The Afghan army didn’t just fold

Over the last few months and weeks, many U.S. officials have stressed that the U.S. gave the Afghan military everything they would need to win against the Taliban. They just had to use the training and equipment, the story goes. As President Biden argued on Monday, “the Afghan military collapsed,” he said, “sometimes without trying to fight.”

After the Taliban entered Kabul, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, put it this way: “despite the fact that we spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars to give the best equipment, the best training and the best capacity to the Afghan national security forces, we could not give them the will.” He added, “And they ultimately decided that they would not fight for Kabul and they would not fight for the country, and that opened the door to the Taliban to come into Kabul very rapidly.”

The U.S. Defense Department and State Department did spend nearly $90 billion training and equipping the Afghan military between 2002 and today. Americans fought alongside the Afghan military and many died with them. But to reduce all this to a story of the Afghan military supposedly chickening out is to absolve America of responsibility and undersell the strength of the Taliban.

It goes without saying that there are mistakes all around here, and the situation in Afghanistan did not have to turn out as it did. There were many other possible outcomes if the U.S., its allies and the Afghan government had acted differently.

For example, the U.S. should never have made a bilateral agreement with the Taliban for a U.S. withdrawal in February 2020; it was a grave mistake to exclude the Afghan government from those negotiations. Further, having made the bad agreement, and having then decided to keep it, the U.S. should have long ago quietly accelerated and expedited the special visas for Afghans who worked with the U.S. and who were put at risk. Those were only a few recent mistakes among dozens.

Still, at the beginning of August, we were where we were — having decided to pull U.S. forces and the contractors who assisted the Afghan military and maintained their air force, having spent years without taking a critical look at what was being achieved with all that training and equipment. The U.S. left the Afghan military and police to try to defend against the Taliban and other militants, and perhaps come to a negotiated solution at some point in the future. The Afghan military did have advantages, including possessing the only air forces.

But we cannot forget that the Afghan military did fight. They have been fighting for years, taking many more casualties than their international allies. And in the last several months, the Afghan military put up a determined defense of several cities. There was heavy fighting in Nimroz, Sheberghan and Kandahar Province.

When the Afghan military and the Taliban clashed, they inevitably put civilians at risk. In the last several months, more than 2,000 civilians were killed in cross-fire, or by pro-government forces. The Taliban and ISIS also killed and injured thousands of civilians. Thus, in the first six months of 2021, the UN counted a 41% increase in civilian casualties over the same period the previous year.

If the Afghan forces had continued to fight the Taliban everywhere — in the streets of Kabul or other cities — the unintentional killing of civilians, and the destruction of their homes, hospitals and other infrastructure would have continued. The destruction of infrastructure brings its own hell in the future: without sanitation, medical facilities, schools, water and electricity, people suffer and die.

Perhaps the Afghan military had seen the cost of the destruction of their own towns and decided it wasn’t worth it. Or perhaps they looked elsewhere and saw the price of victory. Yes, the U.S. and the Iraqi military retook Mosul from ISIS in 2017, but the city was reduced to rubble.

So, given the choice between fighting and perhaps losing, members of the Afghan military chose not only to save themselves but to spare the people of the cities and villages. In sum, what was achieved by their stand-down was the saving of thousands of lives — their own and those of the civilians who would have died.

It may be disappointing, to say the least, that the Afghan military did not defeat the Taliban. But rather than blame them for ultimately standing aside, we must remember that they have fought and they knew the costs.

This is a terrible outcome. I would not want to be governed by the Taliban. However, a determined defense of Kabul could have led to a humanitarian catastrophe, the likes of which the world has seen all too often. Don’t blame the Afghan military for reaping the harvest of America’s political mistakes.