In 2010 I wrote an article titled “War on the Brink of Failure” in the Armed Forces Journal that plainly stated upfront, that “absent a major change in the status quo that currently dominates in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led military effort there will fail … and despite our best effort to spin it otherwise, we will lose the war in Afghanistan.”
Two years later, while still an active-duty Army officer and after my second combat deployment to Afghanistan, I wrote a detailed report which revealed that things had gotten much worse. Senior ranking U.S. military leaders, I revealed, had intentionally deceived the American public.
Also exposed in the Afghan Papers was the candid opinion of Ambassador Ryan Crocker. At a 2016 interview with SIGAR staff, Crocker explained that the Afghan special forces could help the U.S. “clear an area, but the police can’t hold it, not because they’re out-gunner or out-manned. It’s because they are useless as a security force and they’re useless as a security force because they are corrupt down to the patrol level.”
That observation was nothing new to Crocker, however, as he further admitted that “of all the painful lessons I carry out of my time in those two war zones, Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s the…corruption at every level, that is the starkest point.”
Yet despite these apparently deeply held views, the ambassador remains a stalwart advocate for continuing the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. “In my experience, we just have a lack of strategic patience as a nation and as a government,” Crocker told the New York Times on Tuesday. How the ambassador squares his continued advocacy of the war with the experience he gained through two wars that the local security forces remain “hopelessly corrupt” and “useless as a security force,” after 20 years was not explained.
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/08/why-afghanistan-is-falling-to-the-taliban-so-fast/
