Washington: In a scathing criticism, a report said the US military spent two decades trying to build an Afghan army that could stand on its own, all the while keeping an eye on the clock, with successive US presidents signalling they wanted out. That resulted in 20 years of short-term thinking, and an Afghan army that still needed massive day-to-day operational and logistics support, according to the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
When US troops were ordered to exit, the house of cards collapsed.
“Bush, Obama, Trump and then Biden…. Nobody wanted to be in Afghanistan and nobody wanted to stay,” said John Sopko, the head of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction office, during a Defence Writers Group event February 28. That created an environment where new generals, or ambassadors, would tell their organizations that the effort wouldn’t last much longer, so the goal was to make what progress they could within the next year, two years, and move on.
That meant there was no long-term strategy or plan to build a self-sufficient Afghan National Defence and Security Force in Afghanistan, according to Sopko.
“We basically had 20 one-year plans, or 10 two-year plans,” he told reporters.
The latest SIGAR report is intended as a guide and cautionary tale for future US administrations considering taking another country by force, to impose democracy, or even create stability. But he said the Defence Department hasn’t been cooperating with his team, ostensibly because they are working on their own lessons-learned report, but highlighting a defensive response to a painful chapter for the US military.
“The American people, and Congress, have a right to know what happened ― what worked, what didn’t ― so we don’t do the same mistakes again,” Sopko said.
Sopko’s investigators found that two decades at war played out mostly in nine-month US troop deployments to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces, which turned brigade and division headquarters elements into ad-hoc trainers.
“Advisors were often poorly trained and inexperienced for their mission,” the report found.
The trainers got “limited or no pre-deployment and in-theater training,” and the frequent rotations of US troops meant there were seldom thorough handovers from out coming to incoming teams. For the Afghans, it was difficult to keep track of an ever-rotating cast of new American trainers, who often had little knowledge of what had been taught before they arrived.
‘We will do this again,’ Afghanistan IG warns of future drawn-out wars and John Sopko is not convinced the US learned its lesson in Afghanistan.
The churn created what Sopko likened to an “annual lobotomy” where yet another US unit would come to train its Afghan partners on the same small arms tactics the last group of Americans taught them. That also had the unintended effect of keeping Afghan forces at a junior level while the US forces stepped in for the tougher tasks.
“Knowing that the Afghans couldn’t be trained fast enough to provide security, we did the missions for them,” Sopko said. “A lot of good Afghan soldiers did learn, and died in the process of fighting, but we basically put our thumb on the scale to show success so we could get out.”
In 2015, after the US ended its combat mission and transitioned fully to a training mission, that operational support still continued, and perhaps taken for granted. For example, the US helped the Afghans retake Kunduz, which the Taliban had managed to seize and hold for 15 days, the first time the militants had held a provincial capital since 2001. It was a similar story in Ghazni city in 2018.
“From President Ghani’s point of view, those events indicated that when provincial centres were threatened, the US military would step in to stave off disaster,” the report said.
The US Army decided to professionalize the training mission, sending its first Security Force Assistance Brigade to Afghanistan in 2018, which helped some, but not enough, according to Sopko.
The 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade has been in Afghanistan almost 100 days. This is what they’ve been up to.
“That approach worked a little bit,” Sopko said. “Problem was, we never fulfilled the mandate. Those units weren’t fully staffed, and they didn’t stay long enough.”
Rather than assign US trainers to small units, the Americans were embedded at the Afghan “kandak” level ― similar to a US battalion ― and not able to make much progress with the small units doing the day-to-day security operations.
Another issue was the insistence on creating an Afghan military in the image of the US, with a strong non commission officer corps, something of which Afghans had no institutional understanding.
The US also insisted on supplying the Afghans with US equipment, rather than the Russian military equipment they’d been using for decades, which set them back 20 or 30 years, Sopko said.
That also meant US contractors had to maintain the equipment, as in the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters provided to the Afghans. US defence officials were still trying to decide how that maintenance would continue when the Biden Administration ordered the withdrawal. When US personnel were pulled out, there were no Afghans trained to keep those airframes running.
So has the US learned its lesson? Unlikely, Sopko said, pointing to the Pentagon’s refusal to cooperate with his investigation. “I’m not super optimistic that we are going to learn our lessons.”
