The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly?

The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly? (New York Times)

Ok, so the Afghan Military was based on the US Military. Does anyone else have a bad feeling that being overrun in a future conflict? People always think their side is great, the world, but as we've seen in other institutions recently (From the World Health Organization (WHO), to the CDC, etc) our institutions are letting us down.

We don't even know if the US military could sustain the logistics necessary to deliver food and ammunition to the front lines if we were overrun. An army runs on its stomach and the lack of food and ammunition in Afghanistan are said to be two of the major reasons that they are being overrun by the Taliban.

It doesn't speak well of the American military's model.

P.S. I'm gifting you this New York Times article so that you can read it without a subscription.

 

If they weren’t willing to fight for their country, why should we? They chose to follow the American style pacification system, rather than going the politically unpopular “kill them all” route of a larger effort to destroy the Taliban in detail. Fighting in Afghanistan is seasonal. The Taliban winters in Pakistan. We could take a bunch of them out on the way in to Pakistan, and more on the way back home. A couple of years of that should thin them out. Then push through the rural villages and round up the rest of them. They will never run out of guns but they can run out of trigger pullers.
But, we prefer a kinder, gentler war. No more chants in the US officer's clubs:
"Raise your flagons boys!"
"To deadly wars and dread diseases!"
In Afghanistan the field grade officers got promoted simply through rotation while the grunts took the bleep.
I guess they figured the Taliban would "age out" and start playing video games and watching porn like real Americans.

 

They don't call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires for nothing. The Taliban are basically extreme Islamic hillbillies who treat women like cattle and behead anyone who questions their religion. You can invade and occupy their country but you can never civilize them.

 

The Afghan soldier just doesn't have the will to fight, no matter how much training. It's a lot like the Iranians when they met the U.S. military, they just collapsed.

 

Allah says “Fight to the death or go home”

 

So they all went home.

 

The backbone of the Afghan army was the Kurds. Trump betrayed the Kurds so that his Trump Towers in
Turkey would get government contracts and be safe.

 

Well, now China is in an interesting position. And ultra islamic government is on the border of Xinjaing - AKA Ugyhur-ville.
The “Stans” as they are called are not really countries in the western sense. They are artificial boundaries drawn by Christians on Muslim territory with the aim of getting tribes to form countries.
It will be fun to see how China juggles this problem, given their “flexibility” in accepting people who aren’t Han Chinese.

 

The national boundaries were drawn by atheists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natio...t_Union#National_delimitation_in_Central_Asia

 

No strategy can make up for a lack of conviction. The simple truth is that there are more people in afghanistan willing to die fighting for Sharia Law than there are willing to die for freedom. Thus Afghanistan will have Sharia Law.

 

My main concern is that if anything happens to the US Military protecting the mainland USA, that the country will fall quickly.

 

Wut?
There’s not even a Kurdish minority in Afghanistan. What the hell are you talking about? Did you just make this up?

 

What makes you think that?

 

People tend too forget that counter insurgency is a whole different beast, compared to conventional warfare.

 

This is a good question. There are a couple of factors.
Many soldiers in the Afghan military were not paid well. This created very low morale. The soldiers were not very motivated to fight, risk their lives, or go out of their way to expend effort. There was not even really a feeling that the soldiers were fighting for a worthwhile cause. Some Afghan soldiers had even been defecting to the Taliban simply because the pay was so low. For others, they took bribes from the Taliban, giving away valuable information that later helped the Taliban wage attacks.

Another problem is Afghan forces had come to rely too much on US air support. When that was suddenly pulled away, that created a big problem. The Afghan military forces were not expecting the US to pull away air support so suddenly or unexpectedly. With US air support, the Taliban was unable to wage an attack directly on military bases or cities in the open.

There was still some vague feeling that Afghanistan was being occupied by a foreign power, so much of the population was not as sympathetic towards the central government.
The literacy rate in Afghanistan is only 38 percent, so many people were not able to read what was going on, contributing to the disconnect.
Then there is the fact that most all of the population is muslim. So there exists some level of sympathy for the Taliban, who want to institute an Islamic-style government and society. Even if the people do not completely approve of the Taliban and would not prefer them to take over, there is still some level of sympathy; their resistance against the Taliban taking over is lower. The Taliban would not have been able to take over if there was not this level of widespread sympathy and support from a large segment of the population. Maybe not an outright majority of the population, but the segment of the population is large enough.

It might be accurate to say that the supporters of the Taliban just had a lot more enthusiasm and zeal than most of the supporters of the Afghan government.
We should remember that only 26% of the population in Afghanistan is urbanized, so most of the society had less liberal values.

 

Source?

 

Don’t hold your breath on that one.

 

With more guns in private hands than any other nation, you dont have much to fear.

 

Private gunowners in the U.S. would be nothing against an organized military.

 

Tell that too the Taliban.

 

American gun owners are never going to threaten to murder all the members of the military and their families.

 

In that respect, let’s hope so. But, a insurgency can start anywhere under the right conditions. And, the bane of any conventional military is counter insurgency.

 

It was less that the military failed, but the civilian government failed. Many districts rolled over and surrendered with hardly a shot fired.

When you see your "country" dissolving in front of your eyes, what is there to fight for? You get out, or hide.

Not unlike in Vietnam. The actual fighting started in late 1974, and the early battles were fierce with the NVA (like the Taliban) getting trashed. But as they gained more territory and got closer to Saigon, the rest saw the writing on the wall and largely gave up and left.

 

The Taliban have training camps, military grade equipment, and have been fighting for years.

Exactly what training do most in the US have, other than playing video games? The Taliban already had a "command structure", who are all those "gun owners" in the US going to follow?

"Hey, I'm going to follow GoGetSom3! He had 318 confirmed kills in Call of Duty!"

 

He obviously thinks that Iraq and Afghanistan are the same country.