all, they’ve been running towns like Sangin and Musa Qala in the south of the country since 2017, where I have covered British soldiers fighting and dying on many occasions.
What was shocking in the first few days of the crisis was the abject collapse of the Afghan forces.
Many of these were trained at the Afghan National Army Officer Academy by British military instructors – or “Sandhurst in the Sand” as it became known.
The fact is, the Afghan army, trained by Western forces at a cost of billions, was hopelessly ill-prepared to defend the country against the Taliban.
The official line would have us believe they were fully ready. On several occasions, I was told by British top brass that they had every confidence in the fighting capabilities of the Afghan National Army.
And yes, there were some brave and competent soldiers among them – but there were also many who were ill disciplined and very far from the finished article.
It was the soldiers on the ground who would tell you the truth.
In 2007, during the retaking of Musa Qala from the Taliban, it was constantly stressed that the Afghans led the operation.
Yet I remember British soldiers saying that Afghan troops just emptied their weapons during a firefight and then ran away.
A lad from the Rifles in Sangin told me the unit they monitored a rocket-propelled grenade operator who was often high on marijuana – not unusual in my experience.
On another embed with the Ministry of Defence I was taken to a base in Garmsir to see British Marines and an Afghan gun crew – but when we got there the gun crew were nowhere to be seen.
We were told they had been sent to another base but a Marine later admitted they were usually strung out on heroin and had been thrown out because they were a danger to themselves and others.
It was also plain to our troops that the Afghan soldiers weren’t always getting paid what they were owed.
At least in the early days, huge wads of cash were handed out by the Americans but it was often siphoned off by corrupt Afghan commanders before it reached the troops.
Who can blame the average soldier – both British and American – for feeling wearily cynical at the failure of our political leaders to understand what was happening on the ground?
That dismay has surely been compounded by the inexplicable absence of Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab as the crisis gathered pace, his holiday apparently more important than returning to his desk to get Brits out of Kabul.
Who can blame families who have
Our failure is etched across the faces of the desperate people at Kabul airport PHIL COBURN ON INABILITY TO BUILD AN AFGHAN ARMY
lost sons and daughters for their fury?
Not that they died in vain. On the contrary, I’d say many died protecting their comrades in the most trying and difficult situations that any person could find themselves in.
I was with the Brigade Reconnaissance Force during the retaking of Musa Qala that I mentioned earlier.
I spent two weeks with the unit in the desert and plains of Helmand, travelling in the back of a Pinzgauer all-terrain vehicle driven by Corporal Darryl Gardiner.
Devastatingly, a matter of weeks later he was killed when his vehicle hit a mine as he drove four of his comrades to a waiting helicopter after they had been hit by another, earlier, IED.
He didn’t die in vain. He was killed helping save the lives of four of his friends.
Some say that British soldiers fight for Queen and country.
But in my experience in Afghanistan I saw many nationalities serving in the military: Fijians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Irish and Nepalese to name a few.
They fight for their friends and comrades and share a bond, forged by their extreme shared experiences, that few others on the outside could possibly understand.
I remember the surprise on some SAS soldiers’ faces when they heard my Ulster brogue and my colleague Rupert Hamer’s clipped English accent as we left our breakfast table in the communal tables at the US Marine base called Geronimo.
We were setting off on what we thought was a fairly routine journey to another base on a sharply cold and bright January morning in 2010.
It was anything but routine – shortly after dropping off some Marines at a base, we were attacked.
Despite being in a 25-ton Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, the IED we hit was so huge it blew off the two rear axles and bent the chassis. Rupert and a young US Marine named Mark David Juarez were killed instantly.
Five US Marines and I were seriously injured. I lost my lower legs and broke my back.
My life has never been the same since but I am grateful to have survived. So many others in similar attacks didn’t.
In the military ward at Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham, where I ended up after being flown back from Afghanistan, I was the only patient in the ward who had his knees left.
I was 43 years old but the others there were all teenagers or in their early 20s. I hope that Western governments will hold whatever government Afghanistan now has to account in respect of human rights and the rights of girls and women to access education and healthcare.
It goes without saying that the people who helped British forces should be given the chance to come and be resettled in the UK by this Conservative Government.
But the fact remains: the US – and the UK Government too – had two decades to build a competent, credible, incorruptible Afghan army.
Our failure is etched across the faces of those desperate people scaling the walls of Kabul airport, pulling their terrified daughters after them.