On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort explains why the way that soldiers were required to cover up ANA shortcomings or even blatantly lie about the ANA’s military capabilities show that collapse was inevitable once western forces began to pull out:
A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com
I always get confused when I hear people say they never saw the collapse of the Afghan military coming.
Anyone who’s been on the ground with them knew this.
I saw an entire ANA battalion with modern American equipment get pinned down by 3 Taliban with AKs. Begging me for air support.
How was this a surprise?
And further:
When it came to partnering with Afghans, I was actually convinced for awhile that their failure was my fault. Why? Because that’s what our superiors told us.
I remember giving honest assessments in formal reports about the capabilities of Afghans. It led to many confrontations with superiors across different tours.
“You can’t write that they don’t do X, Y, or Z in this SITREP. Don’t you know every failure is yours and every success is theirs?”
That was the mantra. Every failure was ours and every success theirs. And I believed it.
The military intellectual crowd was in charge at the time. The ones who hate us now for noticing their inadequacies.
The ones who made us think that we could succeed if we made just one more measure of performance and measure of effectiveness to implement.
Maybe we could make that barbarian culture better by just doing one more intellectual thing.
No. And it’s those same people who punished us for telling the truth. And they should be shamed for it in perpetuity.
Senior leaders in 2021 acted stunned at how the Afghans fell so fast. Nobody could believe it.
Maybe they were stunned because the truth had been filtered for decades. Laundered. And for what?
Lies. All lies. And they were peddled by the most “intelligent” military leaders among us.
So if you’re part of that crowd and are now uncomfortable with the current backlash from “idiots” like me. I simply ask, why?
You earned it.
Forcing subordinates to lie doesn’t change the reality they’re trying to inform you about, it just makes the point where reality asserts itself that much more surprising and painful. True in business, especially true in the military.
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