What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force … We provided close air support. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong … a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.
For example, in his August 16 speech to the nation, he stated:Īmerican troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. 7 The most significant advancement of the second and third themes came from President Biden, who has remarked on them several times. 6 And the third is that these forces simply did not fight. The second is that the United States and its international partners gave the ANDSF everything they needed to be independently successful. The most cogent rendering of this theme came in a remark from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, who said, “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army, and this government, in 11 days.” 5 The first is that Afghanistan’s army-and therefore, the country-collapsed in less than two weeks. 4 From these initial offerings, three thematic narratives have emerged that are specific to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). government officials up to and including President Biden have offered explanations as well. A plethora of forensic articles have already been published by news agencies and analysts, 3 and U.S. Since August 15, the United States-and indeed, the world-has tried to understand what happened in Afghanistan that led to this stunning turn of events. 1 The preceding four months, between President Joe Biden’s announcement on April 14 that the United States would withdraw all of its military forces from Afghanistan 2 and Ghani’s flight from the country, saw the Taliban conduct a nationwide campaign that quickly overwhelmed the country’s security forces and forced their total collapse. On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani boarded an aircraft bound for Tajikistan, effectively abdicating his position as the country’s president and cementing the Taliban’s victory over his Western-backed government. model of security assistance requires reform and greater emphasis on non-material factors (e.g., morale) is needed in future security force assessments. From these themes, there are three key lessons: the ANDSF’s failure had many fathers the U.S. Abstract: Six themes emerge from a close examination of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) collapse in 2021: the ANDSF collapse was months-if not years-in the making the United States did not give the ANDSF everything they needed to be independently successful the ANDSF did put up a fierce fight in many areas the ANDSF were poorly served by Afghan political leaders the ANDSF were poorly served by their own commanders and the Taliban strategy overwhelmed and demoralized the ANDSF.