As Taliban forces closed in on Kabul, then-president Ashraf Ghani feared his personal navy would flip in opposition to him and suspected america was plotting to take away him from energy, the report reveals, quoting former Afghan and U.S. officers.
Ghani additionally dismissed a lot of his senior safety officers and key commanders on the bottom, believing they had been disloyal, strikes that additional undermined the morale of Afghan safety forces, confused the warfare effort and culminated within the nation’s fall, the report concluded.
The speedy collapse of Afghanistan’s safety forces, regardless of billions of {dollars} in arms and coaching over 20 years of warfare, have been central to criticism of the Biden administration’s dealing with of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal.
The report stated “the U.S. determination to withdraw navy forces and contractors from Afghanistan,” regardless of the shortcoming of Afghan forces to assist themselves, was probably the most important issue within the nation’s collapse.
“When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all of the stands out of the Jenga pile and anticipated it to remain up,” former senior U.S. commander David Barno advised researchers. “We constructed that military to run on contractor assist. With out it, it could’t operate. Recreation over.”
Regardless of some U.S. assessments that the Afghan capital may maintain off a Taliban assault for months, Kabul fell to Taliban fighters in a matter of hours in August after the town’s defenses melted away.
Related scenes performed out in cities throughout the nation. Afghan safety forces stated Taliban leaders had been securing negotiated surrenders many months upfront, laying the groundwork for its fighters to isolate and take management of city facilities.
In the end, nearly all of territory taken by the Taliban was not captured by navy drive, however was handed over after dealmaking with native authorities officers, tribal elders and Afghan navy commanders.
The withdrawal settlement america signed with the Taliban in Doha in February 2020, paired with rising Taliban success on the battlefield, was interpreted by many Afghans as “a transparent signal that … the tide had turned,” the report said.
After the U.S.-Taliban deal, Ghani additionally started to concern there was a U.S. plot to oust him and so he started “altering commanders continually [to] carry again a number of the old-school Communist generals who [he] noticed as loyal to him, as a substitute of those American-trained younger officers who he [mostly] feared,” former Afghan Gen. Sami Sadat advised the watchdog.
Sadat described Ghani as a “paranoid president … afraid of his personal countrymen.”
Former senior Afghan authorities and safety officers have offered related accounts to The Submit suggesting Ghani feared his personal safety forces would in the end activate him.
Afghanistan’s safety forces had been beset by poor management on the high and had been by no means educated to function independently, the report said. When U.S. troops departed and withdrew aerial assist for presidency operations, the Afghan navy started to falter.
Because the variety of U.S. airstrikes dropped, Taliban forces started steadily isolating patches of government-controlled territory in Afghanistan. Afghan troops had been unable to defend in opposition to the advances as a result of the forces “by no means turned a cohesive, substantive drive able to working by itself,” the report stated.
“The U.S. and Afghan governments share within the blame,” the report concluded. “Neither aspect appeared to have the political dedication to doing what it will take to deal with the challenges.”
U.S. efforts to construct a self-sufficient Afghan safety drive “had been prone to fail from the start,” SIGAR famous, however the determination “to decide to a speedy U.S. navy withdrawal sealed the [Afghan military’s] destiny.”
