The Afghanistan Papers Part 5: Unguarded Nation

Bottom Line: The United States spent billions of dollars training Afghan soldiers and police, but were unable to make real improvements to the quality of these security forces or make Afghanistan defense independent.

Before the United States could withdraw from Afghanistan, Afghan security forces needed to be able to successfully operate and defend their country. To that end, the United States “has allocated more than $83 billion in security assistance to Afghanistan,” since 2002.

Yet despite that massive investment, “the Afghan army and police are still too weak to fend off the Taliban, the Islamic State and other insurgents without U.S. military backup.”

Officially, Afghanistan’s security force consists of “352,000 soldiers and police officers.” But Afghan commanders spent years inflating the number of troops so they could pocket salaries paid for by U.S. taxpayers. As a result, the government can only prove that 254,000 people serve in the ranks. An estimated 60,000 Afghan security forces have been killed.

One reason the Afghan forces have remained so ineffective is that the United States dawdled in building up the forces in the beginning of the war, then rushed to do so later, when the Taliban had rebounded. One army lieutenant interviewed blamed this poor planning on the decision to invade Iraq during the initial period of Taliban weakness.

As early as 2005, senior Bush administration officials were worried about the Afghan National Police, who as a whole were “illiterate, underequipped and barely trained.” One official estimated that about a third of the 30,000 men that make up various local police forces “seemed to be drug addicts or Taliban.”

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pushed to keep the forces small and train them quickly, an approach other officials viewed as “stingy and shortsighted.” Rumsfeld pushed for caps on the number of soldiers the U.S. would train. Coupled with an ad hoc approach to training, this spelled disaster.

The Obama administration sought to effectively train a greater number of Afghan security forces. President Obama’s surge strategy “hinged on implementing a huge expansion of the Afghan security forces, from 200,000 soldiers and police to 350,000.” The Obama administration, along with military and elected officials, often claimed that the new soldiers were progressing in their training.

The reality was much worse. Only around 2 in 10 recruits could read or write. Some “mistook urinals in the barracks as drinking fountains,” while others couldn’t perform basic first aid. Additionally, tribal tensions flared and disrupted units, while the officer corps were packed with corrupt warlords.

“Petty corruption” was rampant, with soldiers stealing and selling everything from jet fuel to their own uniforms. As with the rest of the War, the U.S. responded to these failures by sending more money to the Afghan government, much of which disappeared into corrupt pockets.

The failure to train a sufficient number of Afghan troops interfered with Obama’s long-term withdrawal plan. 8,400 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan when he left office.

Read the summaries of Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 6.

Access the full report here.