How did a force with superior numbers and firepower fall to a force believed to be less than a third of the size?
Taliban fighters patrol the streets of Kabul in an Afghan police pickup truck on Monday, August 16, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan’s 20-year war. Photo: -/AFP via Getty Images After 20 years and more than $80 billion of training and support from the United States, Afghanistan’s well-equipped security forces were unable to prevent a rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban. Kabul, the home of Afghanistan’s now-overthrown U.S.
In April, President Biden announced that the U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by August 31, and the Taliban ramped up their offensive after the U.S. began pulling out in May. It made significant gains in rural areas and cut off supply lines for Afghan military bases, while mostly avoiding more heavily defended urban areas.
As Vanda Felbab-Brown explains at Foreign Affairs, Afghanistan’s security forces also suffered years of rot from government incompetence and corruption, as well: Jack Watling, a research fellow for land warfare and military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in London noted to CNBC that the speed with which the Taliban captured the country “is not a reflection of military capability, it is a reflection of a collapse in will to fight”:
A Taliban commander who spoke with Reuters claimed that Afghan security forces collapsed immediately after the U.S. withdrawal “as they didn’t have any ideology except fleecing the Americans.” While many of the world’s armies struggle with this concept, the Taliban have mastered the core elements of public relations, psychological operations, and propaganda. Its brilliant public-relations campaigners created sophisticated propaganda for its own forces, talking about inevitable victory, focusing on “messages to its soldiers and … maintaining unity among them by reminding them of their continuous series of conquests.
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