Why Did the Afghanistan Army Fold so Fast? Because They had Nothing to Fight For by Dave LIndorff!
(2021-08-19 at 22:23:42 )

Why Did the Afghanistan Army Fold so Fast? Because They had Nothing to Fight For by Dave LIndorff!

Lessons go unlearned:

Kabul chaos as Afghan government flees, army drops their weapons, and Taliban moves in, taking over the capital city and the country, and everyone associated with the United States of American occupation tries to flee.

American pundits, politicians and Pentagon apologists are all casting about trying to find the reason why the Afghanistan military, supposedly 300,000 trained people in uniform and supplied with over $83 billion in United States weaponry including ground attack planes and helicopters, folded like an old deck of used cards in two weeks time confronted by an untrained Taliban a quarter that size armed with assault rifles and RPGs.

It has been almost laughable watching the scramble in the United States for an explanation. Gen. David Petraeus, who largely had the job of creating that military during his time heading up the Afghanistan War in the Obama administration, in an NPR interview, blamed President Biden for not sending in troops to defend against the Taliban drive, claiming that a (puppet) army will always fold if it does not have backup.

Probably true, but what was the alternative - another 20 years of United States military "backup"? And should Petraeus not at least have taken a few minutes away from cavorting with his admiring female biographer Paula Broadwell to have warned Barack Obama that an Afghan army would not fight in the clutch? President Nixon after all tried the same thing - "Vietnamization" of the Vietnam War - and got the same result more than four decades ago when the so-called Army of the Republic of South Vietnam crumbled.

Other armchair warriors claim, as if sagely, that it was a "failure of leadership" in Afghanistan, as though more motivated Afghani generals and senior officers would have given the Afghan troops "a reason to stay and fight."

Not mentioned by any of these "analysts," is that the soldiers in the Afghanistan military did not have anything to fight for because they all knew that as awful as the prospect of a Taliban return to government power might be (and for many of these footsoldiers, it may well not have seemed so terrible, as long as they were not retaliated against for having been in the United States backed and funded military), the government they got under United States occupation was a swamp of truly epic corruption.

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani is reported to have fled the country in secret in a plane loaded with money and that a group of ground vehicles also followed with him out of the country to Uzbekistan similarly packed with bundles of cash.

He was surely not alone

Mr. Ghanis sudden departure from Kabul led Taliban forces, who at the time had been waiting patiently outside the gates of Kabul for a surrender of the government, moved into the city of five million quickly when chaos broke out on news of his departure. They immediately took over control of Kabul from local military and police forces without a shot being fired.

But corruption was not just a problem among United States puppet government leaders. It was endemic in the society and in the military, with United States military whistleblowers reporting that it went "right down to the patrol level" of the Afghan Army.

People mostly joined the Afghan military because in a country where the average annual income is $500 it was a good job, especially if it did not do much fighting and if there were ways to make money on the side too.

As for a "will to fight" - given such corruption, what was there really to fight for?

Certainly not the Afghan nation, as Afghanistan is actually a hodgepodge of different ethnic and linguistic groups that have been feuding and fighting amongst themselves for centuries. If there was any national consciousness at all, it would have been a simmering resentment at the occupation by United States forces who in large part looked down on Afghans and themselves did not really want to be there.

Many experts on Afghanistan and on counter-insurgeny, both inside and outside the military, warned from the outset in 2001 that while the United States surely could have gone in and "taken out" Al Qaeda and its leader Bin Laden had they wanted to, but that the decision by the Bush-Cheney administration to turn that invasion into a longer term project ousting the Taliban and building a democratic country was a fools errand.

Now, by refusing to go back and look at that first fatal error and the imperial hubris that underlay and still underlies it, the stage is being set for the next big United States intervention disaster.

The lesson of Vietnam was never learned, and if it was learned or referred to for even a short time, President George Bush declared it dead and buried after his trumped-up Gulf War "victory" over Iraqs Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Now we have the lesson of Afghanistan, but the way things are going, we probably will not learn that one either.

So the question is, where will the United States of Americas next lesson be: taught?? Likely candidates appear to be Cuba, Venezuela and-or Iran.

Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!