[As the United States withdraws
from Afghanistan, it leaves behind broken and battered Afghan security forces
to defend the country from the Taliban and other threats.]
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Najim Rahim and C. J. Chivers
The police captain replied that he
would send more men, along with one can of machine-gun ammunition — 200 rounds,
not enough for even a minute of intensive fire.
“One can?” the voice on the other
end of the radio responded, incredulously.
Ammunition shortages are just one
of the serious and systemic issues plaguing soldiers and police officers who
will soon have to defend Afghanistan — and themselves — without U.S. aircraft
overhead or American troops on the ground.
“We’re holding the weight of the
war,” Captain Saleh said as the attack unfolded in January. Yet one ammunition
can was all he could spare.
President Biden’s decision to
withdraw from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist
attacks that first propelled the United States into conflict, has prompted deep
fears about the Afghan security forces’ ability to defend what territory
remains under government control.
The attack on Captain Saleh’s
forces foretells a potential reckoning for the entire nation.
For nearly two decades, the United
States and NATO have engaged in the nation-building pursuit of training,
expanding and equipping Afghanistan’s police, army and air forces, spending
tens of billions of dollars in an attempt to build government security forces
that can safeguard their own country.
But interviews with two dozen
security and government officials, military and police officers and militia
commanders across the country describe a bleak result: Despite this enormous
effort, the undertaking has only produced a troubled set of forces that are
woefully unprepared for facing the Taliban, or any other threat, on their own.
What comes next is anything but
certain.
Some U.S. and Afghan officials
assert that if the Taliban try any major offensives on cities, the military
could defeat them. The Biden administration insists that the Afghan military
and police will endure. “We’re going to be continuing to support the Afghan
security forces,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said this month on ABC’s
“This Week.” “It’s a strong force.”
But the Taliban already control
vast amounts of the country, even with American military power present. Afghan
units are rife with corruption, have lost track of the weapons once showered on
them by the Pentagon, and in many areas are under constant attack. Some
soldiers have not been home in years because their villages have been
overtaken by the Taliban.
Prospects for improvement are slim,
given slumping recruitment, high casualty rates and a Taliban insurgency that
is savvy, experienced and well equipped — including with weapons originally
provided to the Afghan government by the United States.
It is easy to portray the Afghan
military and police as corrupt, predatory, ineffective, as they at times are.
But those same forces have suffered terribly, far more than Westerners, in what
often feels like a losing war of attrition. Roughly 66,000 Afghan troops have been killed since 2001,
along with more than 3,500 from the U.S.-led coalition and a much higher number
of civilians. Many more troops have been wounded. Years before Mr. Biden
announced his plan to leave, U.S. officials were already warning of
unsustainable Afghan casualty rates.
On paper, the Afghan security
forces have more than 300,000 troops, but the actual figure is likely
significantly less. Some police units keep their ranks lower than their rosters
so commanders can pocket the
salaries of dead or absent officers. One important army corps meant to
have 16,000 men and women has around half that.
Recruiting, too, has been affected,
especially in the country’s north, officials say. The region was once a hub for
recruits who are anti-Taliban, often because of their ethnic background. But
the number of recruits has dropped there from about 3,000 to 500 a month in a
year’s time, officials say.
Unsurprisingly, morale has
suffered.
Second Lt. Khalil Ahmad Atash, a
police commander in Afghanistan’s western Herat Province, was so fed up with
the job that he tried to resign earlier this month before being talked out of
his decision by government officials. “I have been in this job for eight
months, during this time we only got air support once,” Lieutenant Atash said.
“No one is providing support for us, our forces are hopeless and they are
giving up on their jobs.”
Until recently, Lieutenant Atash
was in charge of several police outposts. One sold out to the Taliban. Another
was overrun. At least 30 of his officers have abandoned their posts, he said.
American officials once heralded
commanders like Lieutenant Atash as the future stewards of Afghan security —
people who rose to defend a rebuilding nation after more than a generation of
war. The Pentagon hoped to stabilize rural Afghanistan, usher newly minted
Afghan forces into the countryside to work alongside Western units and then
gradually withdraw. To do so, it recruited and trained hundreds of thousands of
Afghan men, and a small contingent of women, all while distributing funds
unevenly and often haphazardly.
But while the Pentagon crafted
slogans presenting the Afghan forces as partners, there was little trust in
either direction — in part a byproduct of the insider killings of American
service members by their Afghan counterparts that peaked in 2012.
Afghan soldiers and police were
seen as second-tier, and treated as such. They received wages so small that the
rifles they carried were worth several months’ pay. Even from the same
firefights and roadside bombs, after which Westerners received world-class
trauma care, Afghans were taken to entirely different medical facilities where
their treatment was substandard.
When the United States ended its
combat mission in 2014, it left Afghan forces to hold a sprawling and often
remote network of outposts and bases that the United States had built over more
than a decade. But those forces mostly lacked the logistical capacity, fire
support and morale for the job.
The Taliban and its allies went on
the offensive, and seized territory across the country.
What remains in the country is a
security apparatus propped up by international funds and, as in years past,
U.S. support. The United States has poured more than $70 billion in weapons,
equipment and training into the Afghan forces. But from the look of many units,
it is unclear where the money went.
Commanders report having to buy
their own sniper rifles on the black market. They have a fraction of the
Humvees they’ve been promised. Some are running out of ammunition (though
soldiers and police sometimes fire an excessive number of bullets so they can
sell the discarded brass casings for scrap). A small
outpost outside Kandahar relies on decrepit Soviet-era armored
vehicles to defend its position.
And a professional corps of
officers and noncommissioned officers has barely emerged, in part because wages
are low, risks high and many commanders dishonest.
“Only the sons of poor people are
here to show off that we have forces in the district,” army Maj. Abdul Nasir
Haqmal said this winter from his hilltop post in Kandahar. “The salary of the
rest of the soldiers is going to the pocket of corps commanders and people in
the ministry of defense.”
Where government and Taliban
territory meet, police outposts are often battered nightly, frequently by
fighters with night-vision gear. Regular Afghan soldiers and police, lacking
the same capability, have resorted to buying their own or sometimes even
lighting debris or brush on fire to interfere with the Taliban’s devices. The
Pentagon tried to equip certain units with night vision, but stopped after so
much of the gear was lost, stolen or sold.
With police outposts collapsing,
the commandos, a force trained for brief raids, are frequently used as holding
forces in contested territory.
Some crucial Afghan army bases in
the country’s south are surrounded by Taliban fighters, and can only be
supplied by helicopter. Soldiers in Helmand Province recently tried to
negotiate with the Taliban, in hopes of abandoning their base without being
attacked. The Taliban refused to let them go unharmed unless they left behind
their equipment and weapons.
At the same time, the Afghan forces
are taking horrific casualties. By conservative estimates, at least 287
security force members are killed and 185 wounded per month in roadside and
suicide bombings, ambushes, fire fights, insider killings and assassinations,
according to The Times’
casualty report data. Official figures are rarely disclosed by officials.
Some forces are also taken prisoner and others defect.
The void left by dwindling security
forces has given rise to more militias — used by the government or by regional
factions — that many fear will turn on the government or recruit directly from
the military and police, fracturing those organizations along ethnic and political
lines.
In the air force, there are enough
pilots but not enough aircraft, because of overuse, battlefield attrition and
maintenance cycles, said one Afghan helicopter pilot, who was not permitted to
speak to the media. What aircraft are available, another pilot said, usually
only go to help the special operations forces.
While the Afghan government uses
small drones to watch the battlefield, one of its few advantages over the
Taliban, it only has enough to cover hot spots.
But even with operational planes
and armed helicopters, Afghan troops frequently complain of the air forces’
slow response: By the time an aircraft is overhead, soldiers or police need
their wounded and dead evacuated, they say, not an airstrike.
Col. Mohammad Ali Ahmadi, who
commands a commando regiment in the south, said that it will be near impossible
to rely on the air force after the U.S. withdraws. “We must have the air
support of foreigners,” he said.
Speaking from the U.S.-backed
Ministry of Defense in Kabul, the capital, Gen. Yasin Zia, the army chief of
staff and acting minister of defense, acknowledged the logistical and military
challenges his forces face once the United States and NATO withdraw.
But, he said, “we will find a way
to survive.”