Afghan government didn’t think US would actually leave, report finds

To be fair to the Afghans, most of us thought we’d never leave either. Military Times reports on a new by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. Here’s the high points;

1. The Afghans didn’t think we were serious about leaving. That probably came from all our double talking on the topic, maybe even Biden’s postponement of the pullout deadline. Nobody thought we were leaving, which is why all those Americans in-country didn’t bother to leave when told to GTFO.
2. The Afghan government was excluded from peace negotiations with the Taliban. Which should have been an obvious problem point to even a casual observer.
3. They were excluded, because it was thought that would (somehow) help the Afghans integrate the Taliban into their government. I’m not sure how that would help, but I’m no international relations expert.
4. Lastly, the Taliban wasn’t really interested in negotiating. Shocker.

There was also the issue of the Afghan President being insular and “undiplomatic.” Here’s how Military Times relates that. Please try desperately not to read anything into our current political problems here at home.

“The president’s political and social isolation appears to have been a function of both his personality and his desire to centralize and micromanage policy implementation,” according to the report.

This undermined any support that other Afghan powerbrokers might have provided to the government and limited the amount of information Ghani received about what was going on in the country.

“The net effect was a leader who was largely ignorant of the reality confronting the country he led, particularly just prior to the Republic’s collapse,” the report found.

That environment led to the sixth and final reason for the fall: The Afghan government was so centralized and fraught with “endemic corruption” that there was little understanding of how the country was being run in far-flung rural areas, the places the Taliban took first.

“By investing so much power in the executive, Afghanistan’s political system raised the stakes for political competition and reignited long-running tensions between an urban elite eager to modernize and a conservative rural populations distrustful of central governance,” the report found.

I personally like how the State Department criticized the report. You’ll recall the Departments of State and Defense were not exactly operating on the same page during the final months in country.

“Around the world, the United States aids in combatting corruption, advocates for representative government, and supports accountability mechanisms among the various initiatives based on democratic values and human rights,” Erik Schnotala, acting director of State’s Office of Afghanistan Affairs, wrote in his review of the report.

We’re combatting that shit here at home to varying levels of success.

Category: Afghanistan, Foreign Policy