A paranoid president in Kabul and another eager to end the war in Washington led to the fall of the government and the victory of the Taliban
If Ashraf Ghani had been like Volodymyr Zelensky and the Afghans had fought valiantly like the Ukrainians, Kabul would not have fallen into the hands of the Taliban so quickly. That’s what the US military longs for, traumatized by the Vietnam of our time. A report from the Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction agrees, but puts the blame at all levels, starting with the White House.
Ghani was a paranoid president obsessed with the people around him colluding against him, the document states, but the beginning of the end had come a year and a half before the fall of Afghanistan, when President Donald Trump, author of “The Art of the Deal’ signed a worthless deal with the Taliban after eight rounds of secret negotiations. In it, he promised to withdraw the 13,000 US troops by May 1, 2021. NATO followed. Joe Biden knew it was a bad deal, but he signed it. He only pushed the date back to the end of August, because by the time he came to power, he had only 2,500 soldiers left in the country, compared to the 100,000 he saw when he was Obama’s vice president.
“I had only one alternative, to send thousands of troops back to Afghanistan to fight a war we had already won in connection with why we went there (the capture of Osama Bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks),” he later justified.
In Afghanistan, the Washington accord was seen for what it was. The wind had changed and the Taliban would return to power as soon as the Americans left. “Many citizens viewed the Doha agreements as an act of bad faith, believing the US was giving up power in its haste to leave the country,” the report said.
At the presidential palace in Arg, Ghani reacted angrily to Biden’s suggestion to negotiate with the Taliban to share the government. He was convinced that Washington was plotting against him and wanted to replace him. So he fired all US-trained generals and replaced them with the old guard he considered more loyal, former General Sami Sadat told investigators. “Ghani was a paranoid president who was afraid of his own countrymen,” he said. His opinion matched that of other military commanders at The Washington Post.
As a result, Kabul fell within hours, rather than the month US intelligence had expected. The study points to the withdrawal of US outsourced companies as the key moment when the Afghan military collapsed. “It was like taking the sticks out of a Jenga stack (a game where you build a wooden tower by adding sticks from the base) and hoping it would hold up,” the report admits. “We built that army to rely on the contractors and once we took them away, it was game over.”
Unaware of this reality, the Ghanaian government continued to make plans to digitize the economy as the Taliban advanced. Hours before he had to flee the country, he hadn’t even made any plans for an evacuation. Stunned witnesses say the young national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, with no military experience, argued it took just six months to regain lost ground.
Source: La Verdad
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